Ɛpsilon

From William Boyd Dawkins   29 January [1870]1

R. S. Evans Esq,2 | Belvedere Park, Lessness Heath | Kent.

29. Jan 1869.

My dear Sir,

I just write you a line about the skeletons in the Cave at Perth y chwari near Corwen, because I have lighted on a fact of considerable ethnological value. The human skulls are indisputably of the River-bed type (of Huxley),3 the tibiæ are strongly platycnemic,4 and thus the bandy-legged-ness of the River-bed race is established. The bandy-legged race occurs in Algeria, S. France, & Spain, as well as in the laterite of India (.— Last year Dr Oldham5 sent me a scrap big enough to swear by.) and now must be extended to Britain. I believe that once they occupied a large portion of Europe. Busk and I are laying our heads together, and I think that we shall make something out of the investigation.6 At Easter I am to have another dig in Denbigh, and after that the Craven caves are in hand as you will see by the enclosed.7

Wishing you a happy new year, I am Dear Sir | Yours truly | W. Boyd Dawkins

Charles Darwin Esq.

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from W. B. Dawkins, 19 October 1869 (Correspondence vol. 17). Dawkins must have written ‘1869’ in error.
2
Robert Speke Evans was Dawkins’s father-in-law.
3
Thomas Henry Huxley had noticed common features in prehistoric skulls found mainly in river-bed sites in Britain and Ireland (T. H. Huxley 1862).
4
Platycnemia: flattening of the tibia (OED).
6
George Busk and Dawkins described the human remains at Perthichwareu in the Journal of the Ethnological Society (Dawkins and Busk 1870).
7
The Craven caves are near Settle, North Yorkshire. The enclosure has not been found, but probably related to the formation of a committee to undertake the exploration of the caves, beginning with the Victoria Cave; Dawkins made a preliminary report in Nature, 21 April 1870, pp. 628–9. On Dawkins’s research on the platycnemic bones, see also Lucas 2007.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-6582,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-6582