Down,
Beckenham, Kent .
___________________
Railway Station
Orpington. S.E.R.
April 10th 1882.
Dear Sir
I hope that you will excuse the liberty which as a stranger I take in begging a favour of you. I have read with unusual interest your very interesting paper in the American Naturalist on the structure of the flowers of Solanum rostratum & I shd. be grateful if you would send me some seeds in a small box (telling me whether the plant is an annual, so that I may know when to sow the seeds), in order that I may have the pleasure of seeing the flowers and experimentising on them. But if you intend to experimentise on them, of course you will not send me the seeds, as I shd. be very unwilling to interfere in any way with your work. I shd. also rather like to look at flowers of Cassia chamaecrista.
Many years ago I tried some experiments in a remotely analogous case & this year am trying others. I described what I was doing to Dr. Fritz Müller (Blumenau, Sta. Catharina, Brazil) & he has told me that he believes that in certain plants producing 2 sets of anthers of a different colour, the bees collect the pollen from one of the sets alone. He wd. therefore be much interested by your paper, if you have a spare copy that you could send him. I think, but my memory now often fails me, that he has published on this subject in Kosmos.
Hoping that you will excuse me, I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully
Ch. Darwin
P.S. In my little book on the Fertilisation of Orchids, you will find under Mormodes ignea, an account of a flower laterally asymmetrical, & what I think that I called right-handed or left-handed flowers.