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Darwin Correspondence Project

To William Crookes   9 May [1874]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

May 9th

My dear Sir

It would give me much pleasure to comply with your request, but I have so much to do & my health is so weak that I really cannot.— I make it a rule, which I rarely break, to stick to whatever I have in hand, & always repent whenever I break this rule.—2

I was delighted at the chance of seeing your wonderful experiment at the Royal Soc. the other night—3

Pray believe me | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin

Footnotes

The year is established by the stationery, which is of a sort that CD used between 1872 and 1874, and by the fact that only in 1874 had CD made a recent visit to London.
Crookes’s request has not been identified.
At a soirée of the Royal Society of London on 22 April 1874, experiments showing attraction and repulsion accompanying radiation were staged in illustration of a paper by Crookes (Crookes 1873; soirée programme; see also letter to Michael Foster, 23 April [1874]).

Bibliography

Crookes, William. 1873. On the action of heat on gravitating masses. Abstract. [Read 11 December 1873.] Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 22 (1873–4): 37–41.

Summary

Regrets he cannot comply with request because of his work and poor health.

Delighted to have seen correspondent’s "wonderful experiment" at Royal Society.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-9449
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
William Crookes
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Cleveland Health Sciences Library (Robert M. Stecher collection)
Physical description
ALS 1p

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9449,” accessed on 2 December 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9449.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 22

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