To W. B. Carpenter   [October–December 1846]

Down Farnborough Kent

Thursday

My dear Sir

When at Southampton you said you would give me the address of the artist whom you employ to draw from under the microscope, & whom you pay at 5s per hour.1 An early answer would very much oblige me, if you would kindly take the trouble.— The objects which I want chiefly drawn are minute corallines, & minute articulata & mollusca & their various organs;2 please say whether you think your artist would do such things well; it is a very different style, hard & precise, from those wonderfully beautiful sections which you exhibited at Southampton.— I hope you will excuse this trouble.— Shd. you have any communication with your artist, wd you mention my name as a probable applicant for his assistance

Pray believe me, my dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | C. Darwin

1
Probably Samuel William Leonard who prepared the illustrations for Carpenter’s article in the Report of the 14th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at York in 1844, see plates 1–20 in Carpenter 1844.
2
The references indicate that at this time CD intended to describe the invertebrate specimens collected during the Beagle voyage. This plan had been announced earlier for the Zoology (see Freeman 1977, p. 26) but was not achieved, probably because the Government grant was exhausted. In the event, the Cirripedia occupied CD until 1854 and he undertook no further work on the Beagle invertebrates.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.4 The] over illeg
1.9 artist] after del ‘at’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1001,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1001