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To J. E. Gray   25 January [1843]1

Down Bromley Kent

Jan 25

My Dear Sir

Sometime since I presented through you to the British Museum a series of specimens illustrating the Structure of Coral reefs.2 Mr Lyell is going to give as you are aware some lectures on Geology one of which will be devoted to coral reefs & to my theory of their origin.3 I am therefore very anxious that he should have the loan of the specimens which I collected for illustration

They are such as cannot possibly be injured if moderate care be taken of them   Would you be so kind as respectfully lay the request before the Trustees & state how much obliged I should feel if they would permit Mr Lyell to have the use of these specimens for a fort night or three weeks during his lectures4

Believe Me My Dear Sir Yours very Sincerely | C—Darwin

Mr J. E Gray

Contemporary copy

1
The year is established by the reference to the lecture series (see n. 3, below).
2
CD donated twenty-nine coral specimens to the British Museum in 1841 (www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/charles-darwin-coral-conundrum.html, accessed 28 July 2021). The specimens had been collected from the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, in the Indian Ocean, in 1836, during the Beagle voyage, and were registered in the collection on 14 December 1842 (Rosen and Darrell 2011, p 173). For a list of the specimens, see Rosen and Darrell 2011, pp. 195–7.
3
Charles Lyell delivered a series of eight lectures on geology at the Marylebone Institution between 7 and 31 March 1843. The second lecture was on coral reefs; a brief summary of the lecture mentioned Lyell’s discussion of the manner in which coral reefs were raised and of the zoophytes from which they were constituted, but no specimens were mentioned in the report (The Times, 9 March 1843, p. 5; 11 March 1843, p. 6).
4
On the verso of this letter is the draft of a letter from Gray passing on the request to lend the specimens and noting that they had already been presented to the trustees, that is, formally accessioned (see n. 2, above).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-660F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-660F