Ɛpsilon

To John Price   10 February [1878]1

Down | Beckenham Kent. &c.

Feb 10th.

My dear Price.

I am very much obliged for your kind congratulations about the L.L.D.—2 Why the Senate conferred it on me I know not in the least. I was astonished to hear that the R. Prof: of Divinity3 & several other great Dons attended, & several such men have subscribed, as I am informed for the picture for the University to commemorate the honour conferred on me—4

I am very sorry to hear that you are an invalid at present, but trust your own mountain air will do you good.

I have no copy in German of Virchow’s address.5 Naturally I did not admire it as much as you do & he seemed to me to lecture in a very arrogant manner many of his audience, who knew much more of natural science than he does, Not that I mean Virchow has not done good work, though many think his famous aphorism “omnis cellula e cellulâ”, false—6 If we were to meet I dare say neither of us wd. recognise the other!7

Hoping that you may soon get stronger. Yours very faithfully: | Ch Darwin

Copy

1
The year is established by the reference to the award of an honorary LLD to CD; see n. 2, below.
2
The letter from Price has not been found. CD was awarded an honorary LLD degree by the University of Cambridge on 17 November 1877 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
3
The regius professor of divinity at Cambridge was Brooke Foss Westcott.
4
See Correspondence vol. 25, letter to G. H. Darwin, 21 November [1877] and n. 4.
5
Rudolf Carl Virchow had given the address Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft im modernen Staat (The liberty of science in the modern state; Virchow 1877) to the Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians at Munich on 22 September 1877. He argued that there was no room for speculative theories in the new German empire, only established scientific facts (see Weindling 1981, pp. 118–20). Price was an opponent of evolutionary theories on the grounds of their speculative nature (see Price 1863–4, p. 94).
6
The doctrine ‘omnis cellula e cellula’ (every cell comes from a cell; Latin) was popularised in Virchow 1858. CD discussed it in Variation 2: 370. For more on Virchow’s cell theory and CD’s hypothesis of pangenesis, see Geison 1969, pp. 391–3. On Virchow’s criticism of the materialistic Darwinism of Ernst Haeckel, see Weindling 1981, p. 118.
7
CD and Price were school-friends in Shrewsbury (see Correspondence vol. 1).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11350,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11350