Ɛpsilon

To Grant Allen   2 [May] 18791

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

April 2d. 79

My dear Sir

I have just read with much interest your article in the Fortnightly & your views seem to me very probable.2 But my judgment is worth nothing, as I have of late been attending to other subjects. The sole source of doubt which crossed my mind relates to the faces of some monkeys, which, as far as I remember, are nearly hairless & yet can hardly have been subjected to rubbing. Is not the hairless condition of the feet of animals due to the thickening of the skin? would the hair disappear if the skin was not thickened? But my object in writing was solely to send enclosed, in case you have not seen the later edition of the Descent of man.3

It is something wonderful to me to hear of anyone defending Sexual Selection, which, such is my stock of conceit, I have still full confidence in.4

Believe me | My dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin

LS

1
The month is established by the reference to Allen’s essay (see n. 2, below). CD evidently wrote April by mistake.
2
Allen’s essay ‘A problem of human evolution’ was published in Fortnightly Review on 1 May 1879 (G. Allen 1879b). Allen argued that the hair on some parts of the body was initially worn away by long-continued pressure or friction; after this, he suggested, individuals with less hair would have appeared more attractive to their mates, and thus sexual selection completed the process of denudation. He considered the fact that women were less hairy than men as evidence for this argument.
3
CD discussed hair as a sexual characteristic in Descent 2d ed., pp. 601–4; he remarked that the hairless faces of monkeys allowed the colour of their skin to be more fully displayed during the breeding season.
4
Many men of science, including St George Jackson Mivart, William Boyd Dawkins, and August Weismann, disagreed with CD’s notion of sexual selection, but Alfred Russel Wallace was one of the strongest critics (see E. Richards 2017, pp. 466–91; see also Wallace 1877 and Correspondence vol. 25, letters from A. R. Wallace, 23 July 1877 and 3 September 1877). Wallace also attacked sexual selection in his review of Allen’s book on colour in nature (G. Allen 1879a; letter from Raphael Meldola, 4 April 1879 and n. 4).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.3 relates] after del ‘was’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11967,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11967