To William Whewell 16 April [1839]
My dear Whewell
I have been very much flattered by your “marriage gift” and kind note.1 I assure you very few have given me more pleasure.— Mrs. Darwin desires me to give you her best thanks for it.— I hope, sometime when you are in town & happen to be disengaged, we may see you in this house.— I have hardly done more than dip into Herman & D. but I intend beginning it immediately.
A short time since I finished, having only skimmed parts before, another & quite different production of yours,—the Hist of Inductive Sciences,2 —& I will run the risk of appearing exceedingly presumptuous by telling you how much I enjoyed it—to see so clearly the steps by which all the great scientific discoveries have been come to is a capital lesson to every one, even to the humblest follower of science & I hope I have profited by it— When I closed your third volume I wished much to say my thanks to you, and now, however presumptuous it may have been, I have satisfied myself by saying them.
Believe me | Most truly Yours | Chas. Darwin 12 Upper Gower St
April 16th.—
Pray excuse me troubling you with this letter all the way to Cambridge, per post, but I had no other way of sending it.—
Footnotes
Bibliography
Vorzimmer, Peter J. 1977. The Darwin reading notebooks (1838-1860). Journal of the History of Biology 10: 107–53.
Whewell, William. 1837. History of the inductive sciences, from the earliest to the present times. 3 vols. London.
Summary
Thanks WW for wedding gift.
Expresses admiration for his History of the inductive sciences [1837].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-506
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- William Whewell
- Sent from
- London, Upper Gower St, 12
- Source of text
- Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Add c 88: 6)
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 506,” accessed on 24 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-506.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 2