From W. S. Dallas   5 February 1880

Geological Society, | Burlington House, W.

5 Feby. 1880

My dear Mr. Darwin

I have no doubt you are quite right in abstaining from replying to Butler, & as you who are so much more aggrieved than I am let him alone, I think I may do so too.—1 If Krause would reply to him it would be the most satisfactory thing, for although by a judicious use of the pronoun “he” in the last paragraph of his letter Mr. Butler manages to leave his readers in doubt whether he charges Krause or me with having made unacknowledged use of his work, the reference must properly be to Krause.—2

The latter gentleman no doubt is acquainted with Butler’s work, which, indeed, he criticized in some of the MS. parts translated by me but not printed.—3

If you will send me the MS. of Mr. Francis Darwin’s lecture I will look through it to see whether it will suit me for Pop. Sci. Review but I am afraid I shall be unable to put it with the next (April) number.—4 I am very much obliged to you & to him for the kind offer of it.—

Believe me | Yours very truly | W. S. Dallas

1
CD had recently decided not to respond to allegations concerning Erasmus Darwin made by Samuel Butler in a letter to the Athenæum (see letter to T. H. Huxley, 4 February [1880]; for Butler’s letter, see the letter to H. E. Litchfield, 1 February [1880], enclosure 1). CD’s letter to Dallas has not been found.
2
In his letter to the Athenæum, Butler compared the original essay by Ernst Krause (Krause 1879a) with the version in Erasmus Darwin, and suggested that some of the new material made critical reference to Butler 1879 without acknowledging its target. Butler also criticised the reviews of Butler 1879 and Erasmus Darwin in Popular Science Review, the journal edited by Dallas.
3
A substantial amount of Krause’s revised essay for Erasmus Darwin was deleted because it covered subjects already discussed by CD in his preliminary notice (see Correspondence vol 27, letter to Ernst Krause, 13 August 1879).
4
Dallas published Francis Darwin’s lecture on climbing plants in the July 1880 issue of Popular Science Review (F. Darwin 1880c). The lecture was given by Francis to the Sunday Lecture Society at St George’s Hall, London, on 25 January 1880 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242); for more on the Sunday Lecture Society, see Barton 2014, pp. 199–206).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12462,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12462