From Emma Darwin to Friedrich Hildebrand   20 November [1863]1

Down. | Bromley. | Kent. S.E.

Nov 20

Sir

My husband wishes me to write & thank you for your very kind letter & to say that he is so unwell as to be unable to write or attend to any scientific subject.2 He desires also to send his respectful remembrances to Professor Treviranus & to thank him for the paper on Orchids he so kindly sent & to say how much he wd have liked to have written to him on the subject but he is not able.3

Mr Darwin wishes to ask if Orchis Pyramydalis grows in your neighbourhood he wd very much like to see a fresh specimen of it next summer as he is convinced the structure of the stigma is different from what it is here4

With Mr Darwin’s kind regards I am | Sir yours very truly | Emma Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Friedrich Hildebrand, 10 November 1863.
3
The references are to Ludolph Christian Treviranus and to Treviranus 1863c, which was published in the 7 August 1863 number of Botanische Zeitung. There is a lightly annotated copy of Treviranus 1863c in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL, and a manuscript translation in DAR 70: 38–52. The most recent extant correspondence between CD and Treviranus is the letter from L. C. Treviranus, 12 February 1863, in which he mentioned sending Treviranus 1863a. See also letter from Friedrich Hildebrand, 16 July 1863.
4
In Treviranus 1863c, p. 243, Treviranus discussed what he thought were two errors in CD’s diagram of Orchis pyramidalis (Orchids, p. 22). CD wrote in ‘Fertilization of orchids’, p. 141 (Collected Papers, 2: 139), that Treviranus confirmed his ‘observations on this remarkable species’, but differed from him in ‘one or two minor points’. See also Correspondence vol. 12, letter from Friedrich Hildebrand, 21 June 1864, and letter to Friedrich Hildebrand, 25 June [1864].

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4343F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4343F