Ɛpsilon

To Henry Groves   3 April 1882

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.)

April 3d 1882.—

Dear Sir

I thank you cordially for the beautiful specimens of the Nitella & for your letter of instructions.—1 I have roughly tried the effects of C. of Ammonia on the chlorophyll grains, but I find stooping over the microscope affects my heart. The grains swell & then exhibit the contained particles of starch very clearly, & some of the grains become confluent, occasionally sending out prolongations.2 But my observations are hardly trustworthy. The grains do not seem to be so strongly affected as in some few other cases. The facts which you relate about the distribution of the Nitella are very curious;3 & how little we know about the life of any one plant or animal!

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully & obliged | Ch. Darwin

1
See letter from Henry Groves, 1 April 1882. Nitella opaca (dark stonewort) is a species of freshwater algae.
2
The results of CD’s experiments on the effect of carbonate of ammonia on chlorophyll bodies were published in a paper that had been read at the Linnean Society on 6 March 1882 (‘Action of carbonate of ammonia on chlorophyll’).
3
See letter from Henry Groves, 1 April 1882. Groves noted that while the species he observed colonised new areas of shallow water, they seldom survived more than three years once other algae were present.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13754,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13754