Dear M^r Stephen,

We have been having a great family talk & at last have come to such a hopeless division of opinion that my Father has commissioned me to write & ask you whether you would be so very kind as to consider the following question & give him your judgement as to what he had better do. He hopes you will not mind the trouble, & that the consideration of the points involved will not take much time— but he will be really grateful for the opinion of an outsider & of someone in whose opinion he will have so much confidence as in yours.

The question is as to the advisability or necessity of his meeting in any way Butler’s allegation that he has made a false statement in his preface to the Life of Eras. Darwin, which he—Butler—considers does him a great injury.¹

We are sending you Butler’s Op. 5 with the pages marked which bear upon the question,² namely 60– to 79, & also Erasmus Darwin’s life in order that you may see the preface.

The only point which some of us think my Father should meet is, the alleged implication in the preface that Krause’s original article in Kosmos was not altered or added to before translation.³ All the accusations as to Krause’s having taken passages from Op 4 without acknowledgement do not concern my Father & we none of us wish that he should enter into any sort of controversy with Butler.⁴ Two or three of my brothers much wish that a fly leaf should be inserted in the unsold copies of the Life of Eras. Darwin stating as an erratum on p. 1, ten lines from the top, that Krause’s article in Kosmos was altered & enlarged before it was sent to M^r Dallas for translation.⁵

My husband & I, on the other hand, are very strong that nothing whatever should be done. My brother Leonard will be the Devil’s Advocate & will send you what he has to say & I will state our views.⁶

We maintain:

1^st. that Butler has put himself out of court by the grossness of his attack on my Father. If a man clearly implies that he considers another to be a liar, he cannot expect his complaints to be listened to & met by statements, which are only worth making on the assumption that his opponent is a person of credit.

2^nd.: That supposing he has any cause of complaint, which we do not grant, my Father’s letter to him of Jan 3^rd. 1880, in which he states that there has been a blunder & that if there should be a second edition this shall be altered, removes all reasonable ground of complaint: Butler has himself made this letter public not only in Op. 5 but also in the Athenæum & in the St James Gazette, so that any one who reads his books will see that this imaginary injury was not intentional.⁷ If, in last January, it had occurred to my Father to offer to insert a fly leaf with this correction, we should have had no objection, but we do strongly object to any action being taken in consequence of Butler’s last book. We think it is a confession that he has done someone a wrong and this is not the fact. Also his doing anything will open the way to fresh insults.

3^rd: We maintain that no injury has been done to Butler— Supposing any careful & unprejudiced reader had read Butler’s Op. 4 & afterwards read the Life of Eras. D. he would see when he came to the last sentence of the book that it applied to Butler, & he would, if he turned to the preface, be puzzled by finding that it was implied that this was the mere translation of Kosmos unaltered, but a very little reflection would, let him see that in the interval which elapsed between Feb & Nov it was likely that Krause had added to & revised his original article—& had in the meantime read Op 4.

It is hardly necessary to remark that it is impossible to discover what advantage it would be to my Father to attack Butler by a spirit of prophecy.

It would I suppose be an infinitesimal disadvantage to Butler to have it supposed that some anonymous person existed, who had already, before Feb 79, given forth similar views to Butlers—but he has never put that forward as his ground of complaint, &, on the contrary, has said that it was clear the sentence was intended for him.

4^th: The plea for now correcting the statement in the preface is, that its words now mislead as to a matter of fact. But we contend that it is a case where literal accuracy will now give a false impression of what has occurred. The worst that the preface can now do is to cause a misapprehension in a minute point of no consequence to anyone; but the act of meeting Butler’s attack in any way now will be read, & naturally, as a confession by my father that he has done a wrong; and this is not the fact. We think the whole thing utterly unimportant & that the outside world will think so too. And finally we tell my Father that the good sensible rule is, ‘when you doubt let it alone.’ This he is upon the whole inclined to do. He still holds that the preface is not materially inaccurate—the note as to Butler’s book being wholly detached from the sentence as to Krause, & appended to the list of Authors on page 2—& though he would, if he had thought of it, have put in the fly leaf erratum twelve months ago, he leans to our view that he had best now let the matter alone or at any rate is quite doubtful on the matter.

I hope you will not think us all gone mad on such a small matter.

My Father sends his best remembrances & apologies for thus troubling you. He desires me to say he only asks for your verdict & not for any reasons why you give it.

I am, | yours sincerely | H. E. Litchfield

P.S. I may as well add that Krause has written a statement which he is going to send to the Popular Science Review* giving his observations as to Butlers attack upon himself & upon my Father. In this statement he explains as to the inadvertent omission in the preface—

*or Nature more probably⁸