Ɛpsilon

From Francis Darwin   [before 4 June 1881]1

Dear Father

Many thanks for your letter & for Dubbas.2 I enclose a nice letter from Elfving which will interest you; it is very nice of him immediately to tell me something he is at & has not published—3

I will try & find out about eosin & fuchsin, I remember the paper; both those you could get from Martindale4

I spoke to deBary & he seemed to think protoplasm must have been dead but I think it was seen to move coloured.5 Wortmann says deBary thinks Van Tieghem a humbug as did Stahl also, almost dishonest I fancy6   de Bary is not a bit like Sachs in the way of thinking every body fools.7

The scientific public seems to feel H Müllers Alpen blumen like Carpenter Deep Sea, de Bary says he must take several years rest before he reads it there have been so many notices of it mostly be Müller himself.8

I want to know whether you think the false circumnutation produced by the clock worth publishing. It wont be published for a month so I have time but should like to know what you think; I think I shall publish the paper in a shorter form with much fewer diagrams than as I wrote it out: I don’t feel satisfied with so many of the diagrams—9

I am tired so goodbye | Yr affec | F. D.

1
The date is established by the relationship between this letter and the letters to Francis Darwin of 30 May [1881] and 4 [June 1881].
2
See letter to Francis Darwin, 30 May [1881]; the letter from Francis’s son, Bernard Darwin, has not been found.
3
Francis had met Fredrik Elfving in 1879, while they were both working in the laboratory of Julius Sachs at Würzburg. Both men were studying movement in the fungus Phycomyces nitens. The letter from Elfving has not been found, but may have been on the subject of Elfving’s observation of an avoidance response in the fungus (see also letter from Francis Darwin, 19 [May 1881] and n. 3).
4
See letter to Francis Darwin, 30 May [1881] and n. 4. Eosine and fuchsine were colouring agents mentioned in Cornu and Mer 1878. William Martindale was a pharmacist in London.
5
Francis was working in the laboratory of Anton de Bary. De Bary was probably referring to the toxic effect of colouring agents on protoplasm of the cell membrane, as described in Cornu and Mer 1878.
6
Julius Wortmann, Ernst Stahl, and De Bary were commenting on Philippe van Tieghem’s Traité de botanique (Treatise on botany; Tieghem 1884), the second part of which had recently appeared (see letter to Francis Darwin, 16 and 17 May 1881 and nn. 6 and 7).
7
Francis had commented on De Bary’s and Sachs’s temperaments in his letter of 14 May 1881. He had earlier told CD about other researchers who found Sachs difficult to work with (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 27, letter from Francis Darwin, 4 July 1879).
8
Hermann Müller had sent CD Alpenblumen, ihre Befruchtung durch Insekten: und ihre Anpassungen an dieselben (Alpine flowers, their fertilisation through insect agency and adaptations for this; H. Müller 1881a) in November 1880 (see Correspondence vol. 28, letter from Hermann Müller, 27 November 1880). A positive review of the book by Wilhelm Behrens appeared in Kosmos, March 1881 (Behrens 1881). Francis had also reviewed the book in Nature, 10 February 1881, pp. 333–5. William Benjamin Carpenter was one of the first researchers to explore deep-sea fauna; he wrote reports on the results of a number of dredging voyages (see, for example, Carpenter and Jeffreys 1870 and Carpenter 1872).
9
Francis’s paper, ‘Ueber Circumnutation bei einem einzelligen Organe’ (On circumnutation in a single-cell organ; F. Darwin 1881b) appeared in Botanische Zeitung, 29 July 1881, and contained three diagrams (see letter from Francis Darwin, 19 [May 1881] and n. 4). Francis did discuss the false circumnutation in the published paper, noting that it was a response to the movement of the klinostat (ibid., p. 478).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13192F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13192F