Ɛpsilon

From H. N. Moseley   8 April 1882

Oxford.

April 8. 82.

My dear Mr Darwin

Many thanks for the cheque for eight guineas to be added to your former subscription of two guineas to the Rolleston Fund.1 I am extremely sorry that the former payment should have been overlooked   I will at once communicate with Mr Chapman and see that all is put straight.2 He is away from Oxford I believe just now so perhaps you will not hear from him for a few days. He appears to have overlooked the payment which is curious since he is a man of leisure accustomed to act as treasurer here for all kinds of undertakings.

Many thanks for your kind wishes for my success here in my Professorship. I find I have got terribly rusty in all the details of my subject which I have not been working at myself and have not studied for so many years. and owing to my work in London having lasted till the end of January and all kinds of changes to be seen to here I have had scarcely any time to prepare my lectures for next term.3 I am therefore a little apprehensive about them but hope to get on better after a long vacation.

I have had sent to me from Australia a small Actinia which bores small conical chambers in the calcareous skeleton of the Bryozoon Cellepora and inhabits them. or rather I expect it clings to the Bryozoon when young and maintains its position whilst the skeleton develops around it. The result is that neat circular mouthed pores appear all over the Cellepora skeleton looking as if properly belonging to it and very puzzling without the explanation of their origin4

I am sorry indeed to hear you are unwell and hope you may soon regain your health.

Believe me | yours truly | H. N. Moseley

We are I hope going to allow students here to take a degree in anthropology. I am drawing up a syllabus of the subject with that view. General Pitt Rivers has offered his collection to the University.5

2
Edward Chapman, the treasurer of the fund to establish a memorial to George Rolleston, had omitted to record an earlier donation from CD (see letter to H. N. Moseley, 7 April 1882 and n. 2).
3
Moseley had been appointed Rolleston’s successor as Linacre Professor of human and comparative anatomy at Oxford University; prior to that he was assistant registrar at London University.
4
Actinia is a genus of sea anemones. The specimen of minute Actinia that occupied cavities in the bryozoan Cellepora was probably sent by William Aitcheson Haswell; Haswell first saw the phenomenon when he was on a surveying cruise of the Great Barrier Reef, and published his observations in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (Haswell 1882).
5
Rolleston had been a great promoter of ethnology, and at his death his post was divided into the chair of human and comparative anatomy (occupied by Moseley) and a readership in anthropology, established in 1884. Augustus Henry Pitt-Rivers had been a close friend of Rolleston. His collection was accepted by Oxford University in May 1882, and formed the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum; Moseley was responsible for unpacking and arranging the collection. See C. Gosden et al. 2009, pp. 25–6.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13764,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13764