Ɛpsilon

To Japetus Steenstrup   28 July 1881

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

July 28th 1881.

My dear Sir

I have received your Essays, & I hope that you will allow me to thank you very sincerely for your kind recollection of me, ever since the old days, now long past, when you aided me in so important a manner in my work on Cirripedes.1 I have read with interest the French abstract; for hectocotylisation has always struck me with astonishment. It would, I suppose, puzzle any evolutionist to trace the steps by which the arms of the male Cephalopod have been modified.—2 How I wish that you believed in evolution, for I have always honoured your many great services in the cause of natural history, to which we have both devoted our lives in our own ways.3

I remain with the highest respect. My dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | Charles Darwin

1
Steenstrup probably sent two related papers (in Danish, with French abstracts) on the taxonomy of cephalopods, Steenstrup 1875 and Steenstrup 1881. He had corresponded with CD and lent him specimens for his work on cirripedes between 1850 and 1854; see Correspondence vols. 4 and 5.
2
Hectocotylisation: the structural modification of an arm of a male cephalopod to fulfil a reproductive function. CD’s offprint of Steenstrup’s paper on the subject (Steenstrup 1856) is in the Darwin Library–Down. The paper was translated into English in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Steenstrup 1857).
3
In Steenstrup 1881, p. 236, Steenstrup remarked ironically on how useful his observations might be to evolutionary theorists.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.7 your] after del ‘th’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13254,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13254