| Description | Bundle of thirteen letters to James Watt, from various people.
There is a bundle label, written in red ink, as follows:
' Letters from Mr Van Liender, Dr Irvine, Dr Hutton, Mr Clarke, Mr Wilson, Dr Darwin. No. 1 to 13. 1774 to 1776. '
The letters are numbered in red ink, but do not seem to have been arranged in any particular order.
[Old] no. 1, a letter from Erasmus Darwin, 29 March 1775, had been removed for exhibition in the Lunar Society exhibition of 1966, but had not been returned to the bundle, and had been assigned the number C1/40 when purchased. It has now been replaced in the bundle.
The letters from Dr James Hutton are not dated, except by the docket.
The letters have now been arranged in chronological order, where possible, and a conspectus of old and new numbers is given at the end of the list.
The letters have a docket by James Watt with the name of the correspondent and the date. There were no summaries.
Any summary in square brackets has been given by the cataloguer.
Desmond King-Hele, in Erasmus Darwin (1999), p119, mentions that James Watt arrived in Birmingham with James Hutton on 31 May 1774. Hutton met Boulton and Small and went on to Lichfield to meet Darwin at the beginning of June. He stayed with Darwin, using his house as a base to conduct a survey of the Derbyshire Peak District. He left the midlands in July, for an arduous geological tour round Wales and south west England. He returned to Edinburgh in late autumn. This may help with the dating of the letters below. |