From George Bentham   [after 29 September 1868]1

My dear Darwin

Would you kindly put your name first to the enclosed as I do not know Mr Farrer2 personally.

yrs | G B

[Enclosure]3

I send you herewith the form of Certificate of Recommendation required to be signed by three fellows on proposing any one to be a Member of the Linnean. Will you kindly sign it, and perhaps also Mr. Bentham, if he is with you, would sign it— Then send it to Darwin, who knows Farrer very well, and ask him tp be good enough to forward it to the Secretary or to Mr. Kippist—4

Farrer, I think will prove a very useful Member. The papers which he has lately written, sent by Darwin, who thinks so well of them that he has sent them for publication in the Magazine of Natural History—5 I enclose one of the proofs that you may see

incomplete

1
The date is established by the date of the enclosure.
3
The enclosed letter was sent to Joseph Dalton Hooker by Henry Cadogan Rothery, who resided at Oak Leigh, Sunninghill, Berkshire (Post Office directory of Northamptonshire, etc. 1864). Rothery was a friend of Farrer’s (see letter from T. H. Farrer, 17 September 1868), and a fellow of the Linnean Society (List of the Linnean Society of London, 1867).
4
Farrer was elected to the Linnean Society at the meeting of 21 January 1869; he was nominated by CD, Hooker, Rothery, Bentham, and Thomas Henry Huxley (Library of the Linnean Society). Frederick Currey was the botanical secretary of the Linnean Society, and Richard Kippist was the librarian (Gage and Stearn 1988).
5
Rothery refers to Farrer 1868 (‘On the manner of fertilization of the scarlet runner and blue lobelia’), which was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History; the paper had two sections (see letter from T. H. Farrer, 17 September 1868 and n. 4). There is an annotated copy of Farrer 1868 in CD’s collection of unbound journals in the Darwin Library–CUL.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-6405,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-6405