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To Asa Gray   20 January [1880]1

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

Jan 20

My dear Gray

This is a P.S. to yesterday’s letter to say that the drawing at p. 21 of your text Book wd. represent perfectly all that I have seen, supposing that a line were drawn, representing the surface of the soil, 12 inch above the seed, assuming that the seed had been sown at 12 inch depth.—2 You may perhaps like to hear that the first true leaves break out through a split at base of confluent petioles of Delphinium nudicaule presicely as in Megarrhiza.3 The swelling of the plumules bursts the tube, & then the bowing downwards of the tip of the plumules of Megarrhiza, forces it laterally out of the tube. The tip is at first straight.—

This bowing down of the tip is a very common or rather universal movement with seedlings, but here it plays a new part.

Ever yours | C. Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter to Asa Gray, 19 January 1880.
2
See letter to Asa Gray, 19 January 1880 and n. 2. The drawing of Megarrhiza californica is in Gray’s Botanical text-book (A. Gray 1879, p. 21).
3
CD’s notes on the germination of Delphinium nudicaule (red larkspur), with diagrams, dated 19 and 20 January 1880, are in DAR 209.6: 66–78. Megarrhiza californica is a synonym of Marah fabacea, California manroot. CD discussed the two species in Movement in plants, pp. 80–4.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.7 forces] above del ‘forces’
1.7 laterally] after del ‘out’
1.8 The … straight.—] added

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12436,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12436