To Hermann Müller   7 August 1876

Down, Beckenham, Kent

Aug: 7 1876

My dear Sir

— —I was much interested by your brother’s article on Hedychium;1 about two years ago I was so convinced that the flowers were fertilized by the tips of the wings of large moths, that I wrote to India to ask a man to observe the flowers and catch the moths at work, and he sent me 20 to 30 sphinx-moths, but so badly packed that they all arrived in fragments!2 and I could make out nothing.— —

Yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin

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1
Hermann Müller had been writing a series of articles for Nature on the fertilisation of flowers (H. Müller 1873–7). The fourteenth article, ‘Flowers fertilised by the wings of butterflies’ was published in Nature, 22 June 1876, pp. 173–5. It contained an account of observations made by Fritz Müller detailing how pollen from a red-flowered Hedychium (Hedychium is the genus of ginger lilies) attached to the wings of Callidryas philea (a synonym of Phoebis philea, the orange-barred sulphur butterfly). Fritz Müller had noted that, on the first day on which a flower opened, the anthers were more likely to be struck by the wings of the butterfly; on the second day, the stigmas were more likely to be hit, thus ensuring cross-fertilisation.
2
CD had requested information on Hedychium and specimens from James Alexander Gammie (see Correspondence vol. 22, letters from J. A. Gammie, 16 February 1874 and 28 August 1874).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10572,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10572