Ɛpsilon

To E. S. Morse   9 [April] 18801

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station| Orpington. S.E.R.) [Abinger Hall, Surrey.]

March 9th 1880

My dear Sir

I have forwarded your letter to ‘Nature’ with a private one to the Editor & another which he can publish if he thinks fit.2 Your letter, though I believe quite just, is rather fierce, & whether the Editor will publish it, I do not at all know.— I hope that he may.— It is most wonderful & interesting that native Japanese gentlemen shd. have aided you in your very interesting researches.—3

In Haste— Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin.

1
The month is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from E. S. Morse, 23 March 1880. CD evidently wrote March in error.
2
With his letter to CD of 23 March 1880, Morse had enclosed a rebuttal of an unfavourable review of his monograph on the Omori shell mounds in Japan (Morse 1879). CD’s private letter to Joseph Norman Lockyer, the editor of Nature, has not been found. His other letter, dated 9 April [1880], was published in Nature, 15 April 1880, p. 561, along with the letter sent by Morse.
3
In his preface, Morse had cited several Japanese scholars by name and paid tribute to the work done by Japanese artists in producing the plates for the volume (Morse 1879, pp. iii–iv).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12570,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12570