And again he wrote to Hugh Strickland, January 29th, 1849:--
“I have come to a fixed opinion that the plan of the first describer’s name, being appended for perpetuity to a species, has been the greatest curse to Natural History.... I feel sure as long as species-mongers have their vanity tickled by seeing their own names appended to a species, because they miserably described it in two or three lines, we shall have the same _vast_ amount of bad work as at present, and which is enough to dishearten any man who is willing to work out any branch with care and time.”
And in another letter (February 4th) to the same correspondent:--
“In mineralogy I have myself found there is no rage to merely name; a person does not take up the subject without he intends to work it out, as he knows that his _only_ claim to merit rests on his work being ably done, and has no relation whatever to _naming_.... I do not think more credit is due to a man for defining a species, than to a carpenter for making a box. But I am foolish and rabid against species-mongers, or rather against their vanity; it is useful and necessary work which must be done; but they act as if they had actually made the species, and it was their own property.”
A little later in the same year (1849) his health seems to have determined him to give up the crusade, for he writes to Hooker (April 29th):--
“With health and vigour, I would not have shewn a white feather, [and] with aid of half-a-dozen really good Naturalists, I believe something might have been done against the miserable and degrading passion of mere species naming.”
Anyone whose researches have been among the species of any much-worked and much-collected zoological group will quite agree that synonymy is, as Darwin found it, heart-breaking work; and although there may be good reasons why the system of appending the describer’s name must be retained, such a protest as that raised in these letters cannot fail to do good in drawing attention to an abuse which is only too common, and which introduces unnecessary difficulty and gratuitous confusion into the study of Nature.
His father, Dr. Darwin, died November 13th, 1848, at the age of eighty-three, when he was so much out of health that he was unable to attend the funeral. In 1851 he lost his little daughter Annie, who died at Malvern, April 23rd. A few days after her death he wrote a most affecting account of her--a composition of great beauty and pathos.