Ɛpsilon

To Lyon Playfair   15 May [1875]1

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

May. 15th

My dear Sir

I am very much obliged to you for having sent me a copy of the Bill on Vivisection as introduced by you.—2 By undertaking this work, you have in my opinion done a great service in the cause of humanity & Science. I have had no recent communication with any physiologist, but I fear that the clause about registering every experiment, done without anæsthetics, though in itself a good step, may be a source of much trouble & difficulty, especially from the impossibility of explaining to the unscientific the probable advantage of any particular experiments.3

Pray believe me, my dear Sir | yours faithfully and obliged | Charles Darwin

ALS and Copy4

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Lyon Playfair, 21 May 1875.
2
Playfair introduced the bill for the regulation of vivisection in the House of Commons on 12 May 1875 (Hansard parliamentary debates 3d ser. vol. 224 (1875), col. 542). The copy of the bill received by CD is in DAR 139.17: 23; it was ordered to be printed by the House of Commons on 12 May 1875.
3
CD refers to section three, clause five: ‘That a register of all experiments made without the use of anaesthetics shall be duly kept, and be returned in such form and at such times as one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State may direct’. On the controversy over anaesthetics, see Appendix VI.
4
The original letter is described in the sale catalogue as being three pages long. The transcript down to ‘but I’ is from a facsimile in the sale catalogue; the rest is from the copy in DAR 147, except for the ampersand in the phrase ‘trouble & difficulty’, which comes from the transcription in the sale catalogue.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9980,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9980