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Darwin Correspondence Project

From Hermann Müller   14 August 1880

Lippstadt,

Aug. 14. 1880.

My dear Sir,

My heartiest thanks for your obligingness in having offered to my son to visit you.1 It will be the greatest honour and pleasure to him to make your acquaintance and he will thankfully make use of your kind offer as soon as he will be placed at London.

I would have answered your kind letter long ago; but until to these days it was most doubtful, whether my son’s going to England was not to be delayed for a longer time, Prussian teachers being obliged to give notice six months before quitting their posts. Just now my son has found a successor in hist post, and it is almost certain that he will be dismissed from his present place with the beginning of October. Then he will go to London even without having obtained a post there, hoping that after having thoroughly mastered the English language he will succeed in gaining any situation.

I have been greatly satisfied by your approval of my judgement upon G. Bonnier’s paper on nectaries   Although fully convinced of the correctness of all that I had stated in my Kosmos-article, I was anxious, to have—by being lively interested in the subject—been hurried to too violent expressions.2

My following articles in the Kosmos (Jul. Aug. Sept) need to be judged very indulgently, being only abstracts from my work on Alpine flowers (now under the press), which will give the facts my statements rely upon.3

I remain, my dear Sir, with sincere admiration, | yours | H. Müller.

Footnotes

No letter from CD about the proposed visit of Wilhelm Hermann Müller has been found.
See letter to Hermann Müller, 18 July 1880 and n. 1. Müller’s highly critical review of Gaston Bonnier’s work on nectaries (Bonnier 1879a) was published in Kosmos (H. Müller 1880b).

Bibliography

Bonnier, Gaston. 1879a. Les nectaires: étude critique, anatomique et physiologique. Paris: G. Masson.

Müller, Hermann. 1880b. Die Variabilität der Alpenblumen. Kosmos 7: 441–55.

Müller, Hermann. 1880c. Gaston Bonniers angebliche Widerlegung der modernen Blumentheorie. Kosmos 7: 219–36.

Müller, Hermann. 1880d. Über die Entwicklung der Blumenfarben. Kosmos 7: 350–65.

Müller, Hermann. 1880e. Die Bedeutung der Alpenblumen für die Blumentheorie. Kosmos 7: 276–87.

Müller, Hermann. 1881a. Alpenblumen, ihre Befruchtung durch Insekten: und ihre Anpassungen an dieselben. Leipzig: W. Engelmann.

Summary

HM’s son will visit CD when he comes to London.

Is glad CD approves of his judgment of G. Bonnier’s paper on nectaries [Gaston Bonnier, "Les nectaires", Ann. Sci. Nat. (Bot.) 8 (1879): 5–212].

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-12687
From
Heinrich Ludwig Hermann (Hermann) Müller
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Lippstadt
Source of text
DAR 171: 315
Physical description
ALS 3pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12687,” accessed on 5 June 2025, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12687.xml

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