Letter to R.K. Greville, LL.D : being an answer to certain statements contained in a pamphlet entitled "Singular specimens of the Edinburgh practice of criticism, by John Joseph Griffin" / by John Hutton Balfour.

Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter to R.K. Greville, LL.D : being an answer to certain statements contained in a pamphlet entitled "Singular specimens of the Edinburgh practice of criticism, by John Joseph Griffin" / by John Hutton Balfour. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    17/32 (page 13)
    IS money, under the pledge to use it as your class-book So also in a leiter to the eonduetors of the Monthly Journal of Medical Science, he says, I asked Professor Balfour to write a volume. I offered him £200 for his labour, and he agreed to the bargain, accompanying the agreement with a pledge to use the book to be ^yl•itten as his class-book. And, in a letter to myself, dated 27th June 1850 (Pamphlet, p. 19), he says, I must recal to your recollection the fact that, when you undertook to wnte the Manual, you pledged yourself decidedly, I think sincerely, to use the work as your text-book. In another part of the same letter he asserts, the pledge to use the Manual as yom- class-book was as specific a portion (of our bargain) as the pledge to wnte it. And again, that pledge was repeated a dozen times in your letters. Now, in the face of these reiterated assertions, any one will be surprised to be told, that neither at the period of our original bargain, nor at any other time, did I ever pledge myself to Mr. Griffin to use the Manual of Botany as my text- book. It will scarcely be pretended that any such pledge is con- tained in my first letter (4th January 1847) where I state, I have long intended to bring out a cheap text-book for students, and your proposal seems to me the means of accomplishing this object. And again, in accepting the proposal, I shall feel myself at liberty to make some modifications. In fact, I shall take the Cours elementaire as the groundwork, and upon it form my text-book. These words, no doubt, express the intention I at that time entertained, to use the Manual for the pm-poses of . my class, as was very natural, considering it to be my own book, and under my own control. In point of fact, I did so use it,^ and did everything in my power to promote its sale. But that either then, or at any other time, I came under a pledge'' so to use the book, is disproved by the whole course of the correspondence, and has, I think, been virtually admitted by Mr. Griffin himself. He now says, indeed, that the pledge was repeated a dozen times in my letters. 1 have not kept copies of our entire con-espondence ; but on applying to Mr. Griffin for it, he sent me his first letter to me, and my reply, as containing all that was necessary for the understanding of our bargain. I have just quoted from the latter of these letters the only reference they contain to the use of a text-book; and I have a very strong impression that Mr. Griffin's statement would have been nearer the tnith, liad he said that the