Ɛpsilon

To Daniel Mackintosh   16 October 1879

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

Oct 16. 79

Dear Sir,

You are quite welcome to show my letter to the secretaries, as it gives my deliberate conviction; but I beg you to say that it was written without the least notion that any one would see it except yourself, so probably it is badly expressed.1 It has pleased me much that my old paper should have stimulated you to such excellent work.2 If in any future papers you use the expression of ‘overshot loads’, I think you ought to explain your meaning rather more fully, for I failed to feel sure about it.3

I remain, dear Sir, | Yours faithfully | Charles Darwin

LS

1
In his letter of 14 October 1879, Mackintosh had asked CD’s permission to show CD’s letter to him of 9 October 1879, praising his article on erratic boulders (Mackintosh 1879), to the secretaries of the Royal Society of London, which had given him a grant towards his research. The secretaries of the Royal Society were Thomas Henry Huxley and George Gabriel Stokes.
2
In his paper, Mackintosh had referred to CD’s ‘Ancient glaciers of Caernarvonshire’ (Mackintosh 1879, pp. 442, 448).
3
See Mackintosh 1879, p. 428. Mackintosh used the term ‘overshot boulder-loads’ to describe groups of boulders that had fallen close to each other but apparently in separate events. He did not use the term in later articles in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12259,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12259