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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

Footnotes

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).

Bibliography

Bartlett, Abraham Dee. 1861. Remarks on the Japanese masked pig. [Read 11 June 1861.] Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1861): 263–4.

Goodacre, Francis Burges. 1875. A few remarks on hemerozoology; or the study of domestic animals. London: Robert Hardwicke.

Variation: The variation of animals and plants under domestication. By Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray. 1868.

Summary

Thanks FBG for his essay. Thinks FBG’s planned collection would be very useful but is ‘not sanguine of success’. Most naturalists do not care 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.’

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-9864
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Francis Burges Goodacre
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Dr John Goodacre (private collection)
Physical description
4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9864,” accessed on 5 June 2025, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9864.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 23

letter

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