skip to content

Darwin Correspondence Project

From J. V. Carus   18 September 1880

Leipzig

Sept 18th. 1880.

My dear Sir,

I am very much obliged to you for sending me the two first sheets of your new book and for the kind words with which you accompany them. Of course I shall be most happy to translate the book and I wrote at once to Mr Koch, who will again publish the translation. He will I think directly apply to you about the stereotypes of the wood cuts.1

Before I take up my regular winter work I shall for a few days go to Hamburgh. In the mean time some more sheets of your book will be struck off, so that I can begin translating soon after my return. Would you perhaps be so kind as to tell me how large the book will be, of course some sheets more or less would not matter.

I was at Ems again for four weeks and feel again all the better for it.2 Although I drank the water there and made a regular “cure”, yet I consider my going there principally as a time of rest and slackening the tension of the ropes and springs of my hard working mental and bodily machine.

I enjoy just now the visit of my dear old friend Dr Acland from Oxford, who was the first to set an example of true staunch trustworthy English friendship.3 And so many followed him! You may believe that I am really happy to be able to thank you also amongst them all for great kindness and sympathy.

Believe me | My dear Sir, | Yours ever sincerly | J. Victor Carus

Footnotes

CD had sent the first two proof-sheets of Movement in plants with his letter to Carus of 14 September 1880 and said that he would get the woodcuts stereotyped if Carus wished to translate the work. Eduard Koch ran E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, CD’s German publisher.
Bad Ems is a spa resort on the river Lahn, a tributary of the Rhine; Carus suffered from bronchial problems (see Correspondence vol. 24, letter from J. V. Carus, 19 March 1876 and n. 4).
From 1849 to 1851, Carus had worked as a conservator at the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in Oxford (Complete dictionary of scientific biography); Henry Wentworth Acland was Lee’s Reader in anatomy at Christ Church, Oxford, during that period.

Bibliography

Complete dictionary of scientific biography. By Charles Coulston Gillispie, Frederic Lawrence Holmes, and Noretta Koertge. Electronic publication. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 2008.

Movement in plants: The power of movement in plants. By Charles Darwin. Assisted by Francis Darwin. London: John Murray. 1880.

Summary

Will be happy to translate CD’s new book [Movement in plants]. Asks how large the book will be.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-12716
From
Julius Victor Carus
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Leipzig
Source of text
DAR 161: 113
Physical description
ALS 2pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12716,” accessed on 28 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12716.xml

letter