Ɛpsilon

To ?   2 August [1866]1

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

Aug 2d.

My dear Sir

Although you tell me not to write I must have the pleasure of thanking you for your never failing kindness in remembering what interests me.—2 I have not seen Bäers paper, but I read long extracts in one of Wagner’s papers after publishing my historical sketch.—3

The case of the hairy & toothless family (so like the Turkish dog) I knew of from Crawfurds Embassy & Yules Travels;4 but I had not heard of the case being brought before the B. Association.—5

I am now hard at work on the very obscure subject of the causes of Variability in domestic productions & hope to get to press in the winter or spring.—6

With my sincere thanks | Yours very faithfully | Charles Darwin

1
The year is established by the reference to CD’s work on Variation (see n. 6, below).
2
The letter referred to has not been found.
3
CD refers to ‘Über Papuas und Alfuren’ by Karl Ernst von Baer (Baer 1859). Extracts of the paper appeared in Zoologisch-Anthropologische Untersuchungen, I by Rudolph Wagner (Wagner 1861, pp. 50–2). CD’s lightly annotated copy of Wagner 1861 is in the Darwin Library–CUL (see Marginalia 1: 831). CD first added a ‘historical sketch’ to Origin in the US edition of 1860. He added a short discussion of Baer’s paper, as reported in Wagner 1861, to the historical preface of Origin 4th ed., pp. xx–xxi, noting that Baer supported the view ‘that forms now perfectly distinct’ had ‘descended from a single parent-form’. In 1860, Thomas Henry Huxley had sent CD a note from Baer in which Baer remarked that he had ‘expressed the same ideas on the transformation of types or origin of species as Mr. Darwin’ (see Correspondence vol. 8, letter from T. H. Huxley, 6 August 1860; see also Baer 1859, p. 343).
4
CD refers to Journal of an embassy from the governor general of India to the court of Ava by John Crawfurd, and to A narrative of the mission sent by the governor-general of India to the court of Ava in 1855 by Henry Yule; the authors described different members of a family whose entire bodies were covered with hair and who lacked canine and molar teeth (see Crawfurd 1834, 1: 320, and Yule 1858, pp. 93–4). CD mentioned the case in Variation, in his discussion of the inheritance of different characters at corresponding periods of life (Variation 2: 77), and the laws of correlated variability (ibid., pp. 327–8); see also Descent 2: 378. The ‘Turkish dog’ is mentioned in Variation 1: 30 and 2: 227.
5
The reference is to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The case has not been found in the British Association reports.
6
CD sent the manuscript of Variation to his publisher in December 1866 (letter from John Murray, 24 December [1866]).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5170,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5170