Ɛpsilon

From John Henry Gurney   2 July 1856

No 24 Palace Gardens | Kensington

2 July 1856

Sir

Mr C Buxton1 has forwarded to me your note of the 23d June as to the hybrids of P. Versicolor which I bought at Knowsley2 & which certainly appear to breed freely between themselves as well as with the Common Pheasant—3 I have not however made any accurate experiments as to the degree of relationship between the hybrids so intermixing & by this time these degrees of relationship have been lost sight of

I am assured that the hybrids between the mallard & pintail are sometimes fertile inter se—which I mention as it bears on the same subject & may be interesting to you4

I am Sir | Yours faithfully | J H Gurney Charles Darwin Esq

CD annotations

‘N. Q’added pencil, circled pencil
2.3 interesting to you] ‘See Fiennes in Zoolog Proc’ added pencil
Top of first page: ‘17’5 brown crayon
1
Charles Buxton was married to the eldest daughter of Henry Holland, who was a distant relative of CD’s. The Buxtons and the Gurneys were noted Quaker business families.
2
Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby, had established a private menagerie at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire.
3
The fertility of offspring of Phasianus versicolor crossed with P. colchicus is discussed in Natural selection, pp. 438, 440.
4
In Natural selection, p. 439, CD cited two cases of a hybrid between the mallard and pintail: the first was a specimen exhibited by Twiselton Fiennes (see CD’s annotations, above) at a meeting of the Zoological Society on 13 December 1831 (Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London pt 1 (1830–1): 158); the second was mentioned in a letter to the Magazine of Natural History by James H. Fennell (Magazine of Natural History 9 (1836): 615–16).
5
The number of CD’s portfolio of notes on hybridism.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1916,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1916