From B. J. Sulivan   23 January 1872

Bournemouth

Jany 23/72

My dear Darwin

I think you would like to see a Photo of Philip King that he has sent me recently. I have sent it to Mellersh who will forward it to you.1

It makes one feel old indeed to see one we thought so juvenile with a white beard. I have heard nothing for some time from our old shipmates except Hamond2

Very recent accounts from Beagle Channel say all is going on most favorably3   The natives “docile”—and “learning”.

I see that Professor Aggasis is going on a scientific voyage and will call at Falklands.4 Do you think it would be advisable for me to write to him about the Gallegos Fossil bed.5 If he could go there & make a good collection it would perhaps produce many new species— You I suppose know him   if so and you think it worth writing to him about perhaps you would so and I would send you particulars as to position &c to inclose. a letter to Falklands by the mail of Feby. 8th. would I think meet him there.

I went to College of Surgeons the other day   I found the Curator knew nothing about the fossils. we had difficulty in finding one or two of those that had been worked out & the casks of stones not touched when I saw them years after they came home, are now known nothing of, & we could not find them.6

With our kind regards to Mrs. Darwin & all your party | Believe me very sincerely yours | B J Sulivan

1
Philip Gidley King was midshipman on the Beagle between 1831 and 1836 (Aust. dict. biog.). Arthur Mellersh was midshipman and mate on the Beagle between 1825 and 1836 (Modern English biography). Sulivan was lieutenant on the Beagle between 1831 and 1836 (ODNB).
2
Robert Nicholas Hamond was midshipman on the Beagle from 1832 to 1833 (O’Byrne 1849).
3
Sulivan was a member of the South American Mission Society (see Correspondence vol. 18, letter from B. J. Sulivan, 1 July 1870).
4
Louis Agassiz embarked on a voyage on the Hassler, an experimental steamship of the United States Coast Survey, in December 1871, intending to pass through the Straits of Magellan; the expedition arrived in San Francisco in August 1872 (Marcou 1896, 2: 182–91; Lurie 1960, pp. 371–7). He had hoped to investigate the ‘rivers of stone’ in the Falkland Islands, which he thought might be due to glacial action, but was prevented from visiting the Falklands and some other sites owing to bad weather and defective machinery on the ship (E. C. Agassiz 1885, 2: 695, 711). The ‘American deep-sea exploring expedition’ was reported in The Times, 12 January 1872, p. 6.
5
Sulivan had collected mammalian fossils at the Gallegos river in Argentina in 1845 (see Correspondence vol. 3, letters from B. J. Sulivan, 13 January – 12 February 1845 and 4 July 1845). A later expedition recommended by CD had found more (Correspondence vol. 17, letter from T. H. Huxley, 7 May 1869). For more on Sulivan’s discovery, see Brinkman 2003.
6
William Henry Flower was curator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (ODNB). Two of Sulivan’s fossils were at the British Museum (Nesodon ovinus; Catalogue of the fossil Mammalia in the British Museum (Natural History) 3: 168), and one was recorded at the Royal College of Surgeons (Nesodon imbricatus; Flower 1879–91, 2: 436). See also Owen 1853.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-8175,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-8175