Ɛpsilon

To T. C. Eyton   22 April 1876

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Ap 22. 76

Dear Eyton

It is a pleasure to me to see your handwriting as it brings back vividly before my mind the many pleasant days I formerly spent at Eyton.1 I have received an account of the skeleton from the Geological Survey of Canada, but I would wager that it will turn out to have nothing to do with man any more than the famous skeleton of the salamander which was for so long a period thought to be human.2 I return the extracts3

Dr Haughton is an old and bitter opponent of mine.4 I am now at work at plants and do not suppose I shall ever return to the consideration of man.

I sincerely hope that you and all your family are well & remain | Yours very truly | Charles Darwin

LS

1
Eyton’s letter has not been found. Eyton was a Shropshire friend of CD’s and a contemporary of his at Cambridge. The Eyton estate was at Eyton-upon-the-Weald Moors, Shropshire; CD visited it as a young man in the 1820s and 1830s (see Correspondence vols. 1 and 2).
2
A report of the discovery of a skeleton of a tailed human in Prince Edward Island, Canada, was sent to CD by Robert Bell (see letter from Robert Bell, 28 March 1876). In 1726, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described a Miocene fossil as Homo diluvii testis (Scheuchzer 1726), believing it to be the remains of a human who had drowned in the biblical flood. In 1811, Georges Cuvier showed it to be the remains of a salamander, and named it Andrias scheuchzeri (Rudwick 2005, pp. 277 and 500–1).
3
The extracts have not been found.
4
Samuel Haughton was professor of geology at Dublin University. In Haughton 1859, he criticised CD’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers announcing the theory of natural selection (Darwin and Wallace 1858), and he subsequently criticised Origin in [Haughton] 1860.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10465,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10465