From G. H. Darwin 5 October 1873
Trin. Coll.
Sunday | Oct 5 73
My dear Father,
I have decided to send the letter to Nature for the reasons wh I gave before & also because I feel partly guilty of the obscurity of your former letter. I have of course altered it as you suggest & added one other sentence.1
I had to do a great deal more than was good for me in London & even then did’nt buy my furniture for Down, & consequently when I got down here on Friday morning was quite knocked up with all the scrimmage & was very bad all day.2 Yesterday morng. I was bad too but got m. better in the p.m & had a most enjoyable game of tennis—the first for about 1 years. I shall try & play as often as I can but fear that I shall not be always up to the mark. Horace seems tol. as far as I can see.3 I am trying to starve myself right, but it is most difficult to know how & to what extent to do it.4 I’m not very brilliant again this morning, but I sha’nt have quite so m. scrimmage henceforward.
I found my rooms in the most hopeless confusion, full of my boxes & straw & dismantled bookshelf & writing table. One sitting room & the bedroom literally without a stick in them. I am now in some rooms on the same staircase & hope to get into my room tomorrow or Tuesday. There is a general gyproom5 for the staircase with a boiler in it, which will be very convenient & I have of course a small private one. I have been spending my time in going backwards & forwards to the upholsterers & crockery shop & have bought bed-room furniture glasses &c. furniture for the small room & the big one I shall do by degrees afterwards.
The man whose rooms I am going into is very touchy & has just come to a dead cut (after many little tiffs) with Jackson,6 who is my next door neighbour; so the change must be pleasant for J..— There are very few men up yet & I hope to get furnished before the crush comes.
I heard from F Galton this a.m & he says ‘Do u kno or has Dr. C heard of that incred. but uncontradd. assertion made … before a crowd of physiologs. at Bradf. that albumen mixed with water in a short time becomes indistinguishable from the contents of the lacteals white corpuscles &c!!! (So that u cd. assim. it witht. any stomach at all) & the v. pract. conclusion that if an egg is broken into cold water & left to stand 12 hrs it becomes opaque then boil the whole slightly & the result is a food that the author asserted to be digestible when nothing else cd be digested!’7
He says he’s sorry to hear of yr illness.
I saw the Ed. of Examiner (Cox not [Mawe] in town & Im put on his free list for the paper & am to write occasionally if I like.8 I of course sha’nt let it interfere with my work but I think it will be rather amusing than otherwise to write a little— They pay about £1 per article.
Yours affly | G H Darwin
Will you have sent me the wooden cone for putting on wicks to my reading lamp— have I got lamp scissors if so send them too
Very glad to hear about Allens—9 I suppose it will be snapped up for F. at once
Footnotes
Bibliography
Goodman, John. 1873. White corpuscles, their nature and origin in the animal organism. Report of the 43d Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1873), Transactions of the sections, pp. 129–30.
ODNB: Oxford dictionary of national biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000. (Revised edition.) Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. and index. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.
OED: The Oxford English dictionary. Being a corrected re-issue with an introduction, supplement and bibliography of a new English dictionary. Edited by James A. H. Murray, et al. 12 vols. and supplement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1970. A supplement to the Oxford English dictionary. 4 vols. Edited by R. W. Burchfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1972–86. The Oxford English dictionary. 2d edition. 20 vols. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. Oxford English dictionary additional series. 3 vols. Edited by John Simpson et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993–7.
Pearson, Karl. 1914–30. The life, letters and labours of Francis Galton. 3 vols. in 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Summary
Has decided to send the letter ["Variation of organs", Nature 8 (1873): 505].
Writes of his poor health and problems of settling in at Trinity.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-9088
- From
- George Howard Darwin
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Trinity College, Cambridge
- Source of text
- DAR 210.2: 30
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9088,” accessed on 26 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9088.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 21