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From Lawson Tait   15 July [1875]1

7, Great Charles St. | Birmingham.

July 15

My Dear Sir,

I have finished the book and gone over some of the ground new to me. The evidence of absorption is overwhelming & your discovery of “aggregation” alone is enough to immortalise you.2 I have to review the book for the Spectator so that there you will see my opinion more at length.3 I have also announced “Insectivorous Plants” as the subject of my next annual lecture at the Sunday Society St George’s Hall, Langham Place.4

There are one or two points where I do not think you are yet complete, but I will not weary you with them now.

I am working at Droserin, but am sadly hampered for want of material. We cannot get the D. binata anywhere

I shall find the same thing no doubt in the secretions of the Nepenthes to which I have abundant access5

Let me congratulate you on having made as substantial a contribution to biology as any you have yet achieved, and a confirmation of “Darwinism” of the most important character.

With best regards | Yours faithfully, | Lawson Tait

CD annotations

3.1 We cannot … anywhere 3.2] cross in margin blue crayon

Footnotes

1
The year is established by the reference to Insectivorous plants, which was published on 2 July 1875 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
2
CD discussed the aggregation of fluid in the tentacles of plants in Insectivorous plants, pp. 38–65.
3
Tait’s review appeared in the Spectator, 14 August 1875, p. 1036. A copy is in CD’s bound volume of reviews (DAR 226.2).
4
The Sunday Lecture Society sponsored talks on science, literature, and the arts at St George’s Hall in Langham Palace, Regent Street, London. CD was listed as a supporter of the society, and had donated £1. See Barton 2014, pp. 199–206.
5
Tait was trying to isolate substances in the digestive fluid of insectivorous plants. In Nature, 29 July 1875, p. 252, he reported having separated a substance ‘closely resembling pepsine’ from the secretions of Drosera dichotoma (Drosera binata, the forked-leaf sundew) and Nepenthes (the tropical pitcher-plant). He gave the name ‘droserin’ to the substance in later reports of his experiments (Tait 1879; Tait 1879–80; Nature, 30 September 1880, p. 521).

Bibliography

Barton, Ruth. 2014. Sunday lecture societies: naturalistic scientists, Unitarians, and secularists unite against Sabbatarian legislation. In Victorian scientific naturalism: community, identity, continuity, edited by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Insectivorous plants. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1875.

Tait, Lawson. 1879–80. Notes on the structures of pitcher plants. Midland Naturalist 2 (1879): 265–8, 295–7; 3 (1880): 5–8, 58–62.

Tait, Lawson. 1879. Researches on the digestive principles of plants. [Read 22 May 1879.] Proceedings of the Birmingham Philosophical Society 1 (1876–9) pt 2: 125–39.

Summary

Has read Insectivorous plants and is to review it for the Spectator.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-10066
From
Robert Lawson (Lawson) Tait
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Birmingham
Source of text
DAR 178: 14
Physical description
ALS 4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 10066,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-10066.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 23

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