Ɛpsilon

To Charles Lyell   3 July [1849]

Down Farnborough Kent

July 3d.

My dear Lyell

As I know you are particular in accuracy even to minutest point, I send one line to say that you speak of Megatherium having been found as far South as 50o. 1 I never found it further than 39o. & I do not think that Sulivan found Megatherium, in southern Patagonia.—2

It appeared to me that there was either misplaced or omitted words in two places but these you would certainly observe in correcting for 2d Edit;3 I may just mention that one was in 2d. Vol about the diameter of a great Equatorial telescope;4 & the other was in 1st. vol about oxygen & anthracite which I cd. not at all understand.—5 I cannot give pages for I left my copy at Malvern with the Wedgwoods. I finished it before leaving & a most interesting work it is— I don’t know when I have read a book so interesting: some of your stories are very rich.—

You ought to be made Minister of Public Education; not but what I shd. think even that beneath the Author of the Old Principles.— Your Book must, I shd. think, do a great deal of good & set people thinking. I quite agree with Athenæum6 that you have shown how a man of Science can bring his power’s of observation on Social Subjects.— You have made H. Wedgwood, heart & soul, an American; he wishes the States would annex us, & was all day marvelling how anyone, who could pay his passage-money, was so foolish as to remain here.—

I wish Lady Lyell & yourself a most pleasant summer. | Yours | C. Darwin

1
C. Lyell 1849, 1: 349.
2
See South America, p. 105. CD’s specimen was found at Punta Alta, near Rio Negro, Patagonia. Bartholomew James Sulivan had found fossils at Rio Gallegos in Southern Patagonia (see Correspondence vol. 3, letter from B. J. Sulivan, 13 January – 12 February 1845), but no mention is made of Megatherium in CD’s account (South America, p. 117). Richard Owen had not finished examining the specimens by the time South America went to press (October 1846), but he had identified ‘some large, but mostly small, species of Pachydermata, Edentata and Rodentia’.
3
No second edition of C. Lyell 1849 was published.
4
C. Lyell 1849, 2: 294, in which Lyell remarked that there was an equatorial telescope with a diameter of 17 feet 12 inches, a mistake for 18 feet.
5
A reference to Lyell’s description of natural anthracite deposits in Virginia, to the east of the Appalachian Mountains. He suggested that former beds of coal had been converted into coke as a result of nearby volcanic rocks having driven off all the gaseous matter (C. Lyell 1849, 2: 286).
6
A review of C. Lyell 1849 appeared in the Athenæum, no. 1130, 23 June 1849, pp. 640–2.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

2.2 you] over ‘wd’
3.5 on] over ‘to’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-1248,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-1248