Ɛpsilon

To James de Carle Sowerby   12 February [1850]

Down Farnborough Kent

Feb. 12th.

My dear SIr

I find coming to London so disagrees with my health, that I shall not attend anniversary of Geolog. Soc.—1 Will you, therefore, be so good as to send me a line when you have finished all the drawings, & I will soon or immediately come up & bring several others to be drawn.—

If you can with any honesty do purloin a proof-sheet of Mr Dixon’s Plate with Cirripedes.2 for me.—

Yours sincerely | C. Darwin

I beg your pardon for troubling you, but I shd. be glad to have, when you write, a memorandum of what I shall owe you for present drawings,3 as a guide how far I may indulge myself in all the future ones.—

1
The anniversary meeting of the Geological Society was on Friday, 15 February 1850.
2
F. Dixon 1850, Tab. xxviii. See letter to Richard Owen, 10 September [1850]. Fossil Cirripedia (1851): Tab. I (fig. 2) reads: ‘Scalpellum angustum:—carina, dorsal and lateral views of, copied from Dixon’s “Geology and Fossils of Sussex,” Tab. xxviii, fig. 9’.
3
When this letter was written, CD thought he was employing Sowerby in a private capacity and expected to pay for the engravings. After it was decided that the Palaeontographical Society would publish CD’s work on fossil Cirripedia, the society paid for the cost of the plates. Sowerby was already one of the engravers employed by the society.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1303,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1303