If FD gets the chance, will he observe whether the platysma contracts in a shivering fit? Wants much to know whether the platysma of frightened patients contracts before chloroform is given.
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The Charles Darwin Collection
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.
If FD gets the chance, will he observe whether the platysma contracts in a shivering fit? Wants much to know whether the platysma of frightened patients contracts before chloroform is given.
CD will take care of the eight little rabbits. FG outlines their future.
Please thank Mr Jackson for facts about shrugging, but case not distinct enough. Gestures associated with laughter. Platysma.
George [Darwin] plans a trip to America and would like FD to go [see 7757]. CD will gladly pay whole cost if the trip will not interfere with FD’s medical work.
CD will pay for the American trip if it takes place.
Asks whether FD can help him understand the eyes of cephalopods; is the structure the same as in the Vertebrata and are the parts developed from homologous layers of skin?
Has been pleased by a recent review.
Postscript: Is thinking of a cheap edition of the Origin [1872] in which he hopes to answer St George Mivart’s criticisms.
Asks FD whether he can get some references to good papers on cephalapod eyes.
Thanks for FD’s help. CD cannot conceive what Mivart means by "the identity between eyes of Cephalopods and Vertebrata".
Has invited Michael Foster to Down.
Asks who Fiske is. The articles [Harvard lectures?] are "so fair and in some respects so complimentary" that CD thinks he should write to him. [See 8058.]
Sends drawings of dogs in different attitudes, drawn by his friend A. May. FD should not trouble CD unless he thinks the drawings will please him. [See Expression, pp. 54–5.]
Will FD try to persuade A. D. Bartlett to show a live snake to a porcupine and observe whether the porcupine rattles the quills on its tail? [See 8333.]
Sends an account of an attempt to take a sphygmograph tracing of a woman during fright
and some references that might apply to CD’s work on pulse rates during rage and fright.
Sends to Pantlludw [North Wales] bottle of formic acid. FD and Amy [Darwin] can search for spawn. If found, keep in two basins and add 6 drops of acid to one and look for differences.
"Try only 1 or 2 drops of Formic A[cid]."
Fears all the seeds are dead. Will try with less vapour of formic acid.
Observations on bees’ biting holes in Lathyrus.
Suggests an experiment FD could carry out with Drosera.
CD is working on Mimosa, and "everything has turned out as perversely as possible".
Asks FD to bring any book that gives the affinities of the various earths, alkalis and metals.
Lists observations he would like FD to make on the dried species of Desmodium at Kew.
Wants FD to look at the little lateral leaflets of Desmodium. CD has "a wild hypothesis that the little leaflets may be tendrils reconverted into leaflets".
Asks FD to come early to write from dictation.
Thanks Amy for her drawing of Utricularia montana.
Asks FD to make out [Hermann] Hoffmann’s conclusions about the fertilisation of Phaseolus multiflorus [in Untersuchungen zur Bestimmung des Werthes von Species und Varietät (1869)].
Begs FD’s pardon: his notes on Utricularia amethystina are on same page with those on U. nelumbifolia.