Ɛpsilon

To Charles Henry Middleton   20 [1867?]1

Down Bromley Kent

20th

Dear Sir

I am very sorry that I can give you no information. I cannot remember where S. Filippe is & have no good charts of coast of Chile.2 Guano might be accumulated in extreme N. part of coast of Chile, but I never heard of any.—3

I confess that I cannot believe that the bones of the ox, sheep & Horse could have been deposited in Guano.—

Nevertheless the Bones would of course be worth examination.— I am sorry that I can give no information & beg leave to remain | Dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | C. Darwin

1
The month and year are conjectured on the basis of the letter’s being pasted into Middleton’s copy of the fourth edition of Origin, which was published in November 1866; the year 1867 is on Middleton’s book plate, which is inside the front cover.
2
No letter from Middleton has been found. Middleton may have asked about San Felipe, an inland city north of Santiago, Chile; CD mentioned the city in Journal of researches, pp. 311, 316. There was also a sixteenth-century settlement on the south coast of the Strait of Magellan called San Felipe; it was later renamed Port Famine (Puerto del Hambre). CD mentioned Port Famine in ibid., p. 264, and in South America, pp. 151–2, 156.
3
Extensive deposits of guano in Peru, north of Chile, contributed to the mid-nineteenth-century guano trade between Peru and Britain, where the seabird excrement was used as fertiliser (see Mathew 1981). The climate of northern Chile is hot and dry, like that of Peru, and therefore conducive to guano deposition; guano was also exported from Chile (EB).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-5341,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-5341