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From E. B. Tylor   4 May 1875

Linden | Wellington Som.

May 4 1875.

My dear Sir

My brother, who lives at Carshalton, writes to me that he would much like to bring Lord Young (the late Lord Advocate, who framed the excellent Scotch Education Act) to call on you on Saturday morning.1 As of course he would not like to do so unless he knew it would not be burdensome to you, he asks me to enquire. I shall be staying with my brother, but even if their visit is acceptable, I think I had better not make a third. May I then ask you for a note to care of Alfred Tylor, Shepley House, Carshalton.2

My brother does not say whether he has any geological object in view. Geologists seem to take more kindly now to the theory he has been preaching for so many years of what he calls a “pluvial period” of heavy rainfall during which the excavation of valleys went on far more rapidly than now.3

Believe me Dear Sir | Yours very truly | Edward B. Tylor

Charles Darwin Esq

1
George Young visited CD and had lunch at Down House on 8 May 1875 (see letter to J. B. Innes, 10 May [1875]); presumably he was accompanied by Alfred Tylor. Young served as lord advocate of Scotland from 1869 to 1874; he established a national system of publicly funded compulsory elementary education in Scotland with the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act in 1872 (ODNB).
2
This letter has not been found.
3
At a meeting of the Geological Society of London in 1852, Alfred Tylor had first expounded his theory that sea-level changes and denudation required a sustained period of increased rainfall (a pluvial period); opposition to his views resulted in the removal of any reference to a pluvial period from the abstract published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (Tylor 1852), but his views appeared in full in the version of his paper published in the Philosophical Magazine (Tylor 1853). Tylor again encountered opposition to his views at the Geological Society in 1868 when he explained post-glacial river-gravel deposits in terms of his pluvial theory (Tylor 1867, 1868a, 1868b, 1868c), and further argued that the erosion of valleys was more rapid when they had large, swiftly moving rivers flowing through them as a consequence of higher than normal rainfall. By 1872, other geologists had begun to argue that rainfall in the post-glacial period must have been heavier than in modern times (see Correspondence vol. 20, letter from Alfred Tylor, 8 June 1872 and n. 3), and Tylor published a full version of his paper on the formation of deltas (which had appeared only as an abstract in 1868 (Tylor 1868c)), together with an appendix outlining his view of the disputes surrounding it (Tylor 1872).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-9971,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-9971