Sir Francis Darwin (16 August 1848 – 19 September 1925) was a British botanist. He was the third son of the naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin.
Biography
Francis Darwin was born at Down House, Downe, Kent in 1848. He was the third son and seventh child of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood. He was educated at Clapham Grammar School.
He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, initially 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.
Francis Darwin worked with his father on experiments dealing with plant movements, specifically phototropism. They co-authored The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) and Francis Darwin published a second expanded edition of Insectivorous Plants (1888) after his father's death. 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 nominated by his father to the Linnean Society of London in 1875, and was elected as a Fellow of the Society on 2 December 1875. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 8 June 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).
