Showing 81–92 of 92 items
The Charles Darwin Collection
The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Describes circumstances surrounding discovery of seed in sand-pit. Encloses certificates testifying to the good character of the men involved.
Has sent WK’s paper to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Kemp 1844).
Chalcidites collected by CD are all similar to those of Europe. Mentions other specimens quite different from European forms.
Thanks JDH for short sketch of botanical geography of Southern Hemisphere. Comments on his own S. American collections and observations; notes other Galapagos collections.
Henslow has sent him CD’s Galapagos plants along with Macrae’s. JDH impressed by the island endemism, which "overturns all our preconceived notions" on centres of radiation. Describes the extent, and the sharp demarcation at longitude 60° W, of the American and European Northern Hemisphere floras. CD’s plants among those he is using to do Antarctic flora. Drimys winteri shows a graded series of states down the length of the South American continent.
Description and defence of his view of the tosca in Banda Oriental, along the Rio Uruguay and at the Rio Negro, taking issue with A. D. d’Orbigny. Refers to the pumice in the Patagonian Territory. Two tables show the layered tosca formation along the Uruguay.
"You will have been sorry to have seen in the newspapers, the disturbances & fightings with the New Zealanders. – I have lately been much interested in reading your chapters on the slow decrease in numbers … of these poor people. The case appears to me very curious, especially as the decrease has commenced or continued since the introduction of the potato – the relation between the amount of population & of food is hence inverted. It would have been a case for the great Malthus to have reflected on".
Discusses fossil bones found in Australia by Mr Isaac. Suggests they be sent to Richard Owen.
Requests a mixture of verdigris, sal ammoniac, and lamp-black.
Asks for a bottle to be filled with spirits of wine.
Asks SPW to have obsidian specimens and book [Dieudonné de Gratet de Dolomieu, Voyage aux îles de Lipari (1783)] ready when he comes.
News of the Shrewsbury family. He cannot get his father to sympathise with the numbness in his finger ends or his fears of "ruin and extravagance".
