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From James Williams   24 January 1882

Mining Directory Office, | Hayle,

Jany. 24th. 1882.

C. Darwin Esqre./

Sir,

I hope you will excuse the liberty, I now take, in addressing you, if I could have gained the information I required I would not have presumed to trouble you,

The information I require, is, are the three Kingdoms i.e. The Animal, the Vegetable, and the Mineral so nearly merged one in the other so as not to be able to draw the line,1

I have had for answer yes, and no, which is correct,

I have made some important discoveries in the mineral kingdom and am desirous of going further

I am, | Sir | yours most obediently | Jas. Williams

1
Carl von Linné had followed the conventional division of nature into three kingdoms in his influential Systema naturæ per regna tria naturæ (Linnaeus 1758–9). Ernst Haeckel and others had proposed a new kingdom for unicellular organisms between Animalia and Plantae, the Protista (see Haeckel 1866, 1: 203–6). Some of CD’s work on plants raised questions about the animal–vegetable boundary; there were also ongoing debates about the classification of pre-Silurian forms of life, such as Eozoon canadense (see letter from T. G. Bonney, 5 February 1882, n. 4).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13643,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13643