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Darwin Correspondence Project

To W. B. Tegetmeier   20 April [1867]

Down. | Bromley. | Kent. S.E.

Ap 20.

My dear Sir

Many thanks for your offer, but I have the pamphlet; it is clever but has not changed my conclusions.1

I forget whether I have made any alterations about the pigeons in the Origin (excepting about a crossed bird about which I blundered) but to make sure, I send by this post the revises of the last Edit. which are correct excepting perhaps here & there a word;2 but I must particularly beg you to be so kind as to return the sheet as it is of consequence to me.

My dear Sir | yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

Footnotes

1
The letter to which this is a reply has not been found; the pamphlet has not been identified.
2
CD refers to the revised page-proofs of the fourth edition of Origin, which was published in 1866. By the ‘crossed bird about which I blundered’, CD may refer to a passage in the first edition that was altered in the third and later editions. The original passage read (Origin, p. 25): I crossed some uniformly white fantails with some uniformly black barbs, and they produced mottled brown and black birds; these I again crossed together, and one grandchild of the pure white fantail and pure black barb was of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white rump, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon! In the third edition (Origin, p. 26), it read: I crossed some white fantails, which breed very true, with some black barbs … ; and the mongrels were black, brown, and mottled. I also crossed a barb with a spot, which is a white bird with a red tail and red spot on the forehead, and which notoriously breeds very true; the mongrels were dusky and mottled. I then crossed one of the mongrel barb-fantails with a mongrel barb-spot, and they produced a bird of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white croup, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon! See also Peckham ed. 1959, p. 100.

Bibliography

Origin: On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1859.

Summary

Sends the revisions in the latest edition of Origin.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-5507
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
William Bernhard Tegetmeier
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Archives of the New York Botanical Garden (Charles Finney Cox Collection)
Physical description
LS 2pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 5507,” accessed on 24 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-5507.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 15

letter

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