To Edward Blyth   10 December [1866]1

Down Bromley Kent

Dec. 10th

My dear Mr Blyth

I hope that you will forgive me troubling you; when I had the very agreeable walk with you at Zoolog. Gardens,2 you said that you shd. give in “Land & Water” case of tame deer in Isd. of Aral sea.— I have carefully looked in vain for this account.3

Will you have the kindness to give the Vol. year & page in Geograph. Journal, where I can find this account & oblige me much?4

Believe me | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin

1
The year is established by the reference to Blyth’s article in Land and Water (see n. 3, below).
2
CD had been in London from 22 until 29 November 1866 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)); he refers to the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park.
3
Blyth’s notice on the ‘tame deer’ (see n. 4, below) appeared in Land and Water, 15 December 1866, p. 495, under the pseudonym ‘Zoophilus’, which he used for his contributions to the paper. The Aral Sea, which is an inland sea or salt lake, is in central Asia in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
4
The reference is to the account of tame saigas (Saiga tatarica) by Aleksey Ivanovich Butakoff in his ‘Survey of the Sea of Aral’, published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (Butakoff 1852, pp. 94–5).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-4950,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-4950