Ɛpsilon

To A. C. Ramsay   7 April [1848]

Down Farnborough Kent

April 7th

Dear Ramsay

Would you be so kind as to inform me, as you will probably know, or perhaps would be so good as to look at the Ordnance Maps, what is the height of Moel Tryfan in Carenarvonshire situated in a line nearly between Snowdon & Caernarvon.1 This hill has been repeatedly mentioned, since Mr Trimmers important discovery2 & no two authors give the same height: in my notice on this hill, I give a very much less height than others & I cannot for the life of me remember on what authority, though I know I took some pains to ascertain.3 I shd be very much obliged for an answer pretty soon, if you can so far oblige me.

Yours sincerely | C. Darwin

1
CD sought this information for use in his paper, ‘On the transportal of erratic boulders’, read on 19 April 1848 (Collected papers 1: 218–27).
2
Joshua Trimmer discovered broken fragments of marine shells in diluvial sand and gravel ‘1000 ft above the level of the sea on the summit of Moel Tryfan’ (Trimmer 1831, p. 331). Referring to Trimmer’s discovery, CD stated that the beds which included the shells were undoubtedly ‘deposited in the ordinary manner under the sea’ (Collected papers 1: 223).
3
Trimmer had originally given the height as 1000 ft (see n. 2, above). In ‘Notes on the effects produced by the ancient glaciers of Caernarvonshire’ (Collected papers 1: 167), CD gave the height as 1192 ft, but he cited as his source Murchison 1839, 2: 528, where the height is given as 1692 ft. In ‘On the transportal of erratic boulders’, the height is recorded as 1392 ft (Collected papers 1: 219).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.3 situated] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1168,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1168