Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1Darwin, Charles
History
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Darwin, Charles
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Correspondence
I am very unwell, and incapable of doing anything. I do hope I have not
inconvenienced you. I was so unwell all yesterday, that I was rejoicing
you were not here; for it would have been a bitter mortification to me
to have had you here and not enjoyed your last day. I shall not now see
you. Farewell, and God bless you.
Your affectionate friend, C. DARWIN.
I will write to you in India.
[In 1847 appeared a paper by Mr. D. Milne (Now Mr. Milne Home. The
essay was published in Transactions of the Edinburgh Royal Society, vol.
xvi.), in which my father's Glen Roy work is criticised, and which is
referred to in the following characteristic extract from a letter to Sir
J. Hooker:] "I have been bad enough for these few last days, having had
to think and write too much about Glen Roy...Mr. Milne having attacked
my theory, which made me horribly sick." I have not been able to find
any published reply to Mr. Milne, so that I imagine the "writing"
mentioned was confined to letters. Mr. Milne's paper was not destructive
to the Glen Roy paper, and this my father recognises in the following
extract from a letter to Lyell (March, 1847). The reference to Chambers
is explained by the fact that he accompanied Mr. Milne in his visit to
Glen Roy. "I got R. Chambers to give me a sketch of Milne's Glen Roy
views, and I have re-read my paper, and am, now that I have heard what
is to be said, not even staggered. It is provoking and humiliating to
find that Chambers not only had not read with any care my paper on
this subject, or even looked at the coloured map, so that the new shelf
described by me had not been searched for, and my arguments and facts of
detail not in the least attended to. I entirely gave up the ghost, and
was quite chicken-hearted at the Geological Society, till you reassured
and reminded me of the main facts in the whole case."
The two following letters to Lyell, though of later date (June, 1848),
bear on the same subject:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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