Ɛpsilon

From G. H. Darwin   27 July 1880

Trin: Coll: | Camb:

July 27. 80

My dear Father,

I am in some perplexity to know what I ought to do about the enclosed letter from Wrigley.1 It would be exceedingly disagreeable to refuse my name. I really know absolutely nothing about the place for the last 10 or 12 years & what I do remember is that the discipline was far from good & that Wrigley was painstaking but far from brilliant as a teacher. He occasionally had good men as under masters more especially for the military boys2

What on Earth is the meaning of my being a referee. It would hardly be fair to Wrigley to admit my name & then to give a very luke-warm praise of him & how can I refuse.

I have just had a letter from Lady Thomson asking me to join them at Cowes at the end of the week. If I can only get a little better (& I do seem better today) I shall certainly go. I feel it is very lazy to do so & that I ought to stop and look after the pendulum, as I’ve not done anything to speak of for so long3

I found poor Horace quite ill with his toothache yesterday but getting better in consequence of having his face lanced.— We had another thunderstorm & heavy rain again last night. I suppose you are quite alone now.4

Your affectionate son | G. H. Darwin

I think Wrigley might be fairly described as good for men not intending to read high mathematics

Pure trypsin (not thrypsin) not procurable.

Kühne probably the only man who ever had it & it wd. cost about £3 a gramme.5

Will send you tomorrow some stuff which is almost all trypsin out of wh. Lea makes pancreatic ferment.6

Horace better but still in bed with bad sore throat

1
The enclosure has not been found; George had apparently been asked by Alfred Wrigley to write a reference for him.
2
Wrigley was the headmaster of Clapham Grammar School and taught mathematics; the school had a special department for pupils preparing for admission to military colleges and the Indian Civil Service (The Times, 16 September 1867, p. 4). CD’s four younger sons, including George, had been pupils at the school.
3
Frances Anna Thomson was the wife of William Thomson. Cowes is a seaport town on the Isle of Wight. George apparently did join the Thomsons for some time on their yacht, Lalla Rookh, on which they spent most summers (S. P. Thompson 1910, 2: 760). George and Horace Darwin were attempting to construct a pendulum to measure the lunar disturbance of gravity; the idea for the investigation had come from Thomson (see Nature, 3 November 1881, pp. 20–1, for a description of the construction of the bifilar pendulum; see also Longair 2016, p. 93).
4
Horace Darwin also lived in Cambridge. Francis Darwin was in Wales (letter from Francis Darwin, [1 August 1880]) and Elizabeth Darwin had gone to Warwick; however, Henrietta Emma and Richard Buckley Litchfield visited from 26 to 29 July 1880 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
5
The section of the letter from ‘Pure trypsin’ to the end was written on the back of the envelope. In 1876, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne was the first to isolate and name the enzyme trypsin (Kühne 1876).
6
Arthur Sheridan Lea had gone to Heidelberg to study with Kühne around the time of Kühne’s discovery (Geison 1978, p. 183).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12668,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12668