Ɛpsilon

To Ernst Krause   30 July 1881

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

July 30th 1881

My dear Sir

As you might possibly be surprised at not receiving the promised sheets of my Worm book, I write to say that there has been an extraordinary delay by the Printers in correcting the last sheets, & now my Publisher begs me to defer the publication (though the book is as good as ready) till the end of October, which is called the publishing season; & I have been compelled to accede to his desire.—1 I will,, however, send you clean sheets, as soon as I receive them, & then you can judge about extracts. I still think that a review of the whole book wd. be your best plan, but whatever you decide will please me.—

Many thanks for “Die Gegenwart”, which you were so kind as to send me.— I read it with great interest. The “instinct” of plants is a most puzzling problem. I do not see, how mind is to be defined, if we substract consciousness … Nor can I doubt that consciousness is somehow a stage in the natural development of the mental faculties, though philosophers may urge that it belongs to a wholly different category of things.2

My dear Sir | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

What interesting numbers the several latter ones of Kosmos have been.—

By the way I must thank you for honouring my two sons by giving their essays.—3

1
CD’s publisher was John Murray; Murray’s printers were William Clowes & Sons. See letter to R. F. Cooke, 31 July 1881. Krause wanted to publish a chapter of Earthworms, translated into German, in his journal, Kosmos (see letter from Ernst Krause, 15 May 1881).
2
Under the pseudonym Carus Sterne, Krause had published an article about CD’s Movement in plants, titled ‘Sind die Pflanzen beseelt?’ (Do plants have souls?), in the German weekly Die Gegenwart (Sterne 1881b).
3
Francis Darwin’s article ‘Kletterpflanzen’ (Climbing plants) was published in Kosmos in May 1881 (F. Darwin 1881a; see letter to Ernst Krause, 18 May 1881 and n. 7). In July, Krause published in Kosmos a German translation of an abstract in Nature of an astronomical paper by George Howard Darwin (G. H. Darwin 1881a; see letter to G. H. Darwin, 23 July 1881 and n. 1).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.3 begs] below interl & del ‘to’
1.3 to defer] after del caret
1.4 (though … ready)] parentheses over commas
1.6 clean] interl
2.3 mind] above del ‘it’
2.4 natural] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13260,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13260