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Darwin Correspondence Project

To W. C. Marshall   7 September [1874]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Sept 7th

My dear Mr Marshall

I am very grateful to you. Your observations are excellent, & are put most clearly & will be very useful to me.2

I have picked off 16 seeds from this lot! The plant is certainly to a certain extent graninivorous also somewhat graminivorous, though mainly insectivorous.3 The rain, I know washes off the secretion & with it captured insects (& as you say seeds), which are retained by the incurved edges, which then become more incurved. It is a pretty experiment to put a row of flies or cabbage seeds on one margin of a flat leaf & see how the edge of the side curls over in from 12 to 24 hours.

With cordial thanks | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin—

Footnotes

The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from W. C. Marshall, 5 September [1874] (Correspondence vol. 22).
Marshall had sent CD observations on Pinguicula and leaves of Pinguicula with seeds on (Correspondence vol. 22, letter from W. C. Marshall, 5 September [1874]).
Graminivorous: feeding on grass and cereals. Graninivorous: a made-up word presumably meaning feeding on seeds. For CD’s observations on the plants sent by Marshall, see Insectivorous plants, p. 370.

Bibliography

Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.

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

Summary

Thanks for the Pinguicula leaves, from which he has picked off sixteen seeds.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-9627F
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
William Cecil (Bill) Marshall
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Stockholms Auktionsverk (dealers) (15 December 2015)
Physical description
ALS 2pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9627F,” accessed on 28 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9627F.xml

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