From Asa Gray   13 April 1863

Cambridge, [Massachusetts]

April 13, 1863

My Dear Darwin,

Your latest to me is March 20.1 I am very sorry that your health does not hold out as well as it ought.

To my disappointment all my extracts of Bates’ paper on Mimetic Analogy are laid over to July no. of Sill. Journal,2—which you will not wonder at when I tell you that they have put in type at least 16 pages of mine for May no.—the larger part being review of A. DC. on Species derived from Oak-studies.3

⁠⟨⁠half a page excised⁠⟩⁠ am not surprised at his caution about adopting your theory, nor that his opinion about change—i.e. slow & gradual change should “fluctuate”.4

Pray do finish & bring out your book on Variation. I have great expectations of it.5

I have to-day little to write, but cannot resist dropping you a line, though there be nothing in it.

Ever Yours | A. Gray

incomplete

CD annotations

On cover, recto: ‘(Plantago)6 | angle of leaves | Bells— [Recurrent] angles’7 ink
On cover, verso: ‘Language | Lyell does not act as Judge, & this grieves me.—’8 ink, del ink
2
Gray refers to his review of Henry Walter Bates’s account of mimetic butterflies (Bates 1861), which eventually appeared in the September 1863 number of the American Journal of Science and Arts (A. Gray 1863a). The journal was commonly known as ‘Silliman’s journal’, after its founder and editor Benjamin Silliman.
3
Gray’s review of Alphonse de Candolle’s ‘Etude sur l’espèce á l’occasion d’une révision de la famille des Cupulifères’ (A. de Candolle 1862a) appeared in the May 1863 number of the American Journal of Science and Arts (A. Gray 1863d).
4
Gray refers to Charles Lyell and his discussion of CD’s theory in Antiquity of man (C. Lyell 1863a; see letter to Asa Gray, 20 March [1863]).
5
Variation was published in 1868.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4089,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4089