From Thomas Belt   20 January 1877

Dear Mr Darwin,

I feel greatly obliged to you for your kind and frank letter which has so effectually dispelled a pleasant illusion that already I begin to wonder that I should have occupied myself with it.¹ It may not however be entirely fruitless   D^r Hooker advises me to make an application for aid to work out the glaciation of the area between the Pyrenees and the Alps—that is—what traces of ice are there that would have blocked up the Rhone drainage?—² This I could do without giving up my profession—

I can assure you that it is a great wrench to my whole habit of mind to make an application at all but I must either give up, (if I can) some of my scientific work or try to make it remunerative

Please thank M^r George Darwin for the copy of his paper on “the Earth’s Axis of Rotation”   I am sorry he cannot get a change of the obliquity of the ecliptic as the discovery of Miocene plants & trees apparently all round the present pole and to within about ten degrees of it is even more puzzling than the glacial period and a change in the obliquity seemed to offer a solution—³

Thanking you again for your kindness | I am Dear Sir | Yours very truly | Thomas Belt