From G. H. Darwin   4 March 1880

Trin. Coll Camb.

Mar 4. 80

My dear Father,

If the M.S be sent registered to me I will begin the copying at once as I can borrow a machine here.1 I have just finished the paper at wh. I am at work & shall have time & ought to get it done in a fortnight or so.

Leo. will have told you that we paid him £50 for which he agreed to exhaust London resources, but he has been outside his contract & has got the wills at Lincoln searched.2 Do you think of giving more; I suspect he wd. accept if it were done delicately. What a lot of work he must have spent.

I have been having a bad cold in my head & somewhat on my chest but have got thro’ so far rather better than usual as I have only been languid & stupid & have continued doing a little work. I fear however the later stages more than the active nose-blowing.

As I said above I have just finished off my paper & shall send it to the R. S in the day or two. I am glad to say it will be short eno’ for the Proceedings3

We are getting on with the pendulum but have been delayed by finding the stone pillar is not isolated from the floor & so have been having the paving up & have got bricklayers & carpenters at work4   I hope we shall get to work again in a day or two.

Last Sunday I observed a little & thought the thing wobbled when cabs drove along a street 60 yds away— this proves its sensitiveness but does’nt look very hopeful for our doing anything in a town.

I can’t remember whether I told you that Sackville Cecil & I propose going down to Glasgow together after Easter. I’m sorry to say he’s got another railway place & is not going to come here after all.5

I enclose a pleasant letter of McLennan’s which gives a better account of things at Davos. I hope they will adhere to the scheme of coming to Hayes.6

I’m sorry to hear that you are knocked up & I hope going to London will do you good7

I find these incessant colds very disheartening, it is now many months that I have had more or less of a break down every 10 days & it never gives one time to get into good order between whiles.

I shall be tremendously interested with Col. Chester’s papers.

Yours affectionately | G H Darwin

1
CD was planning to send Joseph Lemuel Chester’s manuscript of research on William Darwin of Cleatham and his ancestors; see letter to J. L. Chester, 2 March 1880. George’s extensive notes on Chester’s family history are in DAR 14: 41; the ‘machine’ was probably a letter copying press (for examples, see https://www.officemuseum.com/copy_machines.htm (accessed 6 June 2019)).
2
Leonard Darwin took an interest in the Darwin family history; see letter to J. L. Chester, 2 March 1880. The payment was to Chester for his work on the Darwin ancestry; see letter to G. H. Darwin, 5 March [1880] and n. 4. The wills at Lincoln relate to the Darwin family’s ownership of the Cleatham estate in Lincolnshire.
3
George’s paper ‘On the analytical expressions which give the history of a fluid planet of small viscosity, attended by a single satellite’ (G. H. Darwin 1880) was received by the Royal Society of London on 6 March 1880 and published in their Proceedings.
4
George and Horace Darwin were constructing a pendulum to measure the lunar disturbance of gravity (G. H. Darwin 1907–16, 5: l).
5
Sackville Arthur Cecil became general manager of the Metropolitan District Railway in 1880. George was probably planning to visit William Thomson in Glasgow, as he had done in 1879; see Correspondence vol. 27, letter from G. H. Darwin, 10 May 1879.
6
The enclosure has not been found. John Ferguson McLennan was very ill with consumption; George had planned to visit him in Davos, Switzerland, in January (see letter to G. H. Darwin, 29 January [1880]). McLennan died at Hayes Common, Kent, in 1881 (ODNB).
7
CD was in London from 4 to 8 March 1880 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12510,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12510