To J. V. Carus   25 December 1875

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Dec 25. 75

My dear Sir

I congratulate you on having finished “Insectivorous Plants”. Many thanks for the errata, which I will use for the French translation & append to the unsold copies of the English edit.1

Page 95. l. 4—“120th” is right & the mm ought to be 1.272

Page 301 footnote Spence is right3

Page 375 l 12 for “the following” read this and the following4

Herr Koch can easily get my two Geological books from the publishers Messrs Smith & Elder, London.5

I have looked through the spare copies of all my papers, and send all that I have; but I do not think that several of them are worth translating. I have only one copy of the best viz on the Erratic Boulders of S. America; but I can lend you my one copy whenever you want it. I do not send my long paper on the Parallel Roads of Glenroy, as I am sure that I was wrong, though some still uphold my view.6

All my papers on Dimorphic plants will be republished corrected in the Book at which I am now at work.7 My next work will be to bring out a new Edit of my Orchis book.8

I am heartily glad to hear that yr health is better, & long may it remain so— I can give a very fairly good account of my own health—

My dear Sir | Yrs very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

LS

1
See letter from J. V. Carus, 21 December 1875, and letter to C.-F. Reinwald, 26 December 1875). The German edition of Insectivorous plants was Carus trans. 1876a; the French translation was Barbier trans. 1877. Carus’s corrections were not made in the English text until 1888, when Francis Darwin incorporated the corrections into Insectivorous plants 2d ed., but several were noted on an errata slip that was inserted into remaining unsold copies of the third thousand of Insectivorous plants and in all copies of the fourth thousand (see letter from J. V. Carus, 21 December 1875, nn. 3–11).
5
Eduard Koch, the head of E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, was publishing a German collected edition of CD’s works, and wanted to include translations of South America and Volcanic islands (see letter from J. V. Carus, 21 December 1875). Both these works had been published by Smith, Elder, & Company.
6
Carus wanted to translate some of CD’s geological papers for the German edition of his collected works (see letter from J. V. Carus, 21 December 1875 and n. 15). He did not include ‘Parallel roads of Glen Roy’. In this paper, CD had suggested that the parallel roads of Glen Roy were terraces produced by changing seawater levels, but he had since accepted that they were shorelines of a diminishing ice-dammed lake. In contrast, Henry Darwin Rogers, Robert Boog Watson, and James Nicol had continued to argue for a marine origin of the roads (see Rogers 1861, Watson 1866, and Nicol 1869).
7
CD intended to include revised versions of ‘Dimorphic condition in Primula’, ‘Three forms of Lythrum salicaria’ and ‘Illegitimate offspring of dimorphic and trimorphic plants’ in Cross and self fertilisation (see letter to J. V. Carus, 7 February 1875 and n. 4), but they eventually appeared as part of Forms of flowers.
8
CD finished the first draft of Cross and self fertilisation and began preparing Orchids 2d ed. in May 1876 (Correspondence vol. 24, Appendix II). He had suggested a new edition of Orchids after being unable to buy a second-hand copy of the first edition (see letter to R. F. Cooke, 23 October [1875]).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10323,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10323