skip to content
Home

Darwin Correspondence Project

From Lawson Tait   16 November [1875]1

7, Great Charles St. | Birmingham.

Novr. 16

My Dear Sir,

Have you seen the Dischidia Rafflesiana?

Carpenter describes it (quotum, Dr. Wallich’s Plantae Asiaticae Rariores) at p 152 Principles of Comparative Physiology 4th. Edition.2 Do you know if it is in cultivation?

Yours faithfully, | Lawson Tait

Footnotes

1
The year is established by the reference to pitcher-plants; Tait was experimenting on the tropical pitcher-plant, Nepenthes, in 1875.
2
Dischidia rafflesiana, now Dischidia major, was first described in Nathaniel Wallich’s Plantae Asiaticae rariores (Wallich 1830–2, 1: 32, 2: 142). In Principles of comparative physiology, William Benjamin Carpenter compared the plant’s pitchers, which often contained large quantities of ants, to the stomach of animals (Carpenter 1854, p. 152). CD had asked Joseph Dalton Hooker about the pitchers of Dischidia (see letters from J. D. Hooker, 16 April 1875 and 17 April 1875).

Bibliography

Carpenter, William Benjamin. 1854. Principles of comparative physiology. 4th edition. London: John Churchill.

Wallich, Nathaniel. 1830–2. Plantæ Asiaticæ rariores; or, descriptions and figures of a select number of unpublished East Indian plants. 3 vols. London, Paris, and Strasbourg: Treuttel and Würtz.

Summary

Has CD ever come across Dischidia rafflesiana?

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-10261
From
Robert Lawson (Lawson) Tait
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Birmingham
Source of text
DAR 178: 22
Physical description
ALS 2pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 10261,” accessed on 19 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-10261.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 23

letter

Darwin Correspondence Project
darwin@lib.cam.ac.uk

© University of Cambridge 2022

Copyright declaration

Privacy policy

Website by Surface Impression

 

Study at Cambridge

About the University

Research at Cambridge