From Anthony Rich   14 November 1879

My dear M^r. Darwin.

Murray sent me the Life of Erasmus Darwin in due course, as you had kindly instructed him to do.¹ I spent the two last evenings in reading it through, and write at once to thank you for the book as well as your obliging recollection of me. It is full of pleasant and instructive reading; on both sides of it, your personal accounts, no less than D^r. Krause’s Summary of the doctrines contained in the various works of E. Darwin.² I had only known his name as a poet; and that, to confess the truth, only from Canning’s parody in the Anti Jacobin.³ He must indeed have been a man of remarkable ability and originality of mind to have tapped, as it were, at the period when he lived the sources of knowledge which an equally gifted grand-son has spent an industrious life in investigating, correcting, expanding, and reducing to a system—by cumulative proofs deduced from all orders of nature, sufficient to convert bitter opponents, and satisfy the judgements of the first scientific enquirers of the day. It was well that you should set yourself to remove the slightest aspersion from a character like his.⁴ And, in the fulness of time, when another century has rolled on, I do not know what better wish one could breathe for you, than that another grandson of the family, another “younger Darwin” equal to the two elder ones, may come to the front, if necessary to see that no injustice is done to you. No man I apprehend of illustrious name can hope to pass away without being pelted by some one—if only by a member of that “learned” body who persuade their penitents in Lent that “hog’s flesh is fish ever since the Devil entered into them and sent them rattling into the sea.”!—⁵ But this was to have been only a note of thanks, and I am prosing on much I fear to your tribulation. So good bye!, and pardon! Yours very truly | Anthony Rich.

Nov^r. 14— 79.

P.S. I have this moment remembered that you, or one of your sons, or some one else whom I have jumbled up by mistake, said that he could not find out when I was at Caius Coll: and I am so stupid about dates that I could not myself remember; which in these days of pretentiousness looked rather like being an imposter!—⁶ An old Cambridge Calendar tumbled out of one of my closets yesterday, by which I find that I went up as a freshman in Nov^r. 1821, and took my B.A. degree in Jan^y. 1825.—on the last day of which month I attained the age of 21.