From G. J. Romanes   17 December 1880

18 Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park, N.W.:

December 17, 1880.

My dear Mr. Darwin,—

Just a line to let you know that Professor Tyndall has kindly placed at my disposal the apparatus required to conduct the experiment with flashing light.1

Frank’s papers at the Linnean were, as you will probably have heard from other sources, a most brilliant success, as not only was the attendance enormously large and the interest great, but his exposition was a masterpiece of scientific reasoning, rendered with a choice and fluency of language that were really charming.2 I knew, of course, that he is a very clever fellow, but I did not know that he could do that sort of thing so well.

I have now got a monkey. Sclater let me choose one from the Zoo, and it is a very intelligent, affectionate little animal.3 I wanted to keep it in the nursery for purposes of comparison, but the proposal met with so much opposition that I had to give way. I am afraid to suggest the idiot, lest I should be told to occupy the nursery myself.4

Very sincerely and most respectfully yours, | geo. j. romanes.

2
Francis Darwin read two papers at the meeting of the Linnean Society on 16 December 1880 (see F. Darwin 1880a and 1880b).
3
CD had first suggested that Romanes try keeping a monkey to observe its mental capacity in a letter of 20 August 1878 (Correspondence vol. 26). Philip Lutley Sclater was secretary of the Zoological Society of London.
4
Romanes alludes to a comment in the letter to G. J. Romanes, 2 September [1878] (Correspondence vol. 26). Francis Darwin had jokingly remarked that Romanes should keep an idiot, a deaf-mute, a monkey, and a baby in his house. At this time the term ‘idiot’ was used in both law and medicine to refer to a person congenitally deficient in reasoning powers (OED). Romanes’s daughter, Ethel Georgina, had been born on 19 February 1880 (E. D. Romanes 1918, p. 42). In the event, the animal, identified by Romanes as a brown capuchin monkey, Cebus fatuellus (a synonym of Sapajus apella, the tufted capuchin), was kept by Romanes’s sister Charlotte Elizabeth Romanes (for her diary of observations on the monkey, see G. J. Romanes 1882, pp. 484–95).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12924,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12924