Ɛpsilon

From W. P. Marshall   29 December 1881

15, Augustus Road, | Birmingham.

29 Dec. 81.

Dear Sir,

We beg to thank you for your letter respecting Virgularia, and your kind offer to lend Kölliker’s “Alcyonarien” if we had not been able to see it. We have a copy of that work, but have not been able to find that Kölliker has published yet any further portion of his intended complete monograph.1

Respecting Virgularia he states that he had not been able to see or to hear of any specimen complete at the upper end; but I have just had the pleasure of finding in the Glasgow University Museum a specimen that has the upper end complete.2 It is 9 inches long and broken in the stalk just below the termination of the polypi-bearing portion.3

Dear Sir | Yours very truly | William P. Marshall

Charles Darwin Esqre. | LLD., FR.S.

1
CD’s letter has not been found, but see the letter from W. P. Marshall, 26 December 1881. Marshall and other members of the Birmingham Natural History Society had found several specimens of Virgularia mirabilis (the slender sea pen). CD offered to lend them Rudolf Albert von Kölliker’s Anatomisch-systematische Beschreibung der Alcyonarien: I. Die Pennatuliden. Erste Hälfte (Anatomical-systematic description of the Alcyonaria: I. The Pennatulida. First half; Kölliker 1870). CD’s copy is in the Darwin Library–Down. Alcyonaria (a synonym of Octocorallia) is the former class (now subclass) of soft corals, sea pens, and sea pansies. Pennatulida (a synonym of Pennatulacea) is the order of sea pens and sea pansies. No further parts of the monograph were published, but Kölliker continued working on the Pennatulida, describing the specimens collected on the Challenger voyage (Kölliker 1880).
2
In his description of Virgularia mirabilis, Kölliker noted that he had never seen a specimen in which the upper end of the rachis (Stock) was uninjured; he added that the longest specimen he observed had a rachis of 345mm (about 13.6 inches; Kölliker 1870, p. 190).
3
Sea pens are characterised by a peduncle, buried in sediment, and a polyp-bearing rachis that extends into the water column.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13586,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13586