Ɛpsilon

To G. E. Dobson   25 May [1874]

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

May 25

Dear Sir

I am much obliged for your kind note & paper. I read long ago with great interest your paper in the Proc. Z. Soc., & have corrected my blunders in a new Edit. of the Descent now prepared.1 It is some excuse for me that I found well-instructed mammalogists, as ignorant as myself.— I daresay I do not fully see the point, but there seems to me nothing strange in Geckos, inhabiting a forest-clad land, having suckers & no claws to their feet, for, if I remember rightly Hylæ have no claws.—2

Dear Sir | Yours faithfully & obliged | Ch. Darwin

Postmark: MY 25 74

1
See letter from G. E. Dobson, 23 May 1874. Dobson 1873 appeared in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. CD cited the paper in Descent 2d ed., pp. 218, 529, and 534, in support of his argument that male bats were lighter in colour than females in more species than he had asserted in first edition (Descent 2: 286), and that male bats possessed scent glands and pouches that become enlarged in the breeding season.
2
See letter from G. E. Dobson, 23 May 1874 and n. 4. Hyla is a genus of tree frogs.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.6 to their feet,] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9467,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9467