Ɛpsilon

To G. C. Robertson   27 April 1877

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.) [6 Queen Anne Street, London.]

April 27th/ 77/

Dear Sir

I hope that you will be so good as to take the trouble to read the enclosed M.S. & if you think it fit for publication in your admirable Journal of Mind, I shall be gratified.—1 If you do not think it fit, as is very likely, will you please to return it to me. I hope that you will read it in an extra critical spirit, as I cannot judge whether it is worth publishing from having been so so much interested in watching the dawn of the several faculties in my own infant.— I may add that I shd. never have thought of sending you the M.S. had not M. Taine’s article appeared in your Journal.2 If my M.S. is printed I think that I had better see a proof.

I remain Dear Sir | yours faithfully | Ch. Darwin

1
CD sent his manuscript of ‘Biographical sketch of an infant’; it was published in the July 1877 issue of the journal Mind. A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. CD had kept notes on his children’s development from the birth of his first child, William Erasmus, in December 1839; the notebook is in DAR 210.11: 37.
2
An article by Hippolyte Taine, ‘On the acquisition of language by children’, had appeared in translation in the April 1877 issue of Mind (Taine 1877). Taine’s original article had been published in the first issue of Revue philosophique (Taine 1876).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … Orpington S.E.R.)] parentheses added

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10943,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10943