From E. A. Darwin   11 March [1879]1

11 March

Dear Charles

I think you might send Kosmos at once to Mr Dallas as Krause is quite sure to give his permission with thanks.2 I dont think being published in Fortnightly would have the same monumental effect as an independent book & I’m afraid that it is not large enough for one of Morley’s series even if it suited him.3 Have I only dreamt or have I seen that Huxley is undertaking a series of Lives of Men of Science?4

What I wanted to know about the Kosmos title page was whether that about the Weltanschauung was peculiar to this number as I thought Kosmos was Science generally without any special application to the Evolution Theory.5

E A D

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter to Ernst Krause, 9 March 1879.
2
See letter to Ernst Krause, 9 March 1879; CD had requested Krause’s permission to have William Sweetland Dallas translate Krause’s sketch of the life of Erasmus Darwin published in Kosmos (Krause 1879a).
3
John Morley, the editor of the Fortnightly Review, often serialised longer works over several issues of the periodical (see, for example, Bagehot 1867–72, later published as Bagehot 1872).
4
Thomas Henry Huxley had recently written a biography of David Hume (T. H. Huxley 1879) for a series edited by Morley on English men of letters; he then contemplated editing a similar series on men of science but the project never materialised (see A. Desmond 1994–7, 2: 118).
5
See letter from E. A. Darwin, 8 March [1879] and n. 6. The journal Kosmos had been founded with a view to promoting research related to Darwinian evolutionary theory; for more on the founding of the journal, see Daum 1998, pp. 359–69 (see also Correspondence vol. 25, letter from Ernst Krause, 11 March 1877).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11923,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11923