Ɛpsilon

To I. L. Donnelly   5 June [1874]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

June 5th

Dear Sir

I thank you for your extremely kind letter.2 The facts which you relate are extremely curious & interesting; but I doubt whether I shall ever have time to enter more closely into the difficult subject of the intellect of animals.3

Nothing in the world would please & interest me more than to see your country, now so great & destined to be so much greater; but my health has been for a long time bad, & I am quite incapable of so great an exertion as crossing the Atlantic.—4

With my thanks, I remain | Dear Sir, Yours faithfully | Charles Darwin.

1
The date is established by the date of completion of the second edition of Descent (see n.3, below), and by the printed stationery, which is of a sort that CD stopped using in November 1874.
2
Donnelly’s letter has not been found.
3
CD had expanded his discussions of the mental capacity of a number of animals in the second edition of Descent; his revisions were completed around the end of March 1874 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)). See, for example, Descent 2d ed., p. 70, ‘Intelligence in a baboon’, pp. 72–3, ‘Reasoning power in the lower animals’, and p. 352, ‘Further facts on mental powers of snakes’ (Descent 2d ed., pp. vii–viii).
4
Donnelly was a resident of Minnesota.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9482,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9482