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To William Crookes   9 May [1874]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

May 9th

My dear Sir

It would give me much pleasure to comply with your request, but I have so much to do & my health is so weak that I really cannot.— I make it a rule, which I rarely break, to stick to whatever I have in hand, & always repent whenever I break this rule.—2

I was delighted at the chance of seeing your wonderful experiment at the Royal Soc. the other night—3

Pray believe me | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the stationery, which is of a sort that CD used between 1872 and 1874, and by the fact that only in 1874 had CD made a recent visit to London.
2
Crookes’s request has not been identified.
3
At a soirée of the Royal Society of London on 22 April 1874, experiments showing attraction and repulsion accompanying radiation were staged in illustration of a paper by Crookes (Crookes 1873; soirée programme; see also letter to Michael Foster, 23 April [1874]).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9449,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9449