To W. T. Thiselton-Dyer   23 June [1878]1

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

June 23d

My dear Dyer

One line to thank you for Oxalis seeds & the Stapelia. Instinct must have told you that Stapelia wd be very interesting to me, as it is.—2 Geograph. Distrib. is an awful subject, but I have no doubt that with your great knowledge you will do it splendidly.—3

Sachs has asked Frank to show him the Teazle filaments & I have been delighted to hear that he examined them for a long time; & kept on exclaiming “die merkwurdigste Dinge, Sonderbar, Sonderbar.”4

Yours very sincerely | C. Darwin

I know that Sir Joseph loves Douglas Galton, & so he will grieve to hear how he has behaved to Horace! He asked Horace to assist him about Brakes & H. though that they were to be joint authors. Horace wrote more than half the paper—undertook all the correspondence & superintended all the experiments, without any payment; and Galton publishes the paper as his own, saying merely that he had been assisted by Mr H. Darwin!—5

P.S | I almost forgot one chief object in writing to send seeds of Nicotiana glauca, which you said you wd like to have.6

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter to W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 18 June [1878].
2
For Thiselton-Dyer’s note on the items sent to CD, see the letter to W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 18 June [1878], n. 8. CD had requested seeds of more species of Oxalis so that he could observe the movements of the seedlings at night. Stapelia is a genus of stem-succulent plants; most are native to South Africa. In 1874, CD had asked Thiselton-Dyer about the movement in the flowers; see Correspondence vol. 22, letter from W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 31 May 1874. CD’s observations on the circumnutation of the hypocotyl of Stapelia sarpedon are in Movement in plants, pp. 46–7.
3
Thiselton-Dyer was preparing a lecture, ‘Plant-distribution as a field for geographical research’, for the 24 June meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (Thiselton-Dyer 1878).
4
Francis Darwin was working with Julius Sachs in Würzburg; he had published his discovery of protoplasmic filaments in the common teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris) the previous year (see F. Darwin 1877a and 1877b, and letter to Francis Darwin, [c. 23 June 1878]). ‘Die merkwürdigsten Dinge, Sonderbar, Sonderbar’: The most remarkable things, strange, strange (German).
5
Joseph Dalton Hooker had a long-standing dispute with Douglas Strutt Galton over the running of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, when Galton was director of public works and buildings in the Office of Works; see Correspondence vol. 23, letter from J. D. Hooker, 16 August 1875. The first part of Galton’s ‘On the effect of brakes upon railway trains’, published in June 1878, contained the sentence: ‘The author was assisted in making the experiments, and in their reduction, by Mr. Horace Darwin’, and one further reference to Horace Darwin’s experiments (D. S. Galton 1878–9, pp. 467 and 486).
6
CD had promised seeds of Nicotiana glauca (tree tobacco) in his letter to Thiselton-Dyer of 20 [May 1878]; the Inwards book, Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, records that they were received from CD on 28 June 1878.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.2 Stapelia] above del ‘this’
1.3 that] interl
4.5 merely] above del ‘merely’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11563,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11563