To Hermann Müller   26 October 1875

Down, Beckenham, Kent

Oct: 26. 1875

My dear Sir

… There will always be men who dispute and differ about everything that is discovered; and we may take comfort by remembering that even the sexuality of plants was disputed for half a century after Kölreuter’s papers.1 I have had occasion lately often to refer to your “Befruchtung &c” and I have done so even with greater admiration than at first.2 It is an excellent and most useful work.

My dear Sir | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

Copy incomplete

1
See letter from Hermann Müller, 23 October 1875. CD alludes to Thomas Meehan’s recent work, in which he argued that the role of insects in aiding plant fertilisation was limited (Meehan 1875, p. 251). CD’s heavily annotated copy of Johann Gottlieb Kölreuter’s Vorläufige Nachricht von einigen das Geschlecht der Pflanzen betreffenden Versuchen und Beobachtungen (Preliminary notes on some experiments and observations regarding the sex of plants; Kölreuter 1761–6) is in the Darwin Library–CUL (see Marginalia 1: 458–71).
2
CD was probably using Müller’s Die Befruchtung der Blumen durch Insekten und die gegenseitigen Anpassungen beider (The fertilisation of flowers by means of insects and the reciprocal adaptations of both; H. Müller 1873) in his research for Cross and self fertilisation.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10228,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10228