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From R. T. Clarke   6 February [1878]1

Welton Place | near Daventry

Febr 6th

Dear Mr Darwin

I enclose a pod from an old kind of garden pea called “Woodford’s Marrow.” The colour of the normal seed is of a very peculiar and invariable blue. This pod was fertilized by the pollen of an equally constant white kind, to wit, “Dickson’s favorite” a selection from the Auvergne.2

You will see that it contains two pure white peas, a thing which the old Woodford never was guilty of in its life.— With the exception of my Matthiola this is the only instance I have yet met with, but I doubt not but that we used our eyes more would turn up.3 Please return the specimen soon, as I shd like to produce it before our scientific committee4

Has anything of the kind been noticed in the analogue eggs.? I had the satisfaction last summer of smashing a genus which I never believed in, viz: Elisena which I crossed with Ismene. Flower exactly intermediate.—5

What is Species, and what is Genus?

and Echo answers

What is Truth?6

yrs very truly | R Trevor Clarke

1
The year is established by the reference to Elisena and Ismene; see n. 5, below.
2
The pea varieties ‘Woodford’s marrow’ and ‘Dickson’s favorite’ are described in Burr 1863, pp. 551–2 and 531–2. Auvergne is a province in south-central France.
3
Clarke had published on colour variation in seeds of Matthiola (see R. T. Clarke 1866, Correspondence vol. 14, letter from R. T. Clarke, 6 November [1866], and Variation 1: 398–9). Matthiola is the genus of stocks.
4
Clarke had helped establish the scientific committee of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1868 (see Correspondence vol. 16, letter from M. T. Masters, 4 April 1868, and letter from R. T. Clarke, 14 [April 1868]).
5
Gardeners’ Chronicle, 21 July 1877, p. 86, reported that Clarke exhibited flowers of a hybrid between two ‘so-called genera’, Ismene and Elisena, to the scientific committee of Royal Horticultural Society. Ismene, the Peruvian daffodil, is a genus in the family Amaryllidaceae; the former genus Elisena is subsumed within it.
6
An allusion to George Gordon Noel Byron’s poem The bride of Abydos, canto 2, stanza 27.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10832,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10832