To Fritz Müller   24 July 1878

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

July 24. 1878

My dear Sir

Many thanks for the 5 kinds of seeds: all have germinated, & the Cassia seedlings have interested me much, & I daresay that I shall find something curious in the other plants.—1 Nor have I alone profited, for Sir J. Hooker who was here on Sunday was very glad of some of the seeds for Kew.—2

I am particularly obliged for the information about the earth-worms. I suppose that the soil in your forests is very loose; for in ground which has lately been dug in England, the worms do not come to the surface, but deposit their castings in the midst of the loose soil.—

I have some grand plants (& I formerly sent seeds to Kew) of the cleistogamic grass; but they show no signs of producing flowers of any kind as yet.— Your case of the panicle with open flowers being sterile is parallel to that of Leersia oryzoides: I have always fancied that cross-fertilisation would perhaps make such panicles fertile.—3

I am working away as hard as I can at all the multifarious kinds of movements of plants, & am trying to reduce them to some simple rules; but whether I shall succeed I do not know.

With many thanks & sincere respect— | Yours very truly | Ch. Darwin.

I have sent the curious Lepidoptera case to Mr Meldola.—4

1
The seeds have not been identified. The latest extant letter from Müller that CD would have received by this date is the letter from Fritz Müller, 5 April 1878, but the seeds mentioned may have been sent by Hermann Müller (see letter from Hermann Müller, 5 July 1878). Müller had sent seeds of Cassia neglecta (a synonym of Senna neglecta) with his April letter, but many of these had been destroyed (see letter to Fritz Müller, 16 May 1878 and n. 3). In a letter to Müller of 13 November 1877 (Correspondence vol. 25), CD had asked for more seeds of a species of the leguminous genus Cassia; seedlings of these were later identified in Movement in plants, p. 34, as Cassia tora (a synonym of Senna tora). It is unlikely that the identification was correct since Cassia tora is not native to the Americas; the specimens were probably seedlings of Senna obtusifolia, a South American species often confused with C. tora.
2
Joseph Dalton Hooker visited CD from 20 to 22 July 1878 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
3
CD evidently refers to a now missing letter, probably written in June 1878 (see n. 4, below). CD sent seeds of the Brazilian grass to Kew on 31 January 1878 (Inwards book, Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). CD had studied cleistogamic flowers in the grass Leersia oryzoides (rice cutgrass) in 1864 (his notes are in DAR 111: A39, A40); he published these observations in ‘Three forms of Lythrum salicaria’, pp. 191–2 n. (Collected papers 2: 131). CD also observed Leersia oryzoides in later years (his notes are in DAR 111: A37–8, A58, and DAR 111: B15), and concluded that it appeared to be one of the few species that was perpetually self-fertilised (see Variation 2: 91 and Forms of flowers, pp. 333–5).
4
No letter to Raphael Meldola mentioning a Lepidoptera case has been found, but CD may have enclosed the case in his letter to Meldola of 24 July [1878]. In a letter from Fritz Müller to his brother Hermann Müller of 25 June 1878, Müller mentioned observing a caterpillar that rolled a leaf of a pepper bush (family Piperaceae) around itself to form a case; the butterfly that emerged was a species of Anaea (Möller ed. 1915–21, 2: 381–2). Anaea fabius (a synonym of Consul fabius, the tiger leafwing) behaves as Fritz Müller described from the fourth instar larval stage until pupation (for a detailed description, see Muyshondt 1974, pp. 85–6).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11626,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11626