To P. L. Sclater   4 January [1871]1

Down. | Beckenham | Kent. S.E.

Jan 4th

My dear Mr Sclater

I am infinitely obliged about the Cynomolgus: I have struck out the whole passage.—2 You men who do only or chiefly original work have an immense advantage over compilers, like myself, as you can know what to trust.—

I wish with all my heart I had thought of consulting you about woodcuts, & had known about your artist; but I thought Brehm’s drawings fairly good enough for my purpose of popular illustration; & it saved me trouble; but I now much regret I did not get better drawings.— Murray never objects to cost.—3

You will never know what a load of anxiety you have taken from my mind, as I feared I might have fallen into endless blunders; as it is I shall feel safe, within reasonable limits, for all the chapters you have so very kindly looked over. Heaven knows, whether the book is worth one quarter of the labour which it has cost me, though the collecting the facts, during several past years, has been a great amusement to me

Yours very truly obliged | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the reference to Sclater’s assistance with bird and mammal names in Descent; see n. 2, below.
2
CD had asked Sclater to check the names of birds and mammals in the proof-sheets of Descent (see Correspondence vol. 18, letter to P. L. Sclater, 4 November [1870] and n. 3). Macacus cynomolgus is now Macaca fascicularis subsp. fascicularis , the long-tailed macaque; the passage removed has not been identified.
3
Sclater’s artist was Joseph Smit. For some of the illustrations in Descent, CD had used woodcuts from Alfred Edmund Brehm’s Illustrirte Thierleben (Brehm et al. 1864–9); see Correspondence vol. 16, letter from Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 31 December 1868. They were paid for by CD’s publisher, John Murray (see Correspondence vol. 18, letter to John Murray, 26 September 1870).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 Beckenham] before del ‘Bromley.’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-7427,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-7427