Ɛpsilon

From E. S. Morse   18 May 1877

Salem Mass.

May 18th 77

My dear Sir.

I can hardly express my gratitude for your kind and encouraging words which you have from time to time honored me with in acknowledgement for my papers.1 Though strongly tempted I have yet refrained from writing to you knowing how overwhelmed you must be with correspondence. In your letter just recd, and which I greatly prize relating to my Buffalo Address you express the regret that I have not made clear the views of Hyatt and Cope regarding Acceleration and Retardation.2 Must I confess to a lack of frankness or to a want of honesty in not having the courage to say that I was in utter despair in not being able to make out what these gentlemen meant. Prof Cope a friend of mine of several years standing, and Prof Hyatt a class mate with me with Agassiz and a most intimate friend.3 I had neither the heart nor the courage to confess my ignorance after the patient manner in which Hyatt has time and again endeavoured to make the views clear to me.

I think some light dawns on me when he is with me but it vanishes at once.

To night I start for San Francisco and Japan for the express purpose of looking into the Brachiopods there particularly their embryology.4 If I can be of any aid to you in any special line of work I pray you will command me.

My address will be Tokio Japan.

With the deepest regards | I remain | Faithfully Yours | Edw S Morse

P.S. | It may be of interest to you to know that during the past winter I gave public courses of lectures on Darwinism in Cincinnati, Minneapolis Buffalo, New York City and many single lectures on the same subject.

The New York lectures were given in large Hall of the Cooper Inst. before an audience of 3500 people.5

1
CD had praised Morse’s earlier work on protective coloration in molluscs and on the systematic position of the Brachiopoda (see Correspondence vol. 19, letter to E. S. Morse, 3 December 1871, and Correspondence vol. 21, letter to E. S. Morse, 16 September 1873).
2
Morse had discussed the evolutionary views of Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt in his address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Buffalo, New York (Morse 1876, pp. 159–60). See letter to E. S. Morse, 23 April 1877 and nn. 1 and 4.
3
Morse and Hyatt studied with Louis Agassiz at Harvard University.
4
Morse studied coastal brachiopods in Japan from 1877 to 1880 (ANB).
5
Morse gave his four lectures on evolution in New York on 6, 13, 20, and 27 January 1877, and three lectures on evolution and ‘The origin of man’ in Cincinnati on 16, 20, and 22 February 1877 (New York Herald, 16 November 1876, p. 10; Cincinnati Daily Star, 10 February 1877, p. 1). A report on the second New York lecture is in the New York Herald, 14 January 1877, p. 6. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded in 1859 and is in Cooper Square, Manhattan.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10966,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10966