?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
EVIDENCE FOR THEORY OF NECESSITY OF PLANT CROSS-FERTILIZATION DARWIN, CHARLES. Autograph Letter Signed, to an unnamed recipient [William Henry Harvey], asking whether he believes a plant with adjacent male and female reproductive organs can be fertilized by another individual, stating his interest in [Thomas] Andrew Knight's view that all plants occasionally cross-fertilize, expressing gladness that he has returned safely from his voyage, and recalling when he last saw him at Oxford. 4 pages, 8vo, written on two sheets; folds; matted with a portrait in a double-sided frame. "Down Bromley Kent," 24 Dec[ember 1856]
"Dr. Hooker thinks you would not grudge giving me a little bit of information; . . . It regards the higher marine plants, of which the male & female elements of reproduction are pretty clearly made out. All such plants generally are . . . dioecious, or monoecious, or hermaphrodite in the sense that the male & female organs are so close together that the male element of the same individual would apparently always fertilize the adjoining female, as appears to be the case (whether or not really) in common hermaphrodite phanerogams. Can you answer this question? If so I sh'd be very much obliged for an answer at your leisure. I have long been interested in following out Andrew Knight's notion that all plants occasionally cross with another individual. . . ." To date, does not appear in the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge University Press.
