To Gaston de Saporta 15 August 1878
Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.) [Abinger Hall, Surrey/Barlaston Hall, Staffordshire.]
August 15. 1878.
My dear Sir
I thank you very sincerely for your kind & interesting letter.1 It would be false in me to pretend that I care very much about my election to the Institut, but the sympathy of some few of my friends has gratified me deeply.—2
I am extremely glad to hear that you are going to publish a work on the more ancient fossil plants; & I thank you before-hand for the volume which you kindly say that you will send me.—3 I earnestly hope that you will give, at least incidentally, the results at which you have arrived with respect to the more recent Tertiary plants; for the close gradation of such forms seems to me a fact of paramount importance for the principle of evolution. Your cases are like those on the gradation in the genus Equus, recently discovered by Marsh in North America.—4
With the highest respect | I remain | Yours faithfully & obliged | Charles Darwin
Footnotes
Bibliography
Marsh, Othniel Charles. 1874. Fossil horses in America. American Naturalist 8: 288–94.
Saporta, Gaston de. 1879. Le monde des plantes avant l’apparition de l’homme. Paris: G. Masson.
Summary
It would be false to pretend he cares very much about his election to the Institut.
Glad to hear GdeS plans to publish a work on the more ancient fossil plants. Hopes he will report also on the more recent Tertiary forms because the close gradation of such forms is "a fact of paramount importance for the principle of evolution".
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-11661
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Louis Charles Joseph Gaston (Gaston) de Saporta, comte de Saporta
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- Archives Gaston de Saporta (private collection)
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 11661,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-11661.xml