Ɛpsilon

To E. S. Morse   23 April 1877

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R. [2 Bryanston Street, London.]

April 23d./77

My dear Sir

You must allow me just to tell you how very much I have been interested with the excellent Address which you have been so kind as to send me & which I had much wished to read.—1 I believe that I had read all or very nearly all the papers by your countrymen to which you refer, but I have been fairly astonished at their number & importance, when seeing them thus put together. I quite agree about the high value of Mr Allen’s works, as showing how much change may be effected, apparently through the direct action of the conditions of life.2 As for the fossil remains in the west, no words will express how wonderful they are.—3 There is one point which I regret that you did not make clear in your Address,—namely what is the meaning & importance of Prof. Cope & Hyatts views on Acceleration & Retardation: I have endeavoured & given up in despair the attempt to grasp their meaning.—4

Permit me to thank you cordially for the kind feeling shown toward me througout your Address, & I remain | My dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Ch. Darwin

1
Morse had given the vice-presidential address, ‘What American zoologists have done for evolution’, to the natural history section at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Buffalo, New York, in August 1876 (Morse 1876). CD’s annotated offprint of the address is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. Myron Leslie Baxter had told CD about the address in his letter of 28 September 1876 (Correspondence vol. 24).
2
Morse had referred to Joel Asaph Allen’s observations on geographical variation in birds and mammals, summarised in Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 15 (1872–3): 156–9, and to Allen’s paper on colour variation in North American squirrels (J. A. Allen 1874; see Morse 1876, pp. 146–8). Much of this section of Morse 1876 is scored in CD’s copy (see n. 1, above).
3
See Morse 1876, pp. 160–3.
4
Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt promoted a theory of evolution based on acceleration and retardation of development. CD mentioned their work in Origin 6th ed., p. 149. For CD’s views and uncertainty on the topic, see Correspondence vol. 20, letter to Alpheus Hyatt, 10 October [1872]. For more on the background and development of Cope’s and Hyatt’s ideas, see S. J. Gould 1977, pp. 85–96.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.1 interested] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10938,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10938