i865 i88i] F. MULLER 363 



I am working away as hard as I can at all the multifarious Letter 686 

 kinds of movements of plants, and am trying to reduce 

 them to some simple rules, but whether I shall succeed I do 

 not know. 



I have sent the curious lepidopteron case to Mr. Meldola. 



F. Miiller to C. Darwin. Letter 



In November, 1880, on receipt of an account of a flood in Brazil from 

 which Fritz Miiller had barely escaped with his life {Life and Letters 

 III., 242); Darwin immediately wrote to Hermann Miiller begging to 

 be allowed to help in making good any loss in books or scientific instru- 

 ments that his brother had sustained. It is this offer of help that is 

 referred to in the first paragraph of the following letter : Darwin repeats 

 the offer in Letter 690. 



Blumenau, Sa Catharina, Brazil, Jan. gth, 1881. 



I do not know how to express [to] you my deep heartfelt 

 gratitude for the generous offer which you made to my 

 brother on hearing of the late dreadful flood of the Itajahy. 

 From you, dear sir, I should have accepted assistance without 

 hesitation if I had been in need of it ; but fortunately, though 

 we had to leave our house for more than a week, and on 

 returning found it badly damaged, my losses have not been 

 very great. 



I must thank you also for your wonderful book on the 

 movements of plants, which arrived here on New Year's Day. 

 I think nobody else will have been delighted more than I 

 was with the results which you have arrived at by so many 

 admirably conducted experiments and observations ; since I 

 observed the spontaneous revolving movement of Alisma I 

 had seen similar movements in so many and so different 

 plants that I felt much inclined to consider spontaneous 

 revolving movement or circumnutation as common to all 

 plants and the movements of climbing plants as a special 

 modification of that general phenomenon. And this you 

 have now convincingly, nay, superabundantly, proved to be 

 the case. 



I was much struck with the fact that with you Maranta 

 did not sleep for two nights after having its leaves violently 

 shaken by wind, for here we have very cold nights only after 

 storms from the west or south-west, and it would be very 

 strange if the leaves of our numerous species of Marantaceae 



