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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.
Thanks FD for seeds of Canna.
Still thinks it would be worth FD’s while looking at the fertilisation of Lotus; does not think Frank Darwin has exaggerated the novelty of the contrivance.
Thanks CD for his help and encouragement in his series of experiments [to test Pangenesis].
Thanks AS for his kindness towards himself and his family. Looks back with great satisfaction to his last visit ("as it will probably prove") to Cambridge.
Returns H. C. Watson’s letter.
CD must study JDH’s manner of arrangement of varieties and subspecies, etc.
Thanks FCD for information.
Hopes that translation of his paper will appear in Dublin Journal.
Notes experience of his son [Leonard Darwin] on engorgement of eyes with blood. Discusses secretion of tears when eye muscles are involuntarily contracted.
Asks to have observations made of a person retching violently, but ejecting nothing from stomach, in order to test relation between spasmodic contraction of orbicular muscles and tears. CD believes tears are caused by matter filling nostrils.
The Negro’s idea of beauty is the same as white man’s.
Believes the Jollops select for blackness.
Native immunity from coast fever is not complete.
Has found stone instruments.
Has sent F. Müller "a long screed" about the Passiflora.
Returns copy of Duchenne (found in cupboard) with notes [see 7221].
Sends photograph of woman patient with hair standing on end.
Comments on various figures [in Duchenne’s Mécanisme].
Informs CD that Oxford proposes to confer an honorary degree upon him.
Duchenne [Mécanisme] has arrived. Has been testing the photographs with 20 or 30 persons; when all or nearly all agree with Duchenne, CD trusts him. Not one understood the "contracted pyramidal of the nose". CD does not think the so-called muscle of lasciviousness worth exhibiting.
His MS [of Descent] is so large he may print only what he has, and make a second volume of what he is now writing on expression.
Discusses photographs he would like to have: baby screaming, person in paroxysm of fear.
Hears CD may come to Oxford at Commencement to receive an honorary degree. Invites CD, his wife, and daughter to stay at his house. [CD declined Hon. D.C.L. on grounds of ill health.]
Asks CD whether he is far enough along with his new work [Descent] to allow him to announce it as a forthcoming publication in his next quarterly list.
Asks by what action CD believes bee, spider, and fly orchids came to resemble their namesakes
and how the beauty of bivalves could have been produced by natural or sexual selection.
Has completed a memoir on the Aymara Indians of Bolivia [J. Ethnol. Soc. n.s. 2 (1870): 193–305] and is going to lecture on them.
Believes he has data relevant to CD’s work on man.
Orders seeds, ripened in Algiers; imported seed would be of no use. [Forwarded to Algiers by JDH, see 7272.]
In his reply to [7227] CD questions the significance of the supposed likeness of the bee, spider, and fly orchids to their presumed namesakes.
He thinks that the beauty of shells is altogether incidental and of no use to the animals.
Sends maps of U. S. Far West for CD to follow explorations.
Thanks for RAvK’s work [Anatomisch-systematische Beschreibung der Alcyonarien, pt 1, Die Pennatuliden (1870)].
Asks whether muscles to quills of porcupine are striped. Are they homologous to muscles of ordinary hairs? Could unstriped muscles develop into striped?