Ɛpsilon

To Francis Darwin   [18 December 1881]1

[4 Bryanston Street, London.]

Sunday

My dear F.

As the enclosed contains a cheque, I have thought it best to send it without the delay of a single day.—2 We have been this morning to Huxley., who is working on mould-diseased salmon, & was much interested to hear about Murray’s work, to whom he will write.—3

We come home on Tuesday, viâ Bromley, by train which leaves Victoria Station at 10o 20′. Enquire whether a P. card to this effect reached the servants.—4 Dr. A. Clark finds that my heart is perfectly right, & that the pain & rapid intermittent pulse, must have been only some indirect mischief5

your affec. Father C. D.

1
The date is established by the reference to visiting Thomas Henry Huxley (see n. 3, below).
2
The enclosure has not been found.
3
The Darwins were in London from 13 to 20 December 1881; they visited Huxley on Sunday 18 December 1881 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)). Huxley had been appointed an inspector of fisheries in January 1881 (see MacLeod 1968, pp. 138–40). In December 1881, he went to study the epidemic of salmon disease that had appeared in Conway, Wales, and found that it was caused by a species of Saprolegnia, a type of water mould. He reported his results in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (T. H. Huxley 1882). George Robert Milne Murray had studied under Anton de Bary at Straßburg (Strasbourg) in 1875 and then became an assistant in the botanical department of the British Museum, where he specialised in cryptogamic botany. He and Huxley began to correspond in February 1882; he did further research for Huxley on the pathogen that caused the salmon disease (ODNB; see also Bayliss 1975, pp. 280–1).
4
The railway station at Orpington was closer to Down than Bromley was; trains to Orpington ran from Charing Cross. CD evidently wanted to ensure that they would be met at Bromley rather than Orpington.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.2 this morning] interl
2.2 P.] over ‘c’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13548,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13548