Ɛpsilon

From Lawson Tait   8 April [1875]1

7, Great Charles St. | Birmingham.

April 8th.

Dear Sir,

Thanks for your kind note. I shall visit you on the 18th.2

I am sorry that I cannot get to Down the previous evening as I have to take the chair at a public dinner. But I can reach Orpington at 8.36 a.m. on Sunday morning, no doubt in time for breakfast

It will give me great pleasure to meet Prof. Huxley, with whom already I have a slight personal acquaintance.3

Thanks for your offer of the carriage. As the hour on a Sunday morning would be very inconvenient for your man, and as there might be no flies about then I should be glad if you would order one for me.

Yours faithfully, | Lawson Tait

I enclose a newspaper account of my little paper4

CD annotations

Top of letter: ‘Tail of Mouse Henslow’; ‘Order Fly’ pencil5
1
The year is established by the reference to Tait’s visit to Down (see n. 2, below).
2
Tait visited Down on 17 April 1875 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
3
Thomas Henry Huxley and George John Romanes also visited Down on 17 April 1875 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).
4
A notice of Tait’s lecture, ‘The use of tails in animals’ (Tait 1875a), appeared in the Birmingham Daily Post, 8 April 1875, p. 6. See letter from Lawson Tait, 16 March [1875] and nn. 2–4. The lecture cited the letter to Lawson Tait, [13–15 March 1875], and referred to the letter from Lawson Tait, 16 March [1875].
5
The annotation probably connects Tait’s work on tails with the earlier work done by John Stevens Henslow on the tails of mice; see letter to Lawson Tait, 11 June [1875] and n. 6. CD also made a note to order a fly (a horse-drawn carriage used as a cab) to transport Tait from Orpington station to Down House.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9918,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9918