Ɛpsilon

To F. B. Goodacre   20 February 1875

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Feb 20 1875

Dear Sir

I am much obliged for your essay & for the honour of the dedication.1 I quite agree with all that you say & have read the whole with interest. A collection such as you propose would be eminently useful to men like Prof. Boyd Dawkins & Rütimeyer in Switzerland, who have especially attended to the domesticated animals of the prehistoric races of man.2 Under a strictly scientific point of view in reference to zoology the collection would be chiefly useful, I think, in throwing light on the laws of variation.3 But I am not sanguine of success, as I hardly ever meet a naturalist who cares in the least about domesticated productions. A strong remnant of the feeling yet survives that there is a marked distinction between varieties & species, & naturalists regard only the latter.

Some years ago a most remarkable animal, namely the masked pig of Japan was exhibited in the Zoological Gardens, but it was not allowed to remain there because it was thought to be a mere variety!4

With sincere hopes for your success & with best thanks | Yours very faithfully | Charles Darwin

LS(A)

1
See letter to F. B. Goodacre, 5 January 1875. CD’s lightly annotated copy of Goodacre’s pamphlet Hemerozoology (Goodacre 1875) is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. The dedication reads, ‘Dedicated (by permission) to Charles Darwin’.
2
William Boyd Dawkins and Ludwig Rütimeyer were both interested in fossil mammals associated with early human settlements.
3
In his pamphlet, Goodacre included a plan for establishing a museum of domestic animals, which would include fossils, breed diagrams, and mounted specimens of both domestic animals and wild progenitors, as well as hybrids (see Goodacre 1875, p. 14).
4
CD had discussed the Japanese or masked pig in Variation 1: 69–70. The Japanese pig exhibited at the Zoological Gardens, London, in 1861 (see Bartlett 1861), was described as a distinct species by John Edward Gray (Sus pliciceps (a synonym of S. scrofa); J. E. Gray 1862).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.00 laws of] interl in CD’s hand

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9864,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9864