Sir Francis Darwin, FRS

Sir Francis "Frank" Darwin, FRS, a son of the British naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin, followed his father into botany.

Contents

1. Biography
2. References
3. Further reading
4. External links

Biography

Francis Darwin was born in Down House, Downe, Kent in 1848. He was the third son and seventh child of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma.

Darwin went to Trinity College, Cambridge, first studying mathematics, then changing to natural sciences, graduating in 1870. He then went to study medicine at St George's Medical School, London, earning an MB in 1875, but did not practice medicine.[1]

Darwin was married three times and widowed twice. First he married Amy Ruck in 1874, but she died in 1876 four days after the birth of their son Bernard Darwin, who was later to become a golf writer. In September 1883 he married Ellen Crofts and they had a daughter Frances Crofts Darwin (1886–1960), a poet who married the poet Francis Cornford and became known under her married name. Ellen died in 1903. His third wife was Florence Henrietta Fisher, daughter of Herbert William Fisher and widow of Frederic William Maitland, whom he married in 1913, the year in which he was knighted. Her sister Adeline Fisher was the first wife of Darwin's second cousin once removed Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Francis Darwin worked with his father on experiments dealing with plant movement, specifically phototropism and they co-authored The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). Their experiments showed that the coleoptile of a young grass seedling directs its growth toward the light by comparing the responses of seedlings with covered and uncovered coleoptiles. These observations would later lead to the discovery of auxin.

Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on June 8, 1882, the same year in which his father died. Darwin edited The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887), and produced some books of letters from the correspondence of Charles Darwin; The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) and More Letters of Charles Darwin (1905). He also edited Thomas Huxley's On the Reception of the Origin of Species (1887).

He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

--

Known to his family as ‘Frank’, Charles Darwin’s seventh child himself became a distinguished scientist. He was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, initially studying mathematics, but then transferring to natural sciences.

Francis completed his studies at Cambridge, taking third place in first-class honours in the natural sciences tripos in December 1870. The small amount of surviving correspondence with his father while he was a student is largely about money. He had fallen into debt and had kept the matter secret for some months. Darwin was very stern in his advice: ‘I have never known a man who was too idle to attend to his affairs & accounts, who did not get into difficulties; & he who habitually is in money difficulties, very rarely keeps scrupulously honourable. . . . My father, who was the wisest man I ever knew, thought it the duty of every man, young & old, to keep an account of his money; & I very unwillingly obeyed him; for I was not always so bothersome an old fellow as I daresay I appear to you’ (letter to Francis Darwin, 18 October [1870]).

Subsequently Francis studied medicine in London, working for a while with the histologist Edward Emanuel Klein at the Brown Institution, but never practised. He became engaged to Amy Ruck in 1872; the couple married in 1874. Francis was already living in Down. and from the previous autumn had been employed as his father's secretary and assistant. Darwin had been concerned about his son giving up a career in medicine but Francis's uncle, Erasmus Alvey Darwin, supported him: “After all he is a Darwin and the chances are against any of our unfortunate family being fit for continuous work” (letter from E. A. Darwin, 25 September [1873]). Shortly afterwards, it was arranged for Francis to rent a house in the village (Down Lodge). After Amy's death in 1876, a few days after the birth of their son, Bernard, Francis moved back to Down House, and collaborated in his father's botanical work, spending some time in a laboratory run by Julius von Sachs in Wurzburg.
Francis Darwin was elected to the Royal Society in 1882, the year of his father’s death. From 1884 until his resignation in 1904, he taught botany in Cambridge. He was knighted in 1913, the year of his third marriage (his first two wives having died, and his third wife predeceased him). It is noteworthy, of course, that his father had not been knighted, although in 1877 Charles Darwin was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge. Francis had worked with his father, notably on movement in plants, and they had written a book on this topic together (The Power of Movement in Plants, 1880). Perhaps Francis Darwin, whom the family regarded as a talented writer, is mostly remembered today for his attention to his father’s reputation: in 1887 he published an edited version of his father’s autobiography, and in the same year, and again in 1905, he published volumes of Charles’s selected letters. His Royal Society obituary notice suggests a gifted, straightforward and deeply kind man.