Ɛpsilon

From M. C. Stanley   24 May 1878

23. St. James’s Square. | S.W.

May 24/78

Dear Mr. Darwin

My brother who has just returned from S. America has brought from the River Plate the accompanying fragment of bone from a fish’s head called Corbin; he is very anxious to know if it ever came under your notice.1 There are two of these bony substances in the head of every fish. Fibrous threads diverge from the rough part in to interior— As if this substance were the covering of the brain!.2 if one can venture to speak of the brain of a fish:

Forgive me for troubling you & for daring to suppose I am mentioning any thing that can be new to you.—

Believe me | Yrs Very sincerely | M C Derby

1
Lionel Sackville Sackville-West had been British envoy at Buenos Aires from 1873 until January 1878 (ODNB). The Río de la Plata (River Plate) is an estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers; it forms part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay (Columbia gazetteer of the world). The bone fragment has not been found; the fish was probably Micropogonias furnieri (whitemouth croaker), known locally as corvina.
2
Sackville-West’s bone fragment was probably from an immature fish. In teleost or bony fishes, ossification of the bones occurs differentially, with those bones subject to greater stress being the first to ossify. For more on the sequence of ossification in the neurocranium of Micropogonias furnieri from larval to adult stages, see Jardim and Santos 1994.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11528,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11528