1 866.] SCIENCE AND HORTICULTURE. 57 



[The following letter is in acknowledgment of Mr. Rivers' * 

 reply to an earlier letter in which my father had asked for 

 information on bud-variation. It may find a place here in 

 illustration of the manner of my father's intercourse with 

 those " whose avocations in life had to do with the rearing or 

 use of living things " f an intercourse which bore such good 

 fruit in the ' Variation of Animals and Plants.' Mr. Dyer has 

 some excellent remarks on the unexpected value thus placed 

 on the apparently trivial facts disinterred from weekly journals, 

 or amassed by correspondence. He adds : " Horticulturists 

 who had ... moulded plants almost at their will, at the 

 impulse of taste or profit, were at once amazed and charmed 

 to find that they had been doing scientific work, and helping 

 to establish a great theory."] 



C. Darwin to T. Rivers. 



Down, December 28, [1866 ?] 



MY DEAR SIR, Permit me to thank you cordially for your 

 most kind letter. For years I have read with interest every 

 scrap which you have written in periodicals, and abstracted in 

 MS. your book on Roses, and several times I thought I would 

 write to you, but did not know whether you would think me too 

 intrusive. I shall, indeed, be truly obliged for any informa- 

 tion you can supply me on bud-variation or sports. When 

 any extra difficult points occur to me in my present subject 

 (which is a mass of difficulties), I will apply to you, but I will 

 not be unreasonable. It is most true what you say that any 

 one to study well the physiology of the life of plants, ought to 

 have under his eye a multitude of plants. I have endeavoured 

 to do what I can by comparing statements by many writers 

 and observing what I could myself. Unfortunately few have 



* The late Mr. Rivers was an f Mr. Dyer in' Charles Darwin.' 

 eminent horticulturist and writer on Nature Series^ 1882, p. 39. 

 horticulture. 



