From V. O. Kovalevsky   30 March 1872

Berlin | Behrenstrasse 13.

30. March. 72.

Dear Sir!

It is a pretty long time, I had no news from You, but knowing that Your Home Secretary is gone I did not write fearing to encroach upon Your time which is much better occupied elsewhere then in letter writing.1 However I am now much interested in the progress of Your new work upon “Expression” and I hope You will entrust it to my care for translation as You have done so kindly with Your former works.2 I have just a faint hope to come this spring to London to finish in the Britisch Museum something I begun last year, but I am by no means sure of it.3 I hope Your health is better now then it was at the time of my visit last year.— This winter I began a comparative miology of the Marsupials,4 but schall interrupt it for the summer to do something in Palaeontology and then finish the Marsupials in future winter; I regret I cannot send You a copy of my Anchiterium, as the plates are ready but the letter press is not yet finisched.5

If the work on “Expression” is in progress I should feel extremely obliged for a pair of proofscheets, as I have now every day some free hours which I should like to employ in translation.—

With compliments to Mrs Darwin

I am | very truly Yours | W. Kowalevsky.

1
Kovalevsky alludes to CD’s daughter Henrietta Emma Litchfield. Before her marriage in August 1871, Henrietta had helped CD by reading and commenting on his work. CD’s last extant letter to Kovalevsky is that of 2 June [1871] (Correspondence vol. 19).
2
Kovalevsky had translated Variation and Descent into Russian. Expression was published in November 1872 (Freeman 1977).
3
Kovalevsky arrived in London in the middle of June 1872 (Davitashvili 1951, p. 224).
4
While in Jena in the winter of 1871–2, Kovalevsky worked under the supervision of Carl Gegenbaur on the comparative myology of several marsupial genera, including Phascolarctos (wombats), Dasyurus (quolls), Didelphis (American opossums), Thylacinus (Tasmanian wolves), and Macropus (kangaroos and wallabies). Kovalevsky planned to extend this work in order to determine the underlying relationships between marsupial and placental mammals, but he did not publish on the subject (see Davitashvili 1951, pp. 219–21).
5
Kovalevsky refers to his monograph on Anchitherium aurelianense, a fossil horse (Kovalevsky 1872). CD’s copy is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-8262,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-8262