Ɛpsilon

To G. W. Child   6 May [1868]1

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

May 6.

Dear Sir

As I am not a professed botanist I do not feel myself entitled to give a testimonial in regard to your fitness for occupying the Botanical chair at Oxford.2 But I have pleasure in saying that your Essays have given me a favourable idea of your capacity & of your love for science.3

Your experimental researches on the Production of Organisms in closed vessels, published by the Royal Society, seem to have been performed with much care, & are in my opinion valuable, whatever result may be finally arrived at in this difficult question.4

Believe me dear Sir | yours very faithfully | Charles Darwin

To Dr G. W. Child

LS

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from G. W. Child, 3 May [1868].
3
CD refers to Child’s Essays on physiological subjects (Child 1868a). CD’s lightly annotated copy is in the Darwin Library–Down. The essays were privately published at the beginning of 1868, but were published commercially later in the year (Child 1868b).
4
Child had published two papers on spontaneous generation in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: ‘Experimental researches on spontaneous generation’ (Child 1864), and ‘Further experiments on the production of organisms in closed vessels’ (Child 1865).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-6162,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-6162