Ɛpsilon

To Richard Owen   25 August [1841–2]1

12 Upper Gower St

Aug 25th—.

My dear Owen

I remember showing you some time ago the accompanying old tooth of Elephant from African coast & I have some faint recollection, that you said you would like to have it from its state of decay.— if not please throw it away.

I saw some weeks since at Mr. Shillinglaw’s2 at the Geographical Soc. a piece of a tusk of a Mastodon or Elephant, from Upper Peru.— Does not Cuvier enter into long discussion on a piece of tusk brought by Humboldt from S. America, doubting whether it belonged to an elephant—3 Would this be worth your looking at for that end.—4

Your’s very truly | C. Darwin

1
CD resided in Upper Gower Street from January 1839 to September 1842; however, according to his ‘Journal’ (Correspondence vol. 2, Appendix II) he was not in London on 25 August in 1839 or 1840.
2
Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society (Mill 1930, p. 56).
3
Cuvier initially considered the tusk evidence for the existence of true fossil elephants in South America (Cuvier 1806, p. 57). He later seems to have concluded that other fossil remains in South America were exclusively from mastodons (Cuvier 1821–4, 1: 266–8).
4
Owen discussed elephant and mastodon teeth and tusks at some length in Owen 1840–5, 1: 613–55.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.1 the] ‘e’ over ‘is’
1.1 accompanying] interl
2.2 a Mastodon] ‘a’ over ‘an’
point omitted after : 1.2 ‘Elephant’; 2.3 ‘long’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-608,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-608