To A. G. More   17 [July 1861]1

2. Hesketh Crescent | Torquay

17th.

My dear Sir

If you are quite well & take walks, & if you are not utterly sick & weary of me & my requests, I shd. be very glad of 3 or 4 spikes of O. latifolia and O. maculata, with a few of the lower flowers withered. The point is this, that I find in the Kentish specimens that the O. latifolia is far less visited by insects than O. maculata; & as some Botanists doubt whether they are distinct species, it would be rather curious to show them insects distinguish them.—2 The specimens might be sent in brown paper, without trouble of Box, by putting them in water I could easily count the flowers with pollen-masses in & out.— You will see that it is not worth much trouble.

I am now writing my paper, & I fancy that the points are sufficiently curious to make you not regret having with so much patience & kindness helped me.—

I found the other day a lot of Bee Ophrys, with flowers nearly all withered & with the glands of the pollinia all in their pouches. All facts point clearly to eternal self-fertilisation in this species; yet I cannot swallow the bitter pill.3 Have you looked at any this year?—

Yours very sincerely | C Darwin

1
This letter was first published in Correspondence vol. 9, transcribed from a copy on which the full date is recorded (DAR 146: 398–9).
2
CD believed that the method of pollination of an orchid was a good indicator of specific identity (see letter to George Bentham, 22 June [1861] and n. 8). Although CD was unable to find conclusive evidence distinguishing Orchis latifolia (a synonym of Dactylorhiza incarnata subsp. incarnata, the early marsh-orchid) from O. maculata (a synonym of Dactylorhiza maculata, the heath spotted orchid) on the basis of the number of pollinia removed by insects, he continued to consider them distinct species (see Orchids, p. 42).
3
In appearing to be an ‘eternal hermaphrodite’, the bee orchis, Ophrys apifera, challenged CD’s ‘law’ that all organic beings are occasionally fertilised by other individuals. CD conceded that this species was ‘specially adapted for self-fertilisation’. Nevertheless, he did not ‘swallow the bitter pill’, arguing that although he had never observed an instance in which a plant’s pollen masses had failed to reach its own stigmas, the morphology of the flower parts suggested to him that the bee-orchis might occasionally be cross-fertilised (see Orchids, pp. 65, 70, and Orchids 2d ed., p. 57).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.00 trouble] above del ‘trouble’
3.00 glands of the] interl
3.00 the bitter] ‘the’ after del illeg

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-3211,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-3211