From G. J. Romanes   5 November 1880

November 5, 1880.

I was sorry to hear on my return from Scotland that I had missed the pleasure of a call from you,1 and also to hear from Mr. Teesdale to-day that you had returned to Down, owing, he fears, to the alarming condition of Miss Wedgwood.2 I trust, however, that her state of health may not be so serious as he apprehends.

On my way South I stayed for a couple of days at Newcastle, to give two lectures on Mental Evolution, and hence my absence when you called.3 I stayed with Mr. Newall, who has the monster telescope, and ‘as good luck would have it, Providence was on my side,’ in the matter of giving us a clear sky for observing, rather a rare thing at Newcastle.4

You will be glad to hear that our season’s work at the ‘Zoological station’ has been very successful. A really interesting research has been conducted by Ewart and myself jointly on the locomotor system of Echinoderms, he taking the morphological and I the physiological part.5 When next I see you I shall tell you the principal points, but to do so in a letter would be tedious.

I think it is probable that Mivart and I shall have a magazine battle some day on Mental Evolution, as I think it is better to draw him in this way before finally discussing the whole subject in my book.6

1
CD was in London from 29 October to 2 November 1881 (‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
2
John Marmaduke Teesdale was a neighbour of CD; Elizabeth Wedgwood, who lived at Tromer Lodge in Down, was seriously ill (see letter to T. H. Farrer, 8 October 1880).
3
Romanes’s lectures were delivered at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society on 2 and 3 November 1880 (Newcastle Journal, 2 November 1880, p. 1).
4
Robert Stirling Newall’s telescope was erected at his house near Newcastle in 1871 (ODNB). The quotation is from Erewhon, or, Over the range ([Butler] 1872, p. 28).
5
A small zoological station was opened in Cowie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in August 1879 (Nature, 14 August 1879, pp. 372–3). A joint paper on echinoderms was later published by Romanes and James Cossar Ewart (Romanes and Ewart 1881; see letter from G. J. Romanes, 14 December 1880).
6
Romanes’s next book was Animal intelligence (G. J. Romanes 1882); this was followed by Mental evolution in animals, in which he criticised St George Jackson Mivart’s view that reason was uniquely human (see G. J. Romanes 1883, pp. 335–40).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12799,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12799