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Darwin Correspondence Project

To Lawson Tait   17 January [1877]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Jan. 17th

My dear Sir

I shd. be glad to give any criticisms, but I have none to make & agree with what you say.—2 There is, however, one trifling point on which I differ; viz that I believe the high value of well-bred males is due to their transmitting their good qualities to a far greater number of offspring than can the female.—3

Yours very faithfully— | Ch. Darwin

Footnotes

The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Lawson Tait, 16 January 1877.
See letter from Lawson Tait, 16 January 1877. Tait had sent proof-sheets from his forthcoming book on diseases of women (L. Tait 1877)
Tait had suggested that breeders paid much higher prices for well-bred male livestock because males were more physically fit than females (see L. Tait 1877, p. 49).

Bibliography

Tait, Lawson. 1877. Diseases of women. London: Williams and Norgate.

Summary

CD has only a trifling point to make in criticism [of RLT’s excerpt from Diseases of women]: he believes "the high value of well-bred males is due to their transmitting their good qualities to a far greater number of offspring than can the female".

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-10800
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Robert Lawson (Lawson) Tait
Sent from
Down
Source of text
DAR 221.5: 37
Physical description
ALS 1p (photocopy)

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 10800,” accessed on 29 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-10800.xml

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