To G. J. Romanes   11 February 1881

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

Feb. 11th. 1881

My dear Romanes

I must write a few lines to thank you once again and cordially for your second letter in Nature. I have been particularly pleased by all the first part: The sympathy expressed privately & publickly to me ought to make me rejoice at having been attacked so savagely by Mr Butler; but I can hardly go as far as this, for it has annoyed me a good deal, but I shall now feel no more annoyment.—1

It was very good of you to waste so much of your time in this affair.—

Believe me | yours truly obliged | Ch. Darwin

1
A letter from Romanes rebuffing Samuel Butler’s response to Romanes’s critical review of Butler’s book Unconscious memory (Butler 1880) appeared in Nature, 10 February 1881, pp. 335–6. CD evidently thought that the editor’s comment that this correspondence was now closed (ibid., p. 336) would mark the end of Butler’s year-long campaign of public accusations that CD and Ernst Krause had made unacknowledged use of his work on the history of evolution as well as disparaging him in Erasmus Darwin.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.4 savagely] interl
1.5 feel] after del ‘have’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13049,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13049