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To James Torbitt   [1]4 December 18781

Down,

Dec. 4, 1878.

My dear Sir

I heartily congratulate you on your gigantic labours of comparison being for the present finished and at the apparent great success of your later trials.2 Would it not lighten your labours to throw away all the earliest and less sound varieties? I admire your energy greatly. Energy carries everything before it. That was a very good plan of yours selecting the heaviest and largest seeds, of which I did not think, yet since the publication of my Cross-Fertilization I have received additional evidence of the advantage from selecting large seeds.3 I shall read your abstract with pleasure. I should be unwilling to give you the trouble to copy all the details but besides this I have little strength and am much overworked by my present investigations and endless letters. But pray do not think that I am not interested in your results. Would it not be well to get your abstract published in some good Agricultural or Horticultural Journal?4 When I receive your abstract I will send it to Messrs Farrer & Caird.5 I am sorry that business is still bad.6

With all good wishes | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin.

Copy

1
The day is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from James Torbitt, 12 December 1878. The day on the copy was evidently a copyist’s error; a note at the top of the copy records that it was made from another copy, not from the original letter.
2
Torbitt had sent his report of experiments in growing disease-resistant varieties of potato; see letter from James Torbitt, 12 December 1878.
3
See letter from James Torbitt, 12 December 1878. In Cross and self fertilisation, CD had included measurements of the weight of the capsules and seed produced by cross- and self-fertilised plants (see, for example, ibid., pp. 74–5).
4
In his letter of 12 December 1878, Torbitt had asked CD whether he wanted a full report or a summary of his results. No abstract of the results of Torbitt’s potato-crossing experiments has been found; some results were later published in a letter in Field, 8 March 1879, p. 272.
5
CD had enlisted the help of Thomas Henry Farrer and James Caird to secure government funding for Torbitt’s potato-crossing experiments (see letter to James Torbitt, 1 March 1878).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11772,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11772