Ɛpsilon

To J. V. Carus   23 November 1876

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Nov 23. 1876

My dear Sir,

You need not trouble yourself to look through the new edit of my Geological Book. At p 161 of old edit of Volcanic Islands the name of a genus of Corals has been altered. At end Ch IV of South America, a small appendix has been added in new Edit.1 I do not know why I doubted about the Atlantic dust paper; I think it would be worth translating.2

Your plan of a short hand writer seems excellent; and I am extremely pleased that you have not found the book so intolerably dull as I feared you would. Barnes3 is the name of a gardener, & you had better copy the name I used. I have no idea what Cos means but it is the proper name of the Var:.4

Many thanks about the errata; I have looked to the original notes. and the error has been made in the conversion into decimals   I will send you a perfect copy when published, & why it does not appear I do not know.5

my dear Sir | Yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

LS

1
See letter from J. V. Carus, 20 November 1876. In Geological observations 2d ed., p. 178, CD added a note suggesting that the coral discussed under the name Stenopora tasmaniensis should have been called Thamnopora tasmaniensis (this name was never published) Thamnopora is a genus of extinct tabulate corals, while Stenopora is a genus of extinct bryozoans. A supplement on the thickness of the Pampean formation near Buenos Ayres, first published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (‘Pampean formation’), was added near the end of chapter 4 of South America (Geological observations 2d ed., pp. 363–7). Carus’s translation of it was published in Carus trans. 1878b.
2
See letter from J. V. Carus, 20 November 1876 and n. 4. For CD’s paper, ‘An account of the fine dust which often falls on vessels in the Atlantic Ocean’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 2 (1846): 26–30, see also Shorter publications, pp. 192–6. Carus’s German translation of it was published in Carus trans. 1878c, pp. 99–104.
4
The cos lettuce was introduced from the Greek island of Cos (OED).
5
Carus had sent corrections to Cross and self fertilisation (see letter from J. V. Carus, 20 November 1876). It was published in December 1876 (DAR 210.11: 6). Carus’s corrections were given on an errata slip.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10686,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10686