From J. V. Carus   28 June 1875

Leipzig

June 28th. 1875.

My dear Sir,

I have got the Insectivorous Plants, both parts, and thank you very much   I should have answered your kind letter sooner, if I had not written to Mr Koch about it. Of course the book must be translated, no doubt about that; and I shall be happy to do it, if you kindly allow it   It will then be the first volume of the botanical section of the complete edition.1

I have nearly done the “Journal”, and the delight I felt in reading it amply repaid the trouble I had in translating it.2 Together with the Insectivorous Plants a new edition of the Origin is wanted   As the work is stereotyped, I suppose you will have nothing to add3   To complete the history of the theory, as far as yourself are concerned, we intend to give the paper you published in the Linnean Proceedings, Vol III.4

Although I am pretty well now, yet I suffer too often from colds and (probably) nervous shortwindedness. Change of air does me always good, and so I shall go to Ems as soon as our summer term is over, to drink the water there and rest a little;5 in September I intend to go south-ward with my wife and the two eldest daughters, to avoid the transitional months which are always trying to me6   I hope to be able to do it; but everything depends on circumstances. So, most likely, I shall have to do the Insectivorous Plants before I go. When will they be published in England? Probably not before October. As the book has been asked for already, we must not be late.7

I see, you are preparing a revised edition of the Variation under Domestication. When will it come out? Not before next year or later.8

With grateful compliments I am | Yours ever sincerely | J. Victor Carus

1
CD had received the final corrected sheets for Insectivorous plants on 24 June 1875 (see letter to R. F. Cooke, 24 June [1875]). When CD sent Carus the first set of corrected sheets he asked whether Carus judged the book worthy of translation (see letter to J. V. Carus, 17 June [1875]). Eduard Koch, the head of E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, was publishing a collected edition of CD’s works of which the German translation of Insectivorous plants was volume 8 (Carus trans. 1876a; see also Carus trans. 1875–87).
2
Carus’s translation of Journal of researches (Carus trans. 1875b) was the first volume in the collected German edition of CD’s works (Carus trans. 1875–87).
3
Carus’s translation of Origin 6th ed. had been published in 1872 and was the fifth German edition (Bronn and Carus trans. 1872). The sixth German edition appeared in 1876 and was evidently unchanged from the fifth edition; it was the second volume of the collected German edition of CD’s works (Bronn and Carus trans. 1876; Carus trans. 1875–87).
4
Bronn and Carus trans. 1876 did not contain the paper that appeared in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Zoology) in 1858 (C. R. Darwin and Wallace 1858).
5
Bad Ems is a spa resort on the river Lahn, a tributary of the Rhine.
6
Carus’s wife was Sophie Catherine Carus; his two eldest daughters were Agnes Marie Elisabeth Carus and Anna Sophie Gertrud Carus.
7
Insectivorous plants was published on 2 July 1875 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)); the German translation appeared in early March 1876 (see Correspondence vol. 24, letter from J. V. Carus, 19 March 1876).
8
CD began work on Variation 2d ed. on 6 July 1875 (see CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)). It was published in the second half of February 1876 (Publishers’ circular, 1 March 1876, p. 168), but had an 1875 publication date.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10033,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10033