To Asa Gray 20 January [1880]1
Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.
Jan 20
My dear Gray
This is a P.S. to yesterday’s letter to say that the drawing at p. 21 of your text Book wd. represent perfectly all that I have seen, supposing that a line were drawn, representing the surface of the soil, inch above the seed, assuming that the seed had been sown at inch depth.—2 You may perhaps like to hear that the first true leaves break out through a split at base of confluent petioles of Delphinium nudicaule presicely as in Megarrhiza.3 The swelling of the plumules bursts the tube, & then the bowing downwards of the tip of the plumules of Megarrhiza, forces it laterally out of the tube. The tip is at first straight.—
This bowing down of the tip is a very common or rather universal movement with seedlings, but here it plays a new part.
Ever yours | C. Darwin
Footnotes
Bibliography
Gray, Asa. 1879. Gray’s botanical text-book. Vol. I. Structural botany or organography on the basis of morphology. To which is added the principles of taxonomy and phytography, and a glossary of botanical terms. 6th edition. New York and Chicago: Ivison, Blakeman, and Company.
Summary
Germination of Delphinium and Megarrhiza.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-12436
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Asa Gray
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University (127)
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12436,” accessed on 26 September 2022, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12436.xml