Much obliged for seeds. Will expose seeds to chemical vapours.
Comments on JTM’s spider experiments.
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The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Much obliged for seeds. Will expose seeds to chemical vapours.
Comments on JTM’s spider experiments.
Comments on experiments of touching seeds with acid.
He does not accept Wallace’s definition of instinct because it excludes "inherited experience", i.e., "knowledge acquired by and transmitted through ancestors".
House-flies do not seem to have an instinctive fear of trap-door spiders.
Miss Forster gives him news of CD.
Sends his paper on Ophrys insectifera, translated into German by H. G. Reichenbach [Abh. Kais. Leopold.-Carol. Dtsch. Akad. Naturforsch. 33 (1870) no. 3], which shows the intermediates between O. aranifera and O. apifera. He has since gathered information on variation in Ophrys.
He will repeat the experiments in which CD found that formic acid vapour killed seeds [see 8866]. John Lindley describes effects of other acids on germination.
He has tabulated the large amount of variation in English Ophrys apifera.
CD has clarified the way to conduct the formic acid experiment.
His preliminary results with formic acid show that it inhibits germination of several kinds of seed. It also inhibits growing of mildew, which he speculates may facilitate germination.
He has added carbolic acid to the seed germination experiments and sends more results on the effect of formic acid. Formic acid inhibits mildew on dough but not on seeds.
Mildew never grows in ants’ nests.
Sends an account, from the Mishnah, of grain stored by ants.
Formic acid kills seeds but only rarely makes them dormant – as he presumes ants do. He finds great variation in the vigour of individual seeds. Harvester ants, used in place of formic acid, do not affect germination.