Beschreibung:

DARWIN, Charles (1809-1882) Letter signed (‘Charles Darwin’) to [George Murray] Humphry, Down House, 14 March 1873. In the hand of Emma Darwin. 11⁄2 pages, 201 x 128mm, printed letter-paper headed ‘Down, Beckenham, Kent’. Green roan solander box. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 13 December 2016, lot 40. A magnanimous letter from Darwin following the death of his erstwhile mentor and critic of natural selection, Adam Sedgwick; a testament to Darwin’s lack of rancour towards his intellectual opponents. ‘I am sorry to say that the state of my health prevents me from attending the meeting to which you refer. I have heard from Professor Hughes on the same general subject, & have told him how glad & proud I shall be to aid in any way in doing honour to the venerated memory of Sedgewick’. Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of the study of geology in Britain, was a friend and teacher to Darwin at the beginning of his career, and Darwin credited the older man with kindling his interest in the subject while he was still a student at Cambridge. In the summer of 1831, Darwin attended a course given by Sedgwick in geology, before accompanying him on a two-week tour of the older fossil-bearing rocks of Wales: this served as his primary training in field geology before the Beagle voyage, from which he wrote to another of his mentors, John Stevens Henslow, noting his debt to Sedgwick (DCP-LETT-171). On his return, Darwin and Sedgwick continued to exchange letters, discussing matters relating to the Geological Society of London and sending one another their latest publications. The receipt of a copy of the Origin in 1859 was to provoke an intellectual rift between the two; Sedgwick, a committed Evangelical, wrote on 24 November 1859 expressing his strong objections to the principal of natural selection proposed by Darwin: ‘I have read your book with more pain than pleasure […] You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction’ (DCP-LETT-2548). The two continued to correspond in cordial terms on other matters, however, and they met again in 1870, for what would be the final time, when Sedgwick took Darwin on a tour of the vastly improved geological collections at Cambridge. Following Sedgwick’s death in January 1873, his Cambridge colleague George Murray Humphry proposed a meeting at Senate House on 25 March to discuss his memorial, which occasioned the present response from Darwin, who notes that he has already heard of the plan from Thomas McKenny Hughes. Hughes, who succeeded Sedgwick as Woodwardian Professor of Geology, laid the foundations for the Sedgwick Memorial Museum at Cambridge and would also write his biography; in 1875, sending Sedgwick’s 24 November 1859 criticism of the Origin to Hughes for this purpose, Darwin commented: ‘His judgement naturally does not seem to me quite a fair one; but I think that the letter is characteristic of the man’ (DCP-LETT-9993). The disagreement did not preclude him from contributing to the memorial of his erstwhile mentor. Published (DCP-LETT-8810F).