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The Charles Darwin Collection
The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Relates anecdote concerning the blind Henry Fawcett and the Bishop of Oxford; Fawcett proclaimed, within the other’s hearing, that the Bishop had not read the Origin.
Invites Mrs Huxley and the children to spend a fortnight at Down.
MS of Chauncey Wright’s review has not yet arrived.
[P.S. missing from original.]
Returns a letter, which, when it is published, he believes will make readers take up THH’s lectures in a more impartial spirit.
On THH’s Lectures to working men.
Work by Ferdinand J. Cohn on the contractile tissue of plants ["Über contractile Gewebe im Pflanzenreich" Abh. Schlesischen Ges. Vaterl. Cult. 1 (1861)] seems important. CD has come to the conclusion that there must be some substance in plants analogous to the supposed diffused nervous matter in lower animals.
[Part of P.S. missing from original.]
Sabine’s Royal Society address [awarding the Copley Medal to CD], in referring to the Origin, did not contain the words "expressly excluded". The actual words were "expressly omitted from the grounds of our award". This was not meant to place the Origin on a sort of index expurgatorium, but was a simple statement of fact.
Wishes to correct an expression in his last letter which is "perhaps not rigorously exact": he should not have said "declining to honour it [the Origin] with the Copley Medal" but simply "not honouring it with the Copley medal". "Declining implies having been asked and there was no asking in the present case."
It is improbable that he changed the wording of Sabine’s address without his noticing. Proceeds to defend the passage by quoting the rules of the award of the Copley Medal and the Royal Society Council’s action in this case, which is accurately presented in the wording of the award.
Corrects a minor error in his last letter.
Urges THH to return proofs of his paper to Royal Society. Some authors are more ready to come down on reviewers and secretary for delay than to get on with their own proofs.
Apologises for passing on what he agrees were offensive remarks in V. Lushington’s letter. Has told VL he had no right to make them. Asks THH to make allowance for red-hot disciples defending the master.
Delighted with THH’s review [in Academy (1869)] of Haeckel’s [Natürliche] Schöpfungsgeschichte [1868],
but groans about THH’s view of rudimentary organs. Cites Origin and Variation.
