Ɛpsilon

To Édouard Heckel   4 March 1877

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

Mar 4. 1877

Dear Sir,

I have much cause to apologise for troubling you again; but I made a great blunder in my last note; & the error which I want you to correct in your translation is not at line 6, p 275 as I informed you, but at p 191 bottom line.1 The sentence commencing “The sole conjecture which I can form &c” should run—

“The sole conjecture which I can form is that the self-fertilised seeds had not been sufficiently ripened & thus produced weakly plants which grew at first at an abnormally quick rate, as occurred with Iberis”—2 There is therefore no error at p 275

Allow me to repeat how sorry I am that I felt compelled from want of health & strength to decline looking over your proof-sheets.3

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Ch Darwin

LS

1
For CD’s last note, see Correspondence vol. 30, Supplement, letter to Édouard Heckel, 19 February 1877. Heckel was making the French translation of Cross and self fertilisation (Heckel trans. 1877). For CD’s initial correction to p. 275 of Cross and self fertilisation, see the letter to J. V. Carus, 19 February 1877. Julius Victor Carus had questioned it in his letter of 26 February 1877. See also letter to J. V. Carus, 4 March 1877.
2
The correction was not made to Heckel trans. 1877, p. 192, but it was made to Cross and self fertilisation 2d ed., pp. 191–2, with the final clause expanded to ‘as occurred with seedlings from not well-ripened self-fertilised seeds of Iberis.’
3
In his letter of 27 December 1876 (Correspondence vol. 24), Heckel had asked whether CD would read the manuscript of his translation before publication.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10878,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10878