The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants

Chapter One begins: "I was led to this subject by an interesting, but short paper by Professor Asa Gray on the movements of the tendrils of some Cucurbitaceous plants. My observations were more than half completed before I learnt that the surprising phenomenon of the spontaneous revolutions of the stems and tendrils of climbing plants had been long ago observed by Palm and by Hugo von Mohl, and had subsequently been the subject of two memoirs by Dutrochet. Nevertheless, I believe that my observations, founded on the examination of above a hundred widely distinct living species, contain sufficient novelty to justify me in publishing them." According to Wikipedia: "Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, who realised and demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life."