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From Francis Darwin to W. M. Moorsom   29 October 1877

Down | Beckenham Kent

Dear Sir,

My father directs me to thank you for the letter containing the details about the elephant case.1 If the story is true it appears to my father to be far more probable that the fruit contains some alkaloid such as that in indian hemp.2 This would equally well agree with the natives making a drink from it for similar cases are known e.g. the intoxicating (not alcoholic) liquor brewed from agaricus muscarius by certain steppe tribes (Tartars I believe)3

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Francis Darwin

Oct 29. 1877.

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2
In 1876, Vasily Preobrazhensky had asserted that the active principle of Indian hemp (Cannabis sativa) was an alkaloid, which he identified as nicotine (Watt 1889–93, 2: 125).
3
William Benjamin Carpenter had reported that the Tartars, who lived a nomadic life on the steppes of Russia, used the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, a synonym of Agaricus muscarius) for the purposes of intoxication (Carpenter 1873, p. 316). The natives of Kamchatka in Russia were also famed for producing an inebriating liquor from Agaricus muscarius (W. J. Hooker 1821, pt 2: 19).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11216A,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11216A