Ɛpsilon

To Hermann Vöchting   16 December 1880

Down | Beckenham Kent (&c)

Decr. 16. 1880

My dear Sir.

Absence from home has prevented me from sooner thanking you for your kind present of your several publications—1 I procured some time ago your “Organbildung &c.”—but it was too late for me to profit by it for my book, as I was correcting the press,— I read only parts, but my son Francis read the whole with care and told me much about it, which greatly interested me.2 I also read your article in Bot. Zeitung3 My son began at once experimenting to test your views & this very night will read a paper before the Linnean Soc, on the roots of Rubus, & I think that you will be pleased to find how well his conclusions agree with yours.—4 He will of course send you a copy of his paper when it is printed   I have sent him your letter which will please him if he agrees with me, for your letter has given me real pleasure and I did not at all know, what the many great physiologists of Germany Switzerland & Holland would think of it— I was quite sorry to read Sachs’ views about root forming matter &c. for I have an unbounded admiration for Sachs.—5 In this country we are dreadfully behind in Physiological Botany—

Once again thanking you for your very kind letter I remain | My dear Sir. | Yours sincerely. | Ch. Darwin.

The copy of your work which I procured shall be sent to the Royal or Linnean Society as on reflexion we think it would be most useful.—6

Copy

1
See letter from Hermann Vöchting, 8 December 1880 and n. 3. CD was away from home from 7 to 15 December 1880 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
2
CD’s copy of Vöchting 1878, annotated by both him and Francis Darwin, is in the Darwin Library–CUL.
3
Vöchting’s article was a reply to Julius Sachs’s critique of the theory of fixed polarity expressed in Vöchting 1878 (see Sachs 1880 and Vöchting 1880).
4
Francis’s paper was ‘The theory of the growth of cuttings; illustrated by observations on the bramble, Rubus fruticosus’ (F. Darwin 1880b). Francis had tested the competing theories of Vöchting and Sachs regarding the growth of roots and branches from cuttings; he concluded that Vöchting was correct in claiming that the development of specific organs at the apex and base of the cutting was principally determined by the morphology of the cutting independent of gravitation.
5
Vöchting had told CD that Movement in plants would have ‘a reforming influence on a great part of botanic physiology’ (letter from Hermann Vöchting, 8 December 1880). CD was aware that Sachs had different views on several aspects of plant movement, notably the function of the root tip (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 27, letter to Francis Darwin, 28 June [1879]).
6
There is a copy of Vöchting 1878 in the library of the Linnean Society; no copy has been found at the Royal Society of London.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12916,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12916