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
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