Ɛpsilon

To J. D. Hooker   28 January 1877

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

Jan 28. 77

My dear Hooker,

I am delighted to hear that I have not made you savage about Frank’s paper.1 I enclose an extract from my Coral book which tells all I know about Aldabara, & you will see that it merely shows that the island is not an ordinary atoll.2 I said to Günther many months ago that the most probable view about his tortoises seemed to me to be that various closely allied forms had once been distributed over almost the whole world. How the deuce they get to volcanic islands I cannot pretend to say.3

Every yours very sincerely | Ch. Darwin

[Enclosure]

“Thirdly, Aldabra,— it consists of three islets, about 25 feet in height, with red cliffs (Horsburgh vol 1 p. 176)4 surrounding a very shollow basin or lagoon. The sea is profoundly deep close to the shore. Viewing this island in a chart, it would be thought an atoll; but the foregoing description shows that there is something different in it’s nature; Dr Allan also states that it is cavernous, & that the coral-rock has a vitrified appearance.5 Is it an upheaved atoll, or the crater of a volcano?—uncoloured.—”

LS

1
See letter from J. D. Hooker, 27 January 1877 and n. 3. CD planned to submit Francis Darwin’s paper on Dipsacus (F. Darwin 1877b) to the Royal Society of London.
2
Aldabra is a large outlying coral atoll of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean (Columbia gazetteer of the world). CD described it briefly in Coral reefs, p. 186, but did not visit it.
3
Albert Günther had speculated on how giant land tortoises had been transported to islands in a paper presented to the Royal Society (see letter from J. D. Hooker, 27 January 1877 and n. 6).
4
James Horsburgh had mentioned the red cliffs in Horsburgh 1836, 1: 176–7.
5
CD had received the account of the Scottish physician James Brands Allan from John Grant Malcolmson (see Correspondence vol. 2, letter from J. G. Malcolmson, 7 October 1839).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10819,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10819