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From Hermann Vöchting   8 December 1880

Basel,

8. Dec. 1880.

My dear Dr. Darwin.

Since the announcement of your new work I had daily expected it, and was greatly and most agreeably surprised in getting a specimen of your own hand.1 Allow me firstly and above all to tell you my best thanks for this most valuable present.

From the day when it was delivered to me, your book has been almost my only reading, and the latter has given me the greatest delight. I am sure, the multitude of new facts detected by you and the conclusions you have drawn from them, will have a reforming influence on a great part of botanic physiology. In congratulating you to this new publication I can merely tell, that it is only rivalled by the former works of the same great author.

Your book was the more important for me, because I was led on ground of own researches not yet published to results quite according to several of yours. For instance I was since long time convinced the bending of a horizontal radicle not being the direct effect of gravitation, but caused by the tip. To much occupied with other objects I had as yet not made any attempts to verify my conjecture, and am now much surprised by the most ingenious method you have shown the foundation of my supposition.2

With this letter I take permission to send you some little publications made by myself in the last years, begging not to deal to hard with the trials of a beginner.3 I should have dispatched them sooner, but I thought them scarcely worthy enough for this purpose, and from this cause alone you will excuse the delay. In a future time I hope to appear before you with better works—

More than nine years have elapsed since you honored me with the allowance of paying you a visit in the Down.4 I shall never forget this day, the finest remembrance I have taken with me from my abode in England.

Paying my best respects to Mr. Francis Darwin and repeating my thanks for your work, I remain, my dear Dr. Darwin, in high veneration | always and sincerely yours | H. Vöchting.

CD annotations

Top of letter: ‘My dear F. I have thought that you wd like to see this letter. I have utterly forgotten the man. C. D.’ pencil
1
Vöchting’s name is on CD’s presentation list for Movement in plants (Appendix IV).
2
CD and Francis Darwin performed numerous experiments demonstrating that the sensitivity of the radicle or embryonic root was located at the tip of the organ (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 27, letter to Francis Darwin, [before 5 June 1879]; see also Movement in plants, pp. 572–3).
3
Vöchting sent an offprint of his PhD dissertation, which appeared in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Botanik, ‘Beiträge zur Morphologie und Anatomie der Rhipsalideen’ (Contributions on the morphology and anatomy of the Rhipsalideae; Vöchting 1873), as well as his work ‘Der Bau und die Entwicklung des Stammes der Melastomeen’ (The structure and development of the stem of the Melastomaceae; Vöchting 1875). CD’s copies are in the Darwin Library–Down. Vöchting also sent a copy of his book Über Organbildung im Pflanzenreich (On organ formation in the plant world; Vöchting 1878); CD’s copy, annotated by both him and Francis, is in the Darwin Library–CUL.
4
No record of Vöchting’s visit has been found, but he spent three months in 1871 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and visited CD during this time (see Fitting 1919, p. 43).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12896,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12896