From Daniel Oliver   23 October 1865

Royal Gardens Kew

Oct. 23. 65

My dear Sir/

I have looked over Müller’s paper & return it by this post.1 It will be an interesting thing for an evening Meeting.—2 I have corrected his bracteæ,3 &—assisted by Mr Bentham4—the haziness of the paragraph about upwards & downwards, &c.5 Dr. Hooker returns on Thursday— I have a note this morning. He does not lose the stiffness in his joints yet.—6

The scrap of Strychnos cannot be named with any certainty.7 Young shoots are often so different from those on the flowering branch

Ever very sincerely yrs | D Oliver

1
CD had sent Oliver a letter from Fritz Müller on Brazilian climbing plants that he hoped to submit for publication to the Linnean Society; see letter to Daniel Oliver, 20 October [1865] and n. 2.
2
Müller’s paper was read at the Linnean Society meeting of 7 December 1865. The printed version of the paper is reproduced in this volume as the letter from Fritz Müller, [12 and 31 August, and 10 October 1865].
5
No paragraph containing the terms ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’ occurs in the printed version of Müller’s paper (see above, n. 2). It is likely that the terms were used by Müller in his description of the positions of leaves and tendrils and their relationships to the stem axis. See letter to Fritz Müller, 17 October [1865], and letter to Daniel Oliver, 20 October [1865] and n. 5.
6
Joseph Dalton Hooker had been recovering from an attack of rheumatic fever (see letter from F. H. Hooker, [17 August 1865], and letter from J. D. Hooker, [26 September 1865]). The Thursday following 23 October 1865 was 26 October.
7
CD had enclosed a specimen of Strychnos in his letter to Oliver of 20 October [1865].

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4922,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4922