To R. G. Whiteman   5 May 1881

Down. | Beckenham, Kent.

May 5th. 1881.

Dear Sir.

In the 1st. Edition of the Origin, after the sentence, ending with the words “… insects in the water”, I added the following sentence.

“Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, & if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by Natural Selection more & more aquatic in their structures & habits, with larger & larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”—1

This sentence was omitted in the subsequent editions, owing to the advice of Prof Owen, as it was liable to be misinterpreted;—but I have always regretted that I followed this advice, for I still think the view quite reasonable.2

The remarks of such a man as Mr Cooper are utterly unimportant, but I thank you for your interest in the case.—3

Dear Sir. | Yours faithfully. | Ch. Darwin.

Copy

1
Whiteman’s letter to CD has not been found, but in a letter to Francis Darwin, 2 June 1881 (DAR 198: 217), he said that he had written to CD that ‘a contemptible quack Lecturer Thos Cooper a converted infidel had been lecturing here and all over the kingdom and making game of the reference to the Bear in the first edition & the omission in subsequent editions’. In the first edition of Origin, p. 184, CD had written, ‘In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water.’ In subsequent editions, he changed ‘like a whale’ to ‘almost like a whale’, and omitted the sentence that he quotes in this letter.
2
Richard Owen had asked CD for the source of Samuel Hearne’s report (see Correspondence vol. 7, letter to Richard Owen, 10 December [1859] and n. 2). No letter from Owen suggesting the change has been found.
3
Thomas Cooper had been a Chartist, but renounced free thought around 1856 and travelled throughout Britain as a religious lecturer (ODNB). In the published version of his lecture, ‘Mr. Darwin’s fine fancies’, he suggested that CD had intimated that a whale might be formed from a polar bear by swimming with its mouth open; Cooper concluded, ‘Our sage philosopher—“the greatest since Aristotle”—left all that out in his second edition, and it has never appeared since!’ (see T. Cooper 1880, p. 32).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13146,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13146