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Bentham to FD

25 Wilton Place
SW

May 30/82

My dear Sir

In compliance with your note which I received last night I send herewith the letters I have from your father I should have done so on seeing the general request published in the paper but that I did not think there were any among them which could be of any used to you. Highly flattered as I was by the kind and friendly notice with which Mr Darwin occassionally honored me I was never admitted into his intimacy and he therefore never made any communications to me in relation to his views and labours. I have been throughout one of his most sincere

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Admirers and fully adopted his theories and conclusion notwithstanding the severe pain and disappointment they at first occassioned in me. On the day that his celebrated paper was read at the Linnean Society July 1st 1858 a long paper of mine had been set down for reading, in which commenting on the British flora I had collected a number of observations and facts illustrating what I then believed to be a fixity in species however difficult it might be to assign their limitis and showing a tendency of abnormal forms produced by cultivation or otherwise to withdraw within those original limits when left to themselves. Most fortunately my paper had to give way to Mr Darwin's and when once that was read I felt

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bound to defer mine for reconsideration

I began to entertain doubts on the subject and on the appearance of the Origin of Species I was forced however reluctantly to give up my long cherished convictions the results of much labou rand study, and I cancelled all that part of my paper which urged original fixity and published only portions of the remainder in another form chiefly in the Natural History Review

I have since acknowledge on various occasions my full adoption of all Darwin's views and chiefly in my Presidential address of 1863 and in my 13th and last address issued in the form of a report to the British Association at its meeting at Belfast in 1874

I prize so highly the letters that I

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have of Mr Darwins that I should feel obliged by your returning them to me when you have done with them

Unfortunately I have not kept the envelopes and Mr Darwin usually only dated them by the month not by the year so that they are not in any chronological order

Yours very sincerely,

George Bentham