1

29 Norham Road

Oxford

11/6/82

Dear Sir

Having seen a letter of yours in the 'Lancet' requesting owners of letters from the late Charles Darwin, to lend them to you for the purpose of making copies, with a view to publishing a volume of his letters. I beg to enclose a letter I received from him on the 1st of January 1880, in answer to a letter of mine pointing out what seemed to me a contradiction between two passages occurring on consecutive pages of the 'Origin of Species'

Mr. Darwin did not quite see where my difficulty lay, but his letter incidentally explained to me how it arose. He uses the words 'jostle each other' in two different senses implying in the one case a struggle for existence and in the other mere juxtaposition owing to the absence of a struggle for existence.

You are perfectly at liberty to make any use you think fit of the letter. I send you a copy of it, to save you trouble & to enable you to return the original (which I [illeg] very highly), without delay.

Yrs faithfully

F. S. Arnold