Ɛpsilon

From Thomas Rivers   6 July 1865

Nurseries, Sawbridgeworth, Herts, | Great Eastern Railway,

July 6/65

My dear Sir/

I have delayed thanking you for your kind present of “Movements & Habits of Climbing Plants.1

What patient research & watching! I am more than ever surprised at what you do & can do. I enclose a little sketch of a climbing French bean.2 My son3 had sown in his private garden a row of Haricot beans a variety received from France   this is not a climbing bean but in a good season puts forth very slender climbing shoots. He was much amused at what he said was instinct   one of the beans in the row put forth a climbing stem   this was in front of a plum tree nailed to the wall but which had many young shoots protruding from it all of a sudden— he had been looking into your book— he observed the bean incline itself to the N. E. at a sharp angle, & lay hold of the shoot to which it is now attached— the fact is interesting & curious & so I have thought it worthy of communicating to you. I again thank you

I am My Dr Sir | Yrs. very truly | Thos. Rivers

I have the peach Almond in fruit this season4

1
The reference is to ‘Climbing plants’ (see letter from Charles Kingsley, 14 June 1865, n. 1). It is likely that CD sent Rivers an author’s offprint (see Freeman 1977, pp. 116–17, for the publication history of the first edition of ‘Climbing plants’).
2
The sketch has not been found.
3
T. Francis Rivers.
4
Rivers refers to a variety of fruit tree that he grew as part of his investigation into the relationship between the peach and almond. CD’s interest in this relationship was first mentioned in a letter to Rivers in 1863 (Correspondence vol. 11, letter to Thomas Rivers, 11 January [1863]). Rivers sent CD a peach tree and an almond tree (see Correspondence vol. 11, letter from Thomas Rivers, 21 January 1863), and later provided him with fruits from which drawings of a series of peach and almond stones were made for Variation (see Variation 1: 337–8 for the illustrations and CD’s acknowledgment of Rivers’s help). In Variation, CD noted that Rivers cultivated a variety from France called the ‘Peach-almond’ (Variation 1: 338). CD concluded that the peach was probably a descendant of the almond (Variation 1: 339, 2: 218; see also letter from Thomas Rivers, 6 January [1865] and n. 7, for Rivers’s view of the relationship between the peach and the nectarine).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4866,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4866