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To Hugo de Vries   9 December 1881

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Dec 9 1881

My dear Sir

I hope that will forgive me for troubling you with a question   If my memory does not deceive me, you or someone else divided a stem or a root longitudinally, and then found that the separate were acted on by geotropism.1 Do you know of any such paper, and will you be so kind as to give me a reference to it

My dear Sir | Yours sincerely | Charles Darwin

LS

1
The paper referred to has not been identified. De Vries had alerted CD to the phenomenon of root contraction when he visited CD in 1878; he reported his continuing experiments in 1879 (see Correspondence vol. 27, letter from Hugo de Vries, 7 August 1879 and n. 4). CD may have discussed other aspects of root behaviour during the visit in 1878, but no record of a discussion about divided roots has been found.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13446F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13446F