Ɛpsilon

To Daniel Mackintosh   21 December 18801

Down, Beckenham, Kent,

[A letter on botanical matters … writes to thank the recipient for his ‘… interesting letter.2 I write now to send you an article, I just received from J. [Geikie], which may interest you & may be returned at your leisure.’3 Perhaps referring to a botanical experiment, he continues: ‘You will see that it is important to know whether the laminae of slate has ever been bent up-hill.’4]

incomplete5

1
The date is given in the sales catalogue. The correspondent has been identified by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 24 December 1880.
2
The letter from Mackintosh has not been found, but see the letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 21 November 1880. The subject matter was geological rather than botanical. In geology, laminae are layers of rock; in botany, they are leaf blades (see n. 4, below).
3
CD had mentioned Mackintosh’s paper on drift-deposits (Mackintosh 1879) to James Geikie in a letter of 13 December 1880. Geikie was not convinced by Mackintosh’s view that the intercrossing of erratic boulders was a result of changes in sea level; he sent CD a paper by Washington Carruthers Kerr in which Kerr proposed that the uplift of slaty rocks was caused by a phenomenon he called ‘frost drift’ (Kerr 1880; see letter from James Geikie, 20 December 1880). CD sent the paper to Mackintosh (letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 24 December 1880).
4
CD evidently thought that the bending of laminae, or thin layers of rock, resulted from the process of alternate freezing and thawing that Kerr described as ‘frost drift’ (see n. 3 above).
5
The original letter is complete and is described in the sale catalogue as being one page long.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12930F,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12930F