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To Charles Kingsley   15 July [1866]1

Down. | Bromley. | Kent. S.E.

July 15

My dear Mr Kingsley

I am much obliged to you for telling me where your lectures are published as living in the country I might not have heard of their publication. I shall certainly read them & have not the least doubt they will interest me much, judging from an abstract which I saw in some newspaper.2

I can form no opinion about the wonderful case of the migration of the eye in flat-fish; whether Steenstrup is right who seems to think that the eye itself moves by absorption on one side & growth on the other; or whether Thompson is right who thinks that the eye itself does not move, but that the adjoining parts are developed in a wonderfully unequal manner on the two sides of the head.3 The power of development on either side seems to me one of the most curious points of the case. When I read the paper I speculated how the unequal development cd have originated & imagined that a fish feeding on the ground with its body held laterally might be benefitted by the eye on the lower side becoming deeper & deeper imbedded in the skull, & instead of becoming blind & useless, travelling to the upper side, but this is all baseless speculation.4

With many thanks for your kind note believe me | yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin

LS(A)

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Charles Kingsley, 12 July 1866 (Correspondence vol. 14).
2
Kingsley had drawn CD’s attention to two lectures on science and superstition that he had delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain and that were published in Fraser’s Magazine (Kingsley 1866a and 1866b). CD may have seen the abstract in the Morning Post, 27 April 1866, p. 5.
3
In his letter of 12 July 1866 (Correspondence vol. 14), Kingsley had mentioned an article by Charles Wyville Thomson, ‘Notes on Prof. Steenstrup’s views on the obliquity of flounders’, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (C. W. Thomson 1865). Thomson gave an abstract, with commentary, of a paper by Japetus Steenstrup on the migration of the eye of flounders.
4
CD discussed the migration of the eye in Pleuronectidae, or flatfish (now righteye flounders), in Origin 6th ed., pp. 186–8. See also Correspondence vol. 14, letter from Charles Kingsley, 12 July 1866, n. 3.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.2 in] interl in CD’s hand
3.1 note] interl in CD’s hand

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5155F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5155F