For a translation of this letter, see Correspondence vol.8, Appendix I. This incomplete note, written in pencil, was given to CD by the original recipient of the letter, probably Hugh Falconer (see nn. 2 and 3, below).

The date is written at the top of the letter in Hugh Falconer’s hand. The letter may have been given to CD when he visited Falconer in London (see letter to Charles Lyell, 28 August [1860]). According to Emma Darwin’s diary, CD went to London on 21 August 1860.

Grisons is a canton in south-east Switzerland. At this point, the letter was torn into two parts. The parts were subsequently glued together and attached to another piece of paper, on which notes about the sequence of fossil elephants were written in Falconer’s hand. Gaudin, a Swiss palaeobotanist, studied the fossils of the Arno River valley and incorporated some of Falconer’s findings in Gaudin 1859. Gaudin refers to comments made about bees and clover in Origin, pp. 94–5. The information given in the note was used, without attribution, in the fourth edition of Origin (see Peckham ed. 1959, p. 184).

The information in the note relates to CD’s researches on the role of insects in the cross-fertilisation of leguminous plants such as clover; it also includes information about a new kind of bee, called the Ligurian bee, that had recently been introduced into Britain. On the first point, see the letter to the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, [20 June 1860]; on the second, see the letters to the Cottage Gardener, [after 8 May 1860], and to W. B. Tegetmeier, 20 July [1860] and n. 8.