From Julius Victor Carus   7 November 1866

My dear Sir,

Probably you will know already, that Mr. Schweizerbart, the publisher of Bronn’s translation of your work on the origin of species, has asked me to revise this translation, to mend and correct it as far as possible.¹ It is with the greatest pleasure that I will try to do it, partly because I am fully convinced that this work is the most important of our time, partly as it give me the opportunity to thank you not only for the copy of your work you sent me when it came out first,² but especially for the immense good you did with it to organic sciences in general. Yet, I should have scarcely ventured to write to you directly, if I had not to ask you to help me out of a puzzle. Surely the late Professor Bronn was one of our ablest naturalists and I have the greatest regard for his truly philosophical and earnest endeavours to bring Zoology on a higher, a more scientifical footing. But for one reason or another, because he was a “natural philosopher” of the old German school³ or because he was too much of a describing Zoologist, he was too anxious to allow your work to act freely upon the German public. According to the opinion of most of my younger colleagues he did not even deal fairly with it. I should not like to go as far as this, but I must confess, that I dislike strongly that sort of authoritative doubt and that sometimes quite ludicrous display of a so called higher scientific argumentation which he shows in his “Anmerkungen” and especially in his Epilogue.⁴ But here comes my difficulty. You will be of course the most interested that your work should be presented to the German reader in a fair and unprejudiced form. Now do you think it fair of me, when I leave off all those remarks of Bronn’s which are according to my scientific conscience almost equal to nothing. Do you think it compatible with the due regard to Bronn’s memory if I was to separate his “Schlusswort”⁵ from the body of your work, with which it had nothing at all to do, and to modify it according to my views of the question? I think I may do it. As the first two editions of his translation are existing, the history of the Science will take due notice of his position. But for my part I should not like to propagate his doubts, especially as I pointed already 1853 in my System of animal morphology (p. 5) to the genealogical connexion of the present and past forms of animal life.⁶ If you would be so good as to write with one word that I may have liberty to do as I like best, I should be very much obliged to you.

Mr. Schweizerbart sent me some corrections Dr. Caspary had pointed out.⁷ Most of these I knew before. With regard to the Guinea-fowl which is said to have been wrongly translated by Bronn, I must say, here Bronn was right. It is the Perlhuhn. But in that place you marked (p. 17 of the first English edition) you changed Guinea-fowl into Goose.⁸

Allow me once more to say how much I am delighted to be able to associate my name in a way ever so humble with your work and believe me | My dear Sir | Yours most truly and respectfully. | Prof J. Victor Carus