Ɛpsilon

From Lawson Tait   29 July 1881

Birmingham Liberal Club, | Corporation Street.

July 29/81

My Dear Sir,

I have just read your paper on “Inheritance”.1

Will you forgive me if I point two possibilities of fallacy in it? I am sure you will.

The case of the nails is in all probability a case of syphilis, as the peculiarity died out in the same generation with succeeding children. The disease is well known to be a variety of tertiary syphilis and if such a case had appeared in a medical journal I think it would unquestionably have been set down as due to that cause.2

Guinea pigs. Brown-Sequard’s observations are quite worthless, for under certain circumstances of diet every other guinea pig has epilepsy. I have kept them for years by the hundred and I could have epilepsy abundant or not as I liked, by giving them moist or dry food & varieties. It was not hereditary & it as often as not could be induced on irritation of the “epileptic regions” of B. S. It certainly had nothing whatever to do with division of the cord or of the sciatic nerves.3

I have published all this somewhere but I cannot recall it4

Yours faithfully | Lawson Tait

2
In his article in Nature (see n. 1, above), CD described a man who had sustained damage to his thumbs and thumbnails in his youth, and had apparently passed the resulting deformity on to some of his children and grandchildren. The deformity is described as characteristic of hereditary syphilis in Lancereaux 1868–9, 2: 146.
3
Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard had induced epileptic convulsions in guinea pigs by means of surgical operations; he claimed that the epileptic tendency was transmitted to offspring (Brown-Séquard 1860).
4
The publication has not been found.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13257,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13257