From Hugh Falconer   25 October and 12 November [1859]

My Dear Darwin

It is a full year since we met—or since any friendly missive has passed between us—and strange to say, I am the party this time to break silence and speak the foremost word. I have been dying like all the world besides to see your book upon species out, and think a slight dose of hanging might be administered to John Murray—with much advantage, for keeping it back so long. I met your brother at the Athenæum, a few days ago—and learnt from him, that the book is fairly out of your hands—and that you were still in Yorkshire.

Apropos to species, I have lately been occupied with a case, that ought to have some interest for you. In a newly explored cave in South Wales, we have come upon no fewer than 800 eight hundred antlers of Deer 95 per cent of them shed horns and nearly the same ratio of young animals.¹ The variety in form is so great, that had only one or two of each of the most marked types been met with, they would have been described most probably as distinct species. But when the 800 are spread out, the passage from the one into the other is so easily traced, that there is no making out well marked distinctions between them.

Now they all—or at any rate the greater part of them—belong to the Rein-Deer of the Glacial period in England: and some of the horns differ in the most remarkable manner from any form of the modern Rein Deer, that I have been able to get at, either in figures—or in the London Collection. Would it not be nicely to your hand to investigate whether the characters of the species have remained persistent, from the older time down to the present day—or if modified now, what amount of change has taken place during the long lapse of ages, and what direction it has mainly taken? The inquiry would make a pretty pendant to the case of those dreadful pidgeons, upon which you have been practising such tricks of leger-de-main.²

I am still very weak in the bronchiæ and ought to have gone abroad before now—but I have been hanging on—never having felt so reluctant to leave England, or the neighbourhood of London even, as I have a good deal to do with arrears of late work.³ You know what a start the question of the relative antiquity of man has made within the last twelvemonth. Lyell has forgotten all his prudence and thrown himself head long into the bosom of two heresies—the transmutation of species, and glacial homo.⁴ You are answerable for the one—and I have had a little to do in starting the [scent] of the other.

With kind regards | Yours very sinc^ly | H. Falconer Ch^as. Darwin Esq^re.

12^th Nov^r

P.S. Your note of yesterday just came to hand, & I have sent for the book—the wicked book which you have been so long a-hatching.⁵

The accompanying note has remained undespatched—to complete the address.⁶

On Monday I leave for Torquay where I have taken a house for the winter en famille with two of my nieces—instead of fleeing abroad.

With kind regards to M^rs. Darwin | Yours Ever Sinc^ly | H Falconer