To E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung   27 March [1867]¹

The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 22 March 1867 (Correspondence vol. 15).

In his letter of 22 March 1867, Christian Friedrich Schweizerbart had asked whether CD had any preferences about which photograph of him was reproduced in the German translation of Origin 4th ed. (Bronn and Carus trans. 1867).

Schweizerbart wanted John Murray to provide stereotypes of the woodcuts in Variation.

See Correspondence vol. 15, letter from J. V. Carus, 11 February 1867, and letter to J. V. Carus, 17 February [1867]. Julius Victor Carus was CD’s German translator. In 1864, John William Dawson identified samples taken from pre-Silurian strata in eastern Canada as fossilised Foraminifera, single-celled protists with shells; he named the species Eozoon canadense, the ‘Dawn animal from Canada’ (Dawson 1864). Further samples were sent to William Benjamin Carpenter, an expert on Foraminifera, who confirmed Dawson’s interpretation (Carpenter 1864a). CD added information on the discovery of Eozoon canadense to Origin 4th ed., p. 371, as substantiating his claim, made in Origin, p. 307, that life existed before the Silurian period. The interpretation of the samples as pre-Silurian fossils remained controversial, however (see, for example, Carpenter 1866, and King and Rowney 1866); and by the end of the century, comparisons with similar, more recent, formations indicated that the samples were mineral in origin (see Schopf 2000).