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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.
A believer in evolution seeks to convince CD that a spiritual creative force, rather than natural selection, explains its operation.
Notes on various instances of dimorphic stamens.
Complies with correspondent’s request; encloses photographs of himself.
Letter of reference giving his opinion of the character of a man who has been his footman for a year.
At last, Expression is beginning to sell again.
Cooke has not yet decided on number of Variation [2d ed.] to print.
Asks GHD to calculate average or mean heights of crossed and self-fertilised plant species.
Provides CD with a method of obtaining a numerical ratio that expresses the superiority in heights of crossed plants to self-fertilised plants.
Has confirmed CD’s observations on Drosera.
Asks whether CD agrees that it is "no longer a fact" that the bladders of Utricularia vulgaris enable the plant to become lighter for fecundation and heavier when that act is accomplished. Plans to undertake further observations, under very high-powered microscopes, of mechanism of digestion.
Bug on Tilia, cited in Variation, was Cimex apterus.
He has confuted Descent.
Enclosures announce his cures of potato blight, epilepsy, etc.
Two photographs of T. W. Clarke, Jr, aged three, offered as examples of expression.
Thanks FG for his report [on the statistical validity of CD’s experiments; see Cross and self-fertilisation, pp. 16–18]. Discusses FG’s comments, his own experiments, and the means by which the results may be analysed.
Sends copy of Arabische Korallen [1876].
Comments on reception of his paper on "Gastrula" [see 10012].
Reports on the tendency of the normally fruitless Convolvulus arvensis, to form fruit when roots are cut and plant is in danger of dying.
Reports an observation on his child’s behaviour;
claims to have captured two moths of different species in the act of copulating with each other.
Proposes an unorthodox theory of generation that explains sex determination and atavism.
Thanks WED for his letter of 20 December 1875. Is surprised and delighted by the support from WED and CD for the Index.
He is surveying the literature on the struggle for existence among pasture plants. Asks CD for the "many cases on record" of changed relations among plants under slightly changed conditions alluded to in the Origin. [See M. T. Masters, J. B. Lawes and J. M. Gilbert "Agricultural, botanical, and chemical results of experiments on the mixed herbage of permanent meadow, conducted for more than twenty years in succession on the same land (pt 2, The botanical results)", Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 173 (1883): 1181–413.]
Are plants that arise from vegetative propagation individuals or merely parts of the original parent plant?
In response to CD’s query, answers that he has frequently heard discussions at the Horticultural Society of a saccharine secretion from leaves of the lime and has no doubt it really does occur. [See Cross and self-fertilisation, p. 402.]
