To G. J. Romanes   2 September [1878]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Sept. 2d

My dear Romanes

Many thanks for your letter.2 I am delighted to hear that you mean to work the comparative psychology well.— I thought your letter to the Times very good indeed.—3 Bartlett at the Zoolog Gardens, I feel sure, wd advise you infinitely better about hardiness, intellect price, &c of monkeys than F. Buckland; but with him it must be vivâ voce.—4

Frank5 says you ought to keep an idiot, a deaf-mute, a monkey & a baby in your house! I shd guess that Lady Hobhouse was fairly trustworthy.—6

I send by this post Delboeuf.—7

The enclosed wd. be worth your getting.— I think that I mentioned the first edit. to you. It is a smallish book— He is a Spencerian to the back-bone.—8

Ever yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from G. J. Romanes, 29 August 1878.
3
Romanes had written a letter published in The Times, 28 August 1878, p. 6, responding to comments in an editorial of 23 August 1878, p. 9, on his lecture on animal intelligence given at the meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science (G. J. Romanes 1878b). The editorial argued that the difference between human and animal (and male and female) intelligence, or more precisely their ability to govern their own impulses and thought processes, was due to ‘bulk of brain’. Romanes replied that the human faculty of deliberation depended on abstract thought, which in turn depended on language, and that humans inherited the ‘constructive effects of language or intelligence’ that had accumulated in their ancestors. See also letter to G. J. Romanes, 20 August 1878.
4
In his letter of 29 August 1878, Romanes said that he had written to Frank Buckland to ask what sort of monkey to get for psychological observations, but Buckland had not replied. Abraham Dee Bartlett was superintendent of the Zoological Gardens, Regent’s Park, London.
7
Joseph Delboeuf, La psychologie comme science naturelle, son présent et son avenir (Psychology as natural science, its present and future; Delboeuf 1876). See letter to G. J. Romanes, 20 August 1878.
8
The enclosure has not been found, but was probably a reference to Alfred Espinas’s Des sociétés animales: étude de psychologie comparée (Animal societies: a study in comparative psychology; Espinas 1877); see letter from G. J. Romanes, 10 September 1878. Espinas co-translated Herbert Spencer’s Principles of psychology (Espinas and Ribot trans. 1874–5); see also Correspondence vol. 25, letter from Alfred Espinas, 1 July 1877.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.4 of monkeys] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11684,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11684