WCP2074

[1]¹

53. Harley St.

22^[n]d May [1864]²

My dear Sir

I have been reading with great interest your paper on the origin of the Races of Man, in which I think the question between the two opposite parties is put with such admirable clearness & fairness that that alone is no small assistance towards clearing the way to a true theory.³ The manner in which you have given Darwin⁴ the whole credit of the Theory of Natural Selection is very [2] handsome, but if anyone else had done it without allusion to your papers it would have been wrong.

At p. 2 you speak of the mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley as belonging to the infancy of the human race. But the position of their mounds bears the same relation to the gravel terraces of the same Mississippi & Ohio valleys containing extinct mammalia as the Roman tombs bear to the implement-bearing & mammoth-bearing gravels of St Acheul.⁵

[3] The antiquity of the mounds cannot be greater than the lake-dwellings of Switzerland of the stone-period. —

But your argument is not affected by this because I believe the Engis Skull⁶ which is so well developed to be as old as the extinct mammalia.

But I do not see any necessity to go back to the Miocene time for the speechless progenitor of Man, because without getting back to the glacial period you have many tens of thousands of years & then possible thousands [4] of centuries for that period without getting back to a very appreciable per-centage [sic] of extinct mollusca. At this rate of change if you want some millions of years you may take them without getting beyond Pliocene limits. It will be time when we find a stratum in which one tenth of the shells are extinct and in which the nearest representation of Man has still a well-developed brain to begin to look so far back as the older Pliocene for a progenitor with a cerebral development approaching that of the Gorilla.

[5]⁷There is I think a want of appreciation in this part of your reasoning of the immensity of time at our disposal without going back beyond the Newer Pliocene ages. We cannot prove our caves containing human skulls to belong to the earliest part even of the Post Pliocene. It seems that the African & Indian elephants coexist with those extinct species which were contemporary with Man, which inclines me to believe with Pictet⁸ that the quadrupeds may not have changed [6] since the Amiens flint-tool period, only some species have been extirpated partly to make room for man.

The reading of your paper makes one feel the want of such facts as I hope the Borneo caves may disclose.

With many thanks for your most admirable paper.

believe me | my dear sir | ever very truly yours | Cha Lyell [signature]