Ɛpsilon

To Gaston de Saporta   15 August 1878

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.) [Abinger Hall, Surrey/Barlaston Hall, Staffordshire.]

August 15. 1878.

My dear Sir

I thank you very sincerely for your kind & interesting letter.1 It would be false in me to pretend that I care very much about my election to the Institut, but the sympathy of some few of my friends has gratified me deeply.—2

I am extremely glad to hear that you are going to publish a work on the more ancient fossil plants; & I thank you before-hand for the volume which you kindly say that you will send me.—3 I earnestly hope that you will give, at least incidentally, the results at which you have arrived with respect to the more recent Tertiary plants; for the close gradation of such forms seems to me a fact of paramount importance for the principle of evolution. Your cases are like those on the gradation in the genus Equus, recently discovered by Marsh in North America.—4

With the highest respect | I remain | Yours faithfully & obliged | Charles Darwin

2
CD was elected a corresponding member of the botanical section of the Académie des sciences on 5 August 1878 (see letter from J.-B. Dumas and Joseph Bertrand, 5 August 1878 and n. 2). Saporta had written to congratulate him.
3
Le monde des plantes avant l’apparition de l’homme (The world of plants before the appearance of man; Saporta 1879). See letter from Gaston de Saporta, 9 August 1878 and n. 4.
4
Othniel Charles Marsh had discovered a complete sequence of fossil horses, ancestors of the modern Equus (the genus of horses, asses, and zebras; Marsh 1874).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

2.7 North] after del ‘the’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11661,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11661