Ɛpsilon

From A. W. Bennett   16 March 1873

6 Park Village East | N.W.

March 16th. 1873

My dear Sir

Thank you for your expression of regret about my giving up the subeditorship of “Nature”.1

Your cuts are all right. In fact I never availed myself of your kind permission to make use of those belonging to the Linnean Soc. My idea finally resolved itself into a plan for bringing out an English edition of Asa Gray’s charming little books “How Plants Grow” & “How Plants behave”; but Messrs Macmillan have not yet made the needful arrangements with Prof. Gray: & I think it now far most probable that it will never come to anything.2

Believe me | very truly yrs | Alfred W Bennett

C. Darwin Esq.

You may be interested in hearing that I am now engaged on a translation of Sachs’s Lehrbuch der Botanik for the Clarendon Press Oxford.3 I have just contributed to the Gardeners’ Chronicle an abstract of Hildebrand’s important paper on the Fertilisation of Grasses from the Berlin Monatsbericht4

2
See letter to A. W. Bennett, 11 March [1873] and n. 3. Bennett had intended to reuse woodcuts originally used in CD’s paper ‘Climbing plants’ in an article in Nature, which was published by Macmillan & Co. Asa Gray’s Botany for young people and common schools appeared in two parts, How plants grow (A. Gray 1858), and How plants behave (A. Gray 1872a); no English edition was ever published.
3
Bennett translated Julius Sachs’s textbook of botany into English (Sachs 1870, 1875).
4
Bennett’s abstract of Friedrich Hildebrand’s paper on the fertilisation of grasses, read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences the previous year (Hildebrand 1872), appeared in Gardeners’ Chronicle, 15 March 1873, p. 362, and 22 March 1873, pp. 400–1.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-8811,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-8811