Ɛpsilon

To J. D. Hooker   16 March [1879]1

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

March 16th

My dear Hooker

I thank you much for your most kind letter.2 It has pleased me greatly; & Frank desires me to say how grateful he is for the interest which you have shown about him. Frank desired earnestly to accept the office, & we consulted long about him. The sole point which determined him was that he thought that he had not knowledge enough on morphology & systematic botany, especially on the enormous field of the lower forms, to justify him in pretending to judge on the merits of the answers given by any superior students. In this I could not but agree with him. After reading your & Dyers letters, I confess, however, to being somewhat staggered; but it is now too late as the office has been offered to some one else.3 Frank from the first hoped that the office might be hereafter offered again to him, & he thought then that he might accept it.4 Another point somewhat influenced me (though F. decided quite for himself) namely that he is a slow & almost too conscientious a worker, & I am very anxious that he shd do more original work; but this may have been a mistake on my part. I beg you to thank also Dyer very much for his long letter which has gratified both Frank & me much. I will not answer it separately, as I could only repeat what I have here said:

Farewell my dear & kind old Friends | yours | Charles Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from J. D. Hooker, 13 March 1879.
3
See letter from J. D. Hooker, 13 March 1879 and nn. 1 and 4. The letter from William Turner Thiselton-Dyer to CD or Francis Darwin encouraging Francis to accept nomination as examiner in the natural sciences tripos at the University of Cambridge has not been found, but see the letter to W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 13 March 1879. The person offered the office instead of Francis has not been identified; eight examiners were appointed, of whom four were new appointees, including Francis Maitland Balfour (Cambridge University Reporter, 25 March 1879, pp. 474–5; on Balfour’s appointment, see the letter from J. D. Hooker, 13 March 1879, n. 1).
4
In a letter to Hooker of 17 March 1879 (DAR 95: 483–4), Francis wrote that, having received a letter on the subject from Michael Foster (praelector in physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge), he telegraphed his reply that he would accept; however, his name was not among the the examiners announced in the Cambridge University Reporter, 25 March 1879, pp. 474–5. Francis became an examiner in 1884 (Cambridge University Reporter, 4 December 1883, p. 249).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.11 (though] parenthesis over comma

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11939,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11939