explaining with regret that his health will prevent his attending a meeting but assuring him "how glad & proud I shall be to aid in any way in doing honour to the venerated memory of [Adam] Sedgwick", the body text in the hand of Emma Darwin, 2 pages, 8vo, Down House headed stationery, 14 March 1873, light spotting and nicks at edges not affecting text

A GRACIOUS LETTER ABOUT A FORMER TEACHER AND INTELLECTUAL ADVERSARY. This letter's recipient, Sir George Murray Humphry, had written to invite Darwin to a meeting in memory of the university's Woodwardian Professor of Geology, the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, who had died some six weeks earlier.  Darwin had known Sedgwick since his undergraduate days in Cambridge more than forty years earlier, and Sedgwick had provided him with crucial geological training when he accompanied him on a two-week field tour of Wales just before Darwin was appointed to the Beagle in 1831. Sedgwick had, however, been a vocal opponent of evolution by natural selection, writing to Darwin on receipt of a copy of the Origin that: "You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction, and started off in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon." (quoted in ODNB).

FROM THE LIBRARY OF SIR GEORGE MURRAY HUMPHRY (1820-1896)

Professor Sir George Murray Humphry was a renowned surgeon and anatomist. Despite coming from a modest background without connections, he became the youngest hospital surgeon in England when he was appointed to  Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge at the age of 22. In 1847 he became a lecturer in Human Anatomy at Cambridge University, was appointed Professor of Human Anatomy in 1866, and he ended his life as “one of the most influential people in the University of Cambridge” (ODNB). Humphry was acquainted with Darwin’s son George, who had entered the university in 1863. The first edition Origin of Species offered here reflects Humphry’s participation in the most important scientific debates of his time: when invited in 1880 to deliver the Rede Lecture, he chose as his subject “Man, past, present and future”. In 1866, Humphry founded the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, which he co-edited. The Journal regularly reviewed recen෴t publications, and naturally its editor received copies of Dar🐎win’s works in their earliest editions.