Ɛpsilon

To T. R. R. Stebbing   11 February 1881

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

Feb. 11th 1881

My dear Sir

You must allow me to thank you cordially for your letter in Nature, which has gratified me deeply.—1 The case could not have been better put, & it is a strictly true interpretation of my conduct. I have not the least idea how I have offended Mr Butler so grievously that he is never weary of calling me a liar & scoundrel.— The omission of a statement that Dr Krause had corrected & enlarged his article before it was translated was merely accidental, & I ought to have thanked him publickly for having taken so much pains, but forgot to do so.—2

The forgetfulness was chiefly due to my being much engaged all the time in experimental work.3 If I had, (as I ought to have done) stated that the article had been revised, it could have made no difference to Mr Butler or any other human being.—

I had not intended writing all this, so excuse me, & believe me | Yours truly obliged | Charles Darwin

P.S. | The Historical sketch appeared in 1861 in the 3d Edition; there was no time to make any improvements in the 2d. Edition—4

1
Stebbing had written to Nature to point out that Samuel Butler’s accusation that CD had ignored the work of earlier evolutionists in Origin had been remedied when CD added the historical sketch of the progress of evolution to later editions (Nature, 10 February 1881, p. 336). See also n. 4, below.
2
Butler claimed that unacknowledged use had been made of his work Evolution, old and new (Butler 1879) when Ernst Krause revised his essay on Erasmus Darwin before its publication with CD’s biographical sketch of his grandfather in Erasmus Darwin (see letter to Ernst Krause, 7 February 1881).
3
When writing Erasmus Darwin in 1879, CD had also been conducting experiments for Movement in plants (CD’s ‘Journal’, Correspondence vol. 27, Appendix II).
4
See Origin 3d ed., pp. xiii–xix. Origin 2d ed. was published at the start of 1860, about eight weeks after the first edition had been published (Freeman 1977).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.2 is] after del ‘it’
1.6 before … translated] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13050,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13050