Ɛpsilon

To W. H. Flower   24 September [1876]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Sept. 24th

Dear Flower

I have received the enclosed photo’s from Mr Van der Weyde who is working with some associates at M. Video in collecting fossil bones.2 I want to encourage him in so good a work.— Will you therefore give me your opinion on the one marked with a cross, about which they are curious.— They seem to have to got a grand head of Toxodon.3 I intend urging them to search the Tertiary beds beneath the Pampean Formation.4 I do not want the Photographs returned, so you can keep them or throw them away.

Believe me | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from W. H. Flower, 27 September 1876.
2
The photographs have not been found. John van der Weyde was travelling in South America, photographing animal remains he thought worthy of preservation (Raymond 1889, p. 157). Montevideo is a port city on the Río de la Plata on the south coast of Uruguay.
3
Toxodon is a genus of rhinoceros-like mammals of the extinct order Notoungulata. It was described by Richard Owen as a ‘gigantic extinct mammiferous animal, referrible to the Order Pachydermata, but with affinities to the Rodentia, Edentata, and Herbivorous Cetacea’ (Owen 1837 and Fossil Mammalia, pp. 16–35), based on specimens collected by CD in 1833 (see Journal of researches 2d ed., pp. 82, 127, 130, and 155).
4
CD had disagreed with Alcide Charles Victor Dessalines d’Orbigny on the age and origin of the Pampean formation (see South America, pp. 98–103). CD had included some of his later work on the thickness of the Pampean formation in the new combined edition of Volcanic islands and South America (Geological observations 2d ed.; see letter to the Geological Society of London, 5 May 1876 and n. 1). The Tertiary period is a former geologic period equivalent to the Paleogene and Neogene periods and the first stage of the Pleistocene epoch in the Cenozoic era. For more on the revision of the geologic time scale, see Ogg et al. 2008.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10615,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10615