Cii. XVII.] MOVEMENT IN PLANTS. 315 



pleased me in an extraordinary and even silly manner. You pay 

 pae a superb compliment, and as I have just said to my wife, I 

 think my friends must perceive that I like praise, they give me 

 such hearty doses. I always admire your skill in reviews or 

 abstracts, and you have done this article excellently and given 



the whole essence of my paper I have had a letter 



from a good zoologist in S. Brazil, F. M tiller, who has been 

 stirred up to observe climbers, and gives me some curious cases 

 of brancA-climbers, in which branches are converted into 

 tendrils, and then continue to grow and throw out leaves 

 and new branches, and then lose their tendril character." 



The paper on Climbing Plants was republished in 1875, as a 

 separate book. Tho author had been unable to give his cus- 

 tomary amount of care to the style of the original essay, owing 

 to the fact that it was written during a period of continued ill- 

 health, and it was now found to require a great deal of altera- 

 tion. He wrote to Sir J. D. Hooker (March 3, 1875) : " It is 

 lucky for authors in general that they do not require such 

 dreadful work in merely licking what they write into shape." 

 And to Mr. Murray, in September, he wrote : " The corrections 

 are heavy in Climbing Plants, and yet I deliberately went over 

 the MS. and old sheets three times. " The book was published 

 in September 1875, an edition of 1500 copies was struck off; 

 the edition sold fairly well, and 500 additional copies were 

 printed in June of the following year. 



The Power of Movement in Plants. 1880. 



The few sentences in the autobiographical chapter give with 

 sufficient clearness the connection between the Power of 

 Movement and the book on Climbing Plants. The central idea 

 of the book is that the movements of plants in relation to 

 light, gravitation, &c, are modifications of a spontaneous 

 tendency to revolve or circumnutate, which is widely inherent 

 in the growing parts of plants. This conception has not been 

 generally adopted, and has not taken a place among the 

 canons of orthodox physiology. The book has been treated 

 by Professor Sachs with a few words of professorial contempt ; 

 and by Professor Wiesner it has been honoured by careful 

 and generously expressed criticism. 



Mr. Thiselton Dyer * has well said : " Whether this masterly 



* Charles Darwin, Nature Series, p. 41. 



