To Charles Lyell   15 February [1853]

Down Farnborough Kent

Feby. 15th.

My dear Lyell

I am uncommonly obliged to you for thinking of sending me so valuable a present as Agassiz, but the great man honoured me with a copy, so I will return yours with very many thanks by the Carrier.—1

I am very glad to have Adams’ pamphlets; I had heard of him: I have not read them, but he appears as heteredox as myself.2

With many thanks | Ever yours | C. Darwin

I have just finished dissecting a curious cirripede, which is female & has successive corps of males attached to her: I found one with 12 males so fixed to her! These males I suspect are the most negative creatures in the world; they have no mouth, no stomach, no thorax, no limbs, no abdomen, they consist wholly of the male reproductive organs in an envelope.3

1
Agassiz 1850 (see Correspondence vol. 4, letter to Louis Agassiz, 15 June [1850]). Agassiz’s presentation copy of Lake Superior, with CD’s notes pinned in back of the volume, is in the Darwin Library–CUL. CD recorded having read it between 16 August 1850 and early November 1850 (Correspondence vol. 4, Appendix IV, 119: 22a). Lyell had returned from a visit to the United States of America just before Christmas 1852.
2
Adams 1851a, 1851b, and 1852. The copies mentioned in the letter are in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL with a note on the cover of each ‘from C. Lyell’. Adams 1851a is heavily annotated by CD. Charles Baker Adams argued that there was no aboriginal ‘constitutional peculiarity of character’ in varieties of Mollusca (Adams 1852, p. 193). CD cited Adams in Natural selection, p. 139, concerning the geographical range of varieties discussed in Adams’s study of terrestrial Mollusca.
3
Alcippe lampas (see Living Cirripedia (1854): 562).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.1 me so] after omitted point
1.2 will] interl
2.1 am] over illeg
2.1 him:] before omitted point
4.1 curious] after del ‘new &’
4.5 in] above del ‘with’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1502,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1502