Ɛpsilon

From A. R. Wallace   17 January 1877

Rosehill, Dorking.

Jany. 17th. 1877

My dear Darwin

Many thanks for your valuable new edition of the “Orchids” which I see contains a great deal of new matter of the greatest interest.1 I am amazed at your continuous work,—but I suppose after all these years of it, it is impossible for you to remain idle. I, on the contrary, am very idle, and feel inclined to do nothing but stroll about this beautiful country, and read all kinds of miscellaneous literature.

I have asked my friend Mr. Mott to send you the last of his remarkable papers—on Haeckel.2 But the part I hope you will read with as much interest as I have done, is that on the deposits of Carbon, & the part it has played & must be playing in Geological changes. He seems to have got the idea from some German book, but it seems to me very important, and I wonder it never occurred to Sir Charles Lyell.3 If the calculations as to the quantity of undecomposed carbon deposited are anything approaching to correctness, the results must be important.

Hoping you are in pretty good health | Believe me | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace.

Charles Darwin Esq.

1
Wallace’s name is on CD’s presentation list for Orchids 2d ed. (see Appendix IV).
2
Albert Julius Mott sent CD an offprint of his paper ‘On Haeckel’s History of creation’ (Mott 1876); CD’s lightly annotated copy is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL.
3
Mott argued that geological change was fundamentally dependent on vital rather than physical changes in the earth, caused by the continual combustion of carbon below the surface, and further that the earth was not cooling (Mott 1876, pp. 68–80). Mott referred to Gustav Bischof’s estimate of the carbon in sedimentary rock as part of his argument (ibid., p. 69; see also Bischof 1854–9, 1: 204–5).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10801,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10801