Ɛpsilon

To ?   24 June [1877]1

Bassett, Southampton

June 24th

⁠⟨⁠1 page obscured⁠⟩⁠ that each person shd. follow his natural bent & improve his natural special abilities. I may however mention that I can hardly doubt that a close study of Mill’s Logic would be highly improving to anyone.—2

Hardly any book ever stirred up my zeal for Science so much as Herschel’s Introduction to the study of Natural Philosophy.—3 From all that I hear I fear that both literature & Science are poor lines as a profession.

I remain | Dear Sir | yours faithfully | Ch. Darwin

incomplete4

1
The year is established by the address. CD stayed at William Erasmus Darwin’s house in Bassett, Southampton, from 13 June to 4 July 1877 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
2
In the fifth edition of his System of logic, John Stuart Mill referred to CD’s theory of descent as an ‘unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis’ obeying the ‘rules of induction’ (Mill 1862, 2: 18 n.; see also Correspondence vol. 11, letter from E. A. Darwin, 9 November [1863]).
3
In ‘Recollections’, pp. 381–2, CD remarked that reading John Frederick William Herschel’s Preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy (Herschel 1830a), together with Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal narrative (Humboldt 1814–29), ‘stirred up in [him] a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science’.
4
The original letter is complete and is described in the sale catalogue as being three pages long.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11014,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11014