Ɛpsilon

To G. G. Stokes   28 April 1878

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

April 28th 1878

Sir

I cannot venture to express any decided opinion whether Prof. Haughton’s paper is worth publishing in the Proceedings.1 It is desirable that geologists, who are now freely speculating about the displacement of the Poles, should see that if this be granted the presence of tropical & sub-tropical remains in the Arctic regions is not thus easily explained; & in so far Prof. Haughtons paper might be advantageously published. On the other hand the estimation of geological time is to the best of my judgment extremely wild: it is assumed that we have discovered the oldest sedimentary beds containing fossils: no allowance is made for great breaks in the series, as between the Cretaceous & Tertiary formations: towards the close of the paper it apparently is assumed that sediment is deposited over the bed of the whole Ocean; & various other objections could be raised. The conclusion which follows from his estimate, namely that a greater interval of time separates us from the miocene epoch than that between the commencement of the Secondary period & the miocene, seems almost monstrous, & is strongly opposed by other evidence.—2

I cannot but doubt whether this part of the paper is worth printing; though as a general rule it seems to me desirable that the views of an author who has studied any subject should be judged by the general public

Sir | Your obedient servt | Ch. Darwin

To the Sec. | R. Society

P.S. | On still further reflexion, so many objections & difficulties arise, which if they could be answered, anyhow are not noticed in the paper, that I am inclined to advise that the paper shd not be published in its present form. The subject seems to require much fuller elaboration.—

C.D.

1
Samuel Haughton’s paper, ‘Notes on physical geology’, was read at the Royal Society of London on 4 April 1878 (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 27 (1878): 291). It was not published in the Proceedings of the society, but did appear under the title ‘Physical geology’ in Nature, 4 July 1878, pp. 266–8. George Howard Darwin had considered earlier work by Haughton to be ‘utter rubbish’ (see letter from G. H. Darwin, 28 January 1878.
2
In Nature, 4 July 1878, p. 268, Haughton did not alter his statement that the sediments from the denudation of land were uniformly spread across the ocean floors. This assumption, together with his debatable estimate of strata thickness, would have given a time scale of 1.5 billion years, but Houghton arbitrarily reduced this by a factor of ten to conclude that the whole duration of geological time was a minimum of 200 million years (ibid.; Burchfield 1990, pp. 101–2).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

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Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11488,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11488