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From Edward Cresy   6 June 1867

Metropolitan Board of Works | Spring Gardens

6 June 67—

My dear Sir,

Forgive my having so long omitted to return Dr Hooker’s very interesting paper—1 I meant & ought to have given it your daughter when she was with us—but having been disappointed in not seeing her again as I expected before she left I took it up to town & buried it among some of my other papers—2 I hope you have not been inconvenienced by my inadvertence—

I was greatly rejoiced to hear from your daughter’s report to my wife that you were better & able to work again— I sincerely hope you will keep now steadily improving & that you won’t suffer from a plethora of proofs.3

When George comes “down” pray ask him to come & see me before he goes “up” again & I understood he meant staying to work the latter part of the long.4

Yours very truly | E Cresy

C Darwin Esq.

1
Cresy may refer to J. D. Hooker 1866a, Joseph Dalton Hooker’s paper on insular floras. There are two offprints from the Gardeners’ Chronicle of January 1867 in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL, one annotated, one lightly scored. The offprint was a slightly revised version of the paper printed in Gardeners’ Chronicle; see Williamson 1984 for the text of the offprint.
2
Henrietta Emma Darwin went to visit the Cresys on 10 May 1867 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)); there is a letter from her to George Howard Darwin about her visit in DAR 245: 277.
3
CD was working on the proof-sheets of Variation. Cresy’s wife was Mary Louis Cresy.
4
George was an undergraduate at Cambridge University; Cresy had advised him on his career (see Correspondence vol. 13, letter to Edward Cresy, 7 September [1865], and letter from Edward Cresy, 10 September 1865). ‘Down’ and ‘up’: that is, not in residence, and in residence, at college; the long vacation was the summer vacation (OED).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5564,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5564