Ɛpsilon

To S. L. Lovén   28 January 1876

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Jan 28 76

Dear Sir

Owing to an accidental delay in London, I received your very kind letter of Jan 14th, only yesterday, and a few days before your work on the Echinöidées.1 That you should have sent me so fine a present, I look at as a great honour. I have admired the wonderfully clear drawings & will soon read the text. A more difficult problem than that of the homologies of such complex organisms can hardly be imagined   I can quite understand what you say about the impossibility of tracing at present the genealogy of the members of this group; and in my opinion some naturalists have been very rash in their attempts in this line.2

I remain dear Sir | With very sincere thanks | Yours faithfully | Charles Darwin

LS

1
See letter from S. L. Lovén, [14 January 1876]. CD’s copy of Lovén’s paper on the Echinoidea (heart urchins, sand dollars, and sea urchins; Lovén 1872a) is in the Darwin Library–Down.
2
Although CD never worked on echinoderms, he was aware of some of the difficulties they posed (see Correspondence vol. 13, letter to Fritz Müller, 20 September [1865] and n. 11). Among those who had worked on echinoderm classification were Alexander and Louis Agassiz, Thomas Henry Huxley, Johannes Peter Müller, and Richard Owen; for more on the debates surrounding their work see Winsor 1976. Lovén developed a system of numbering ambulacral plates around the mouths of echinoids, allowing the identification of echinoderm-ray homologies; the system later became known as Lovén’s law. For a synopsis of Lovén’s system, see David 1995.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10373,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10373