To J. V. Carus   14 October [1875]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Oct 14th.

My dear Sir

I send by this post clean sheets of my little book on Climbing Plants.2 I might have sent it a month ago but quite forgot. It will be published Nov. 6th. As you have not yet nearly finished Insectivorous Plants, which is a very heavy work for you I much fear, I would strongly suggest that you shd employ some one to make the Translation under your superintendence otherwise there must be such great delay. I have mentioned this to Herr Koch, from whom I received copies of my Journal, the appearance of which I much admire.—3

My Orchis book is out of Print, & I hope to correct & improve it, but this I shall not do until I have finished my book on the advantages of intercrossing in the vegetable kingdom; & I guess this book will take me a year.—4

The new Edit of Var. under Dom: will be published in December, & I hope that I have considerably improved it— I will keep old sheets for you, as many Chapters are not altered—others rather largely.5

I most truly hope that your Italian tour has done you good.6 How you can get through so much work as you do is astonishing to me.—

My dear Sir | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from J. V. Carus, 20 November 1875.
2
Carus’s translation of Climbing plants 2d ed. appeared in 1876 (Carus trans. 1876b).
3
Carus was translating Insectivorous plants, which had been published in English on 2 July 1875 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)); the German translation (Carus trans. 1876a) appeared by early March 1876 (see Correspondence vol. 24, letter from J. V. Carus, 19 March 1876). CD’s letter to Eduard Koch, the head of E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, has not been found. Koch was producing a collected German edition of CD’s works and the translation of Journal of researches was the first volume of the collection (Carus trans. 1875b and Carus trans. 1875–87).
4
Cross and self fertilisation was published on 10 November 1876 (Freeman 1977); Orchids 2d ed. was published in January 1877 (Publishers’ circular, 1 February 1877, p. 93).
5
Variation 2d ed. was published in the second half of February 1876 (Publishers’ circular, 1 March 1876, p. 168); however, it carried an 1875 publication date. There had already been a second German edition of Variation (Carus trans. 1873); the third German edition of the book was based on Variation 2d ed. (Carus trans. 1878).
6
See letter from J. V. Carus, 28 June 1875. Carus wrote he planned to spend September in the south with his family; CD evidently assumed he meant Italy.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 Kent.] before del ‘Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.’
1.1 little] interl
1.6 from] after del ‘from’
3.2 many] above del ‘many are’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10198,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10198