From Emil du Bois-Reymond   7 November 1878

Berlin N. W. | 15 Neue Wilhelm Strasse

November 7th, 1878

My dear Sir,

I have great pleasure in announcing to you that you were to-day elected a foreign associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences. My proposal was seconded by Ewald, Helmholtz, Peters, Pringsheim and Virchow. As the election requires the sanction of His Majesty the Emperor and King, a few weeks will elapse before you receive the official notification and diploma.1

I also send you, by this post, a copy of an address of which you are the ‘hero’, and in which I have endeavoured to give expression to my ‘worship’. You told me once that nothing short of dire compulsion could make you read german, and I cannot therefore hope that you will read my paper. A translation of it, however, is about to appear in the New York Periodical, Popular Science Monthly. Though very unsatisfactory, it can at least convey an idea of my strain of thought.2

Believe me, my dear Sir, | Yours, sincerely, | E du Bois Reymond.

Charles Darwin, Esqre.

1
CD received the diploma from the Königliche Preussischer Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences) in January 1879 (see Correspondence vol. 27, letter to Emil du Bois-Reymond, 23 January 1879); for a transcription and translation, see Appendix III. The seconders were Julius Wilhelm Ewald, Wilhelm Peters, Hermann von Helmholtz, Nathanael Pringsheim, and Rudolf Carl Virchow. The vote was affirmed by Wilhelm I, king of Prussia and emperor of Germany.
2
Du Bois-Reymond’s secretarial address, ‘Darwin versus Galiani’, delivered to the Königliche Preussischer Akademie der Wissenschaften on 6 July 1876 (Du Bois-Reymond 1876) was published in translation in February 1879 (Du Bois-Reymond 1879). No previous correspondence with du Bois-Reymond has been found.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11739A,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11739A