From Francis Galton   11 December 1869

42 Rutland Gate. S.W.

Dec 11. 69

My dear Darwin

I wonder if you could help me. I want to make some peculiar experiments that have occurred to me, in breeding animals and want to procure a few couples of rabbits of marked and assured breeds—viz:

Lop-ears with as little tendency to Albinism as possible. Common rabbits ditto Angora albinos

and I find myself wholly unable to get them, though I have asked many people. Do you know anybody who has such things.?1

I write without your book in reach, but you there especially mention a breeder of Angoras.2 Also you quote with approbation from Delamer’s little book.3 Are either or both of those men accessible & likely to help.?

Pray excuse my troubling you— the interest of the proposed experiment—for it is really a curious one,—must be my justification

Very sincerely yrs. | Francis Galton

1
On Galton’s published experiments on heredity in rabbits, see Galton 1871; see page 400 for the breeds of rabbits he worked with. For accounts of the experiments, see also Pearson 1914–30, 2: 156–66, and Bulmer 2003, pp. 116–18.
2
CD mentioned Robert Heron as a breeder of angora rabbits in Variation 2: 92; the source of his information was probably an extract included in the letter from William Yarrell, [c. 17 December 1838] (Correspondence vol. 2).
3
CD quoted Eugene Sebastian Delamer’s Pigeons and rabbits, in their wild, domestic, and captive states (Delamer 1854) in Variation 1: 107. There is an annotated copy of Delamer 1854 in the Darwin Library–CUL (see Marginalia 1: 190). Eugene Sebastian Delamer was a pseudonym of Edmund Saul Dixon. See also Correspondence vol. 5, letter from Edward Blyth, 4 August 1855 and n. 7.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-7026,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-7026