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To William Turner   5 June [1866]1

Down,

June 5,

My dear Sir

I thank you sincerely for having sent me so many of your papers, several of which have interested me much;2 and the one on cellular pathology might have been written “to order,” it was so exactly what I wanted to know.3 It was a real pleasure to me to have had the good fortune to have met you at the Royal Soc. Soirée.4

My dear Sir | Yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin.

Footnotes

1
The year is established by the reference to the soirée at the Royal Society of London (see n. 4, below).
2
Signed author’s offprints of Turner 1863, 1864b, and 1866b are in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. The papers are lightly annotated. Copies of Turner 1864a, 1865, and 1866a are also in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL, and are lightly annotated.
3
CD discussed cell theory in his chapter on pangenesis in Variation, and cited Turner’s paper on cellular pathology (Turner 1863) as supportive of the view that all cells develop from pre-existing cells (see Variation 2: 370 and Turner 1863, pp. 5–6). On CD’s use of cell theory in his work on generation and heredity, see Geison 1969 and Bowler 1989, pp. 59–60.
4
CD had attended a reception at the Royal Society on 28 April 1866 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)).

Bibliography

Bowler, Peter John. 1989. The Mendelian revolution: the emergence of hereditarian concepts in modern science and society. London: Athlone Press.

Geison, Gerald L. 1969. Darwin and heredity: the evolution of his hypothesis of pangenesis. Journal of the History of Medicine 24: 375–411.

Turner, William. 1863. The present aspect of the doctrine of cellular pathology: a lecture delivered at an evening meeting of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. [Read 27 February 1863.] Edinburgh Medical Journal 8: 873–97.

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

Summary

Thanks for WT’s papers, especially ["The present aspect of the doctrine of cellular pathology", Edinburgh Med. J. 8 (1863): 873–97].

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-5113
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
William Turner
Sent from
Down
Source of text
DAR 148: 150
Physical description
C 1p

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 5113,” accessed on 19 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-5113.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 14

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