From Francis Walker   26 February 1863

CD visited the British Museum when he was in London at the beginning of February (see letter from Frederick Smith, 11 February 1863, and letter from S. P. Woodward, 14 February 1863), and may have asked Walker to identify the insects on that occasion. Walker had worked particularly on the Hymenoptera, Diptera, and the Chalcids, and compiled numerous catalogues of the British Museum’s insect collections (Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine 11 (1874): 140–1). CD acknowledged Walker’s assistance in the identification of Diptera visiting British species of orchids in ‘Fertilization of orchids’, p. 142 (Collected papers 2: 139).

CD was evidently collecting information on the insect pollinators of the musk orchis Herminium monorchis (see also Correspondence vol. 10, letter from Frederick Smith, 28 June 1862). His conclusions were incorporated into ‘Fertilization of orchids’, p. 145 (Collected papers 2: 142) and Orchids 2d ed., p. 61, where CD stated: When the first edition of this book appeared I did not know how the flowers were fertilised, but my son George has made out the whole process, which is extremely curious and differs from that in any other Orchid known to me. He saw various minute insects entering the flowers, and brought home no less than twenty-seven specimens with pollinia (generally with only one, but sometimes with two) attached to them. These insects consisted of minute Hymenoptera, of which Tetrastichus diaphantus (a synonym of Baryscapus diaphantus) was the commonest, of Diptera and Coleoptera, the latter being Malthodes brevicollis. CD’s notes on George Howard Darwin’s observations, dated 22–7 June 1862, are in DAR 70: 32–6.