Ɛpsilon

From W. S. Dallas   23 January 1879

Geological Society, Somerset House.

Jan. 23. 1879

My dear Sir

I have looked & enquired for the paper in the Quarterly Journal referred to by you but cannot find it.—1 Duncan thought it must be in a paper by Tylor on changes of Sea levels but I find nothing on the subject of Coral islands.—2 Semper’s reference to the matter is most likely in his book on the Philippine Islands, but I cannot say positively as I am not acquainted with the book—3 Or he may have published a paper in the Senckenbergische Berichte,4 or in Wiegmann’s Archiv,5 but I do not remember such a paper in those numbers which I have seen,— or possibly in the Journal des Museum Godeffroy.—6 I am very sorry that I can give you no more satisfaction, but if you are still in difficulty I will do what I can in searching for your desiderata as soon as this month is fairly out.—

With kind regards | Believe me | Yours very truly | W. S. Dallas.

C. Darwin Esq

1
CD’s letter to Dallas has not been found, and the query has not been identified. Dallas was assistant secretary to the Geological Society of London.
2
Peter Martin Duncan was a former secretary and president of the Geological Society. Alfred Tylor had published a paper on sea-level changes in 1853 in the Philosophical Magazine (Tylor 1853); only an abstract appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (Tylor 1852).
3
Carl Gottfried Semper discussed coral reefs in his Die Philippinen und ihre Bewohner (The Philippines and their inhabitants; Semper 1869, pp. 19–24 and 99–109). He first took issue with CD’s theory of the formation of coral reefs in Semper 1863, pp. 565–9. For an summary of his views in English, see Annals and Magazine of Natural History 4th ser. 1 (1868): 486–7.
4
Bericht über die Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Frankfurt am Main.
5
The Archiv für Naturgeschichte, first edited by Arend Friedrich August Wiegmann.
6
The Museum Godeffroy was a museum in Hamburg, Germany; Semper did not write for its Journal, but it held material from the animal class Holothuroidea (sea cucumbers) collected by him.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11843,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11843