To W. T. Thiselton-Dyer   2 June 1878

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

June 2d. 78

My dear Dyer

I remember saying that I shd. die a disgraced man if I did not observe a seedling Cactus & Cycas, & you have saved me from this horrible fate, as they move splendidly & normally.1 But I have two questions to ask: the Cycas observed was a huge seed in a broad & very shallow pot with cocoa-nut fibre as I suppose. It was named only Cycas.— Was it Cycas pectinata? I suppose that I cannot be wrong in believing that what first appears above ground is a true leaf, for I can see no stem or axis.—2

Lastly, you may remember that I said that we could not raise Opuntia nigricans; now I must confess to a piece of stupidity; one did come up, but my gardener & self stared at it & concluded that it could not be a seedling Opuntia, but now that I have seen one of O. basilaris, I am sure it was. I observed it only casually & saw movements which makes me wish to observe carefully another.3

If you have any fruit will Mr Lynch4 be so kind as to send one more.—

I am working away like a slave at radicles & at movements of true leaves, for I have pretty well done with cotyledons. Alas Frank is off tomorrow to Wurzburg, & work by myself will be dull work.—5

I am very sorry to hear about Mrs Dyer not gaining strength: with us civilised beings, nursing seems to try the constitution much; so it did sometimes with my wife, & there seems nothing but patience for it.6

That was an excellent letter about the Gardens: I had hoped that the agitation was over   Politicians are a poor truckling lot, for our minister must see the wretched effects of keeping the garden open all day long.7

Your ever troublesome friend | Ch. Darwin

1
CD had asked for seedlings of cactus and Cycas to study the development and movements of the first shoots and leaves (see letter to W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 9 May [1878]).
2
In Movement in plants, p. 78, CD states of Cycas pectinata (Assam cycas): ‘the cotyledons are hypogean, and a true leaf first breaks through the ground with its petiole forming an arch.’
3
CD reported that he had failed to grow the cactus Opuntia nigricans (a synonym of O. elatior, prickly pear) from seed in his letter to Thiselton-Dyer of 19 [May 1878]. Opuntia basilaris is the beavertail cactus. CD’s gardener was Henry Lettington.
5
Francis Darwin left to work at the laboratory of Julius Sachs in Würzburg, Germany, on 3 June and returned on 8 August 1878 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242) and letter from Emma Darwin to W. E. Darwin, [11 August 1878] (DAR 219.1: 114)).
6
Thiselton-Dyer’s wife, Harriet Anne, had given birth to her first child in April 1878 (Allan 1967 s.v. Hooker pedigree).
7
An unsigned letter, ‘The claims of science and sight-seeing’, was published in the Economist, 1 June 1878, p. 640. It argued against a motion that was to be brought before the House of Commons to open the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to visitors throughout the day, on the grounds that it ‘would be disastrous to the Gardens not only as a scientific establishment, but as a centre from which many new vegetable products have been disseminated to the great advantage of the commerce of the country’ (see Hansard parliamentary debates 3d ser. vol. 241 (1878) col. 1464). The minister responsible for Kew was Gerard James Noel, first commissioner of works; the gardens were only open to the public in the afternoons.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.4 It] over ‘&’
6.2 our] above del illeg

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11540,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11540