Letter from Lydia Becker to Miles Berkeley 27 June 1870

This is a PDF of a scan of a letter from Lydia Becker (1827-1890) to Rev. Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803-1889) written on 27 June 1870. This letter is mentioned in footnote 12 of Antonovics J, Gibby M, and Hood ME. 2020. John Leigh, Lydia Becker and their shared botanical interests. Archives of Natural History (in press). The original of the letter is in personal possession of Michael Hood, co-author on this paper. Lydia Becker was a botanist and pioneer in the women's suffrage movement, and Miles Berkeley was a leading mycologist best known for his identification of the fungus responsible for potato blight, the cause of the Irish potato famine. In this letter, Becker rebukes Berkeley for describing in an article in Nature the anther-smut disease (Microbotryum) of red campion (Silene dioica) yet failing to cite her as the source of the original study. Becker also corresponded with Darwin about her work on anther smut.