From John Lubbock   28 September [1867]¹

The year is established by the reference to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Dundee (see n. 4, below).

Lubbock refers to Robert Grant Haliburton and a paper discussing superstitions connected with sneezing as a proof of the unity of origin of the human race (Haliburton 1863; CD’s copy is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL; see also Correspondence vol. 11, letter to J. D. Hooker, 23 [June 1863] and n. 8). Lubbock evidently sent CD a copy of a paper, later published in Transactions of the Ethnological Society, in which he discussed Haliburton 1863 (Lubbock 1867; CD’s annotated copy of an offprint of this article is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL). In his paper, Lubbock argued that the existence of similar ideas in distant countries owed its origin not to humans having once lived all in close association with one another, as Haliburton suggested, but rather to ‘the original identity of the human mind’ (see Lubbock 1867, p. 341).

According to Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242), CD had recently been unwell with eczema (see also letter from H. B. Jones to Emma Darwin, 1 October [1867]). CD was correcting proof-sheets of Variation; he had recently reported that he had almost finished the first proofs and planned to start work on the second proofs at the beginning of October (see letter to J. V. Carus, 16 September 1867).

The British Association held its annual meeting for 1867 at Dundee from 4 to 11 September 1867 (Report of the thirty-seventh meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Dundee, p. lxxiii). The Orkneys and Shetlands are groups of islands in the North Sea, off the north coast of Scotland.