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Williamson

 

Victoria University

Manchester. June 3rd /82

My Dear Sir

I feat that few of your dear fathers communications to me would be of any value to you even if I had them. They were chiefly brief notes of a very businesslike kind — scientifically speaking and as I had a very large circle of autograph-hunting friends capable of appreciating them I gave them away freely — reserving a few for my own album

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of autographs. I send you three or four from one of which you will see that I enjoyed the high privilege of communicating with him from 1846. I think the most interesting note is that date Nov 18 – 1880, received after we sent up the deputation from our Union of Yorkshire Naturalists. The modesty which led him to value so highly as he did a Deputation from a body of real working naturalists, but most of whom are socially men of humble or modest position is to me a remarkable evidence of what both you and I know was so characteristic of him. That the tribute then paid to him was genuine & spontaneous — I knew to be the case because I presided at the meetings where it was proposed to be offered — but it emanated from the men themselves and not from me. Your father new this — and it was this fact apparently

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that led him to appreciate the tribute as much as, if not more than if it had emanated from the scientific big-wigs of the world.

You have a serious & anxious task before you. It appears to me that a son scarcely dare to put such a father in his right position. I was telling my family at breakfast this morning that your life cannot and will not be the final biography of your father because you cannot and dare not rear his pedestal to the

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Elevation which it must one day reach. It can only be a century hence, when the all embracing comprehension of the Darwinian philosophy has become patent to the entire civilised world, that some future biographer will be able to use your life as a store-house of facts — whilst he constructs the Pantheon in which the subject of his biography must be permanently enthroned.

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Excuse — My Dear Sir this wordy tribute to the memory of one for whom for forty years I have entertained such feelings of reverential affection. And with respectful sympathy for your mother, your brothers & yourself for your incalculable loss —

I am ever

Sincerely yours

W. C. Williamson

See Darwin, C. R. 1880. [Letter of thanks to the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union]. The naturalist 6 (65) (December): 65-68. Text F1969