From W. B. Tegetmeier   15 October 1866

Muswell Hill | London | N

Oct 15, 66.

My dear Sir

The Engravers inform me that they have delivered the blocks to Mr Murray, and have been paid—1 Mr Wells posted me the enclosed—2 I hardly know whether I should have directed him to call or forward it to Mr Murray, or whether it requires your signature to be paid

I have had some pleasant correspondence with Prof Newton respecting an original dodo picture I discovered—3 He also seems to have discovered that varieties and variation are not altogether beneath the notice of naturalists.

I hope your work will be out before very long. I am very anxious to read it— I think in my marginal

AL incomplete

1
Butterworth and Heath, a firm of wood-engravers with premises at 356 Strand, London, engraved the blocks of Luke Wells’s illustrations for Variation (Post Office London directory 1866; see Correspondence vol. 13, letter from W. B. Tegetmeier to John Murray and R. F. Cooke, 17 April 1865). John Murray was CD’s publisher.
2
The enclosure from Wells has not been found, but see letter to John Murray, 16 October [1866]. Tegetmeier had overseen the illustrations of pigeons and fowls for Variation (see Correspondence vol. 13, letter from W. B. Tegetmeier, 27 March 1865).
3
Alfred Newton, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge University, corresponded with Tegetmeier about a seventeenth-century painting of a white dodo that Tegetmeier had discovered in a private collection. Tegetmeier had exhibited the picture at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London, 10 April 1866 (Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 14 (1866): 201). Tegetmeier supplied Newton with a photograph of the original and Newton published an article including a reproduction of the picture (Newton 1867; several letters written by Tegetmeier to Newton about the painting between October 1866 and February 1867 are in the Alfred Newton Papers–CUL).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5243,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5243