Ɛpsilon

To T. H. Huxley   11 May 1880

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

May 11th 1880

My dear Huxley

I had no intention to make you to write to me, or expectation of your doing so; but your note has been so far “cheerier” to me than mine could have been to you, that I must & will write again.—1 I saw your motive for not alluding to natural selection & quite agreed in my mind in its wisdom.2 But at the same time it occurred to me that you might be giving it up, & that anyhow you could not safely allude to it, without various ‘providos’ too long to give in a Lecture. If I think continuously on some half-dozen structures of which we can at present see no uses, I can persuade myself that natural selection is of quite subordinate importance. On the other hand when I reflect on the innumerable structures, especially in plants, which 20 years ago would have been called simply ‘morphological’ & useless, & which are now known to be highly important, I can persuade myself that every structure may have been developed through natural selection.— It is really curious how many out of a list of Structures which Bronn enumerated, as not possibly due to natural selection because of no functional importance, can now be shown to be highly important.3 Lobed leaves was, I believe, one case & only 2 or 3 days ago, Frank showed me how they act in a manner quite sufficiently important to account for the lobing of any large leaf.—4

I am particularly delighted at what you say

⁠⟨⁠13 of page⁠⟩⁠ arrived in ‘Var. of Dom animals’ at exactly the same conclusion with respect to the domestic dogs of Europe & N. America.—5 See how important in another way this conclusion is; for no one can doubt that

⁠⟨⁠13 of page⁠⟩⁠ & how well this supports the Paflasian doctrine that domestication eliminates the sterility almost universal between forms slowly developed in a state of Nature.—6

⁠⟨⁠13 of page⁠⟩⁠ but ⁠⟨⁠rest of line missing⁠⟩⁠ own fault.

Ever yours | Ch. Darwin

Plants are splendid for making one believe in natural selection, as will & consciousness are excluded. I

⁠⟨⁠13 of page⁠⟩⁠ ⁠⟨⁠mi⁠⟩⁠ght as will say that a pair of scissors or nutcrackers had been developed through external conditions as the structure in question.7

incomplete

2
Huxley had not referred to natural selection in his article on ‘The coming of age of the Origin of Species’ (T. H. Huxley 1880c). He had initially had reservations about the mechanism of natural selection, but consistently defended CD’s evolutionary views (see, for example, [T. H. Huxley] 1860).
3
Heinrich Georg Bronn’s objections had appeared in an additional chapter appended to his translation of Origin (Bronn trans. 1860, ch. 15). The list of structures has not been located in Bronn’s work. It is possible this was a list sent by Bronn at the time he was translating Origin into German.
4
Francis Darwin was CD’s botanical assistant.
5
Huxley had recently given two lectures on the genus of dogs, arguing that small domestic dogs were modified from jackals and large dogs from wolves (see letter from T. H. Huxley, 10 May 1880). CD had made the same point in Variation 2d ed., 1: 34.
6
In Variation 2d ed., 1: 32, CD agreed with Pyotr Simon Pallas’s assumption that a long course of domestication eliminated the sterility exhibited by recently confined wild animals. Pallas had made this claim in his ‘Mémoire sur la variation des animaux’ (Pallas 1780). ‘Paflasian’ is a mistake for ‘Pallasian’.
7
CD was possibly responding to criticisms of the theory of natural selection made by Charles Elam (see letter from T. H. Huxley, 10 May 1880 and n. 4).
8
The letter as far as ‘I am delighted at what you say’ is at Imperial College; the rest is in a private collection. The top of the last sheet of the letter has been torn off.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

3.2 domestic] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12604,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12604