To Albany Hancock   15 [April 1850]1

Down Farnborough, Kent,

15th.

My dear Sir,

I ought to have sent you a line sooner to say that your specimens arrived safely. I will venture to keep the Madeira one2 till I commence reworking on the Pedunculata. I have marked outside the box to be ‘returned to you’ after I have taken a few.

The Balanus I will return almost immediately. It is one of the very few species which I dare name with little or no hesitation without opening (with the aid of some part exposed near the basis). It is the B. sulcatus of Bruguière3 =Lepas balanus, Linn.4 You sent me formerly specimens mingled with another species attached to a Pecten with the Clitias.

Do you know the latitude on the coast of Greenland? It would be valuable information for me. If you do even approximatively, will you write it on slip of paper, without anything further, and send it me? I have this species from Iceland.

With respect to Lithotrya, I feel a conviction that if you had seen all the specimens which I have, you would not doubt that all the species bore,5 in whatever manner this may be effected.

Yours very sincerely, | C. DARWIN.

1
Dated from the relationship to the letter to Albany Hancock, [31 March or 7 April 1850], in which CD asked for a specimen of Oxynaspis.
2
Oxynaspis celata (Living Cirripedia (1851): 134).
3
Jean Guillaume Bruguières, who wrote on ‘vers’ in the Encyclopédie méthodique (Bruguières 1789–92). This work, annotated by CD, is in the Darwin Library–CUL.
4
Living Cirripedia (1854): 256. Here CD called it Balanus porcatus, giving priority for the name to Emanuel [Mendes] da Costa, who described this species in 1778. Lepas balanus is a synonym of Balanus balanus.
5
The burrowing powers of Lithotrya are discussed in Living Cirripedia (1851): 344–6, 346 n. See also letters to Albany Hancock, 29 September [1849] and 25 December [1849].

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1321,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1321