To W. W. Baxter 16 July [1872?]1
Please send me a very small Pot of your purest & best Extract of Hyosciamus for experimental purposes—2 I want it as soon as possible.
Ch. Darwin
Down | July 16th
Footnotes
The year is conjectured from the reference to extract of Hyoscyamus (the genus of henbanes); CD used this in experiments on Drosera that he began on 23 August 1872 (Correspondence vol. 20, Appendix II). Drosera is the genus of sundews.
Baxter, a dispensing chemist in Bromley, Kent, often supplied CD with chemicals for his experiments. Although CD had experimented on Drosera with poisons in the early 1860s, he had used only tincture of henbane in his earlier work (see Correspondence vol. 9, letter to W. W. Baxter, 22 January 1861). The experiments described by CD in Insectivorous plants, pp. 84, 206, were done with a powdered extract of Hyoscyamus that he prepared in solution himself, thus ensuring greater accuracy.
Summary
Orders a very small pot of "purest & best Extract of Hyosciamus for experimental purposes".
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-7280
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- William Walmisley Baxter
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- Bromley Historic Collections, Bromley Central Library (Baxter Collection, 1136/1)
- Physical description
- ALS 1p
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 7280,” accessed on 24 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-7280.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 24 (Supplement)
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