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To A. W. Howitt   [before 30 November 1880]1

[I also received a letter from Charles Darwin to whom I sent a copy from myself as he some seven years ago suggested to me to place on record all I could gather about the blacks.2 He writes me that after glancing through the book it seemed to him so important in our “new views and facts” that he at once sent it to his neighbour Mr McLennan who although in terribly bad health is striving to complete a book before he dies.3 When Mr Darwin gets the book back he says he shall read it again very carefully.]

Footnotes

1
The date is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from J. F. McLennan, 30 November 1880.
2
The text is from a letter from Howitt to Lorimer Fison, 10 January 1881. In his letter to Howitt of [September 1874] (Correspondence vol. 22), CD had suggested that Howitt should write a book on the mental powers and beliefs of Australian aborigines. Howitt had sent Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Fison and Howitt 1880).
3
John Ferguson McLennan accepted CD’s offer to lend him Fison and Howitt 1880; see letter from J. F. McLennan, 30 November 1880. McLennan died in 1881. He lived at Hayes Common, Kent, three and a half miles from Down (ODNB); his work on the origin of patriarchal family structures was published posthumously (McLennan 1885).

Bibliography

Fison, Lorimer and Howitt, Alfred William. 1880. Kamilaroi and Kurnai: group-marriage and relationship, and marriage by elopement, drawn chiefly from the usage of the Australian aborigines. Also the Kurnai tribe, their customs in peace and war. Melbourne: G. Robertson.

McLennan, John Ferguson. 1885. The patriarchal theory: based on the papers of the late John Ferguson McLennan. Edited by Donald McLennan. London: Macmillan.

ODNB: Oxford dictionary of national biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000. (Revised edition.) Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. and index. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.

Summary

Thanks AWH for copy of Fison and Howitt 1880, which he will read when it is returned by J. F. McLennan.

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12874F,” accessed on 23 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12874F.xml

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