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To Anton Dohrn   13 February 1882

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.)

Feb. 13th. 1882

My dear Sir

I must write a few lines to thank you for your very kind note.—1 I am extremely glad to hear of the great success in all ways of your Institution, & it is very good news about the physiological department.— I daresay that you are aware that Owen has lately published a paper in Proc. or Journal of the Linnean Soc. on the Brain in relation to the mouth &c.—2 I may be very unjust but I cannot avoid the suspicion that the original idea was borrowed from you.—3

I have got one very bad piece of news to tell you, that F. Balfour is very ill at Cambridge with Typhoid Fever, I suppose caught whilst nursing his friend in Italy.4 I hope that he is not in a very dangerous state; but the fever is severe. Good Heavens what a loss he would be to Science & to his many loving friends.—

Whenever you come to England again I hope that you will find time to pay us a little visit

With cordial good wishes.— | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

Footnotes

2
In his paper, ‘On the homology of the conario-hypophysial tract’ (Owen 1881b), Richard Owen had discussed homologies of these organs in vertebrates and annelids. Owen referred to Dohrn’s work on the subject, but gave different reasons for homologising the organs, based not on ancestral forms, but on the relative positions of the central parts of the nervous and vascular systems (ibid., p. 146). Dohrn had criticised Owen’s earlier discussion of the topic (Owen 1881a) for failing to consider contemporary research (see letter from Anton Dohrn, 9 February 1882 and n. 9).
4
While on holiday in Europe, Francis Maitland Balfour had stopped in Naples to see a student of his, William Hay Caldwell; on finding Caldwell was ill with typhoid, Balfour stayed to nurse him. On returning to England in January 1882, Balfour himself became ill with the disease (see M. Foster and Sedgwick eds. 1885, 1: 19).

Bibliography

Foster, Michael and Sedgwick, Adam, eds. 1885. The works of Francis Maitland Balfour. 4 vols. London: Macmillan and co.

Owen, Richard. 1881a. On the homology of the conario-hypophysial tract, or of the so-called ‘pineal’ and ‘pituitary glands’. Report of the 51st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at York (1881): 719–20.

Owen, Richard. 1881b. On the homology of the conario-hypophysial tract, or the so-called pineal and pituitary glands. [Read 1 December 1881]. Journal of the Linnean Society (Zoology) 16 (1881–2): 131–49.

Summary

Thanks for AD’s letter.

Owen has published a paper on the brain in relation to the mouth ["On the homology of the conario-hypophysial tract", J. Linn. Soc. Lond. (Zool.) 16 (1881–2): 131–49]. CD cannot avoid suspicion that the original idea was borrowed from AD.

F. M. Balfour very ill. His death would be a great loss.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-13686
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Felix Anton (Anton) Dohrn
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (Ana 525. Ba 707)
Physical description
ALS 4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13686,” accessed on 10 September 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13686.xml

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