Ɛpsilon

To H. N. Moseley   22 November [1876]1

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

Nov. 22d

My dear Mr Moseley

It is very kind of you to send me the Japanese books, which are extremely curious & amusing. My son Frank is away, but I am sure he will be much obliged for the two papers which you have sent him.2

Thanks, also, for your interesting note: it is pity that Peripatus is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body: it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spiders web.—3

Yours very sincerely. | Ch. Darwin

P.S | I am not disappointed at what W. Thomson says: as long as a man believes in evolution biology will progress, & it signifies comparatively little whether he admits natural selection & thus gains some light on the method, or remains in utter darkness.4

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from H. N. Moseley, [after 17 November 1876] (Correspondence vol. 24). This letter was originally published in Correspondence vol. 24 from a copy; the differences between the two version are minor, except that the original has ‘thus’ in the postscript where the copy had ‘then’.
2
See Correspondence vol. 24, letter from H. N. Moseley, [after 17 November 1876]. The papers sent to Francis Darwin have not been identified.
3
Moseley had commented on Frederick Wollaston Hutton’s article about Peripatus novae-zealandiae (now Peripatoides novaezealandiae, a velvet worm) in his letter of [after 17 November 1876] (Correspondence vol. 24).
4
Moseley had sent a clipping from The Times about Charles Wyville Thomson’s address to the natural history class at Edinburgh University; see Correspondence vol. 24, letter from H. N. Moseley, [after 17 November 1876] and n. 4.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10685,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10685