WCP2479

Letter (WCP2479.2369)

[1]1

Harlton2

Cambridge

16 December 1893

Dear Dr Wallace

I have just read your article on the erosion of lake basins3. It is excellent. The argument from the outline of a lake basin compared to that of a submerged valley is to me a new one (as you claimed it to be) and I think a striking one.

In your former paper4 there is one point on which I am not convinced. I do not feel sure about all boulder clays being tile[?]. I have boulder clay within5 half a mile of my house. The stones I pick up seem to me better explained by floating ice from a long stretch of [2] cliff than by an ice sheet. I have in former years worked a good deal in Norfolk and Suffolk & am incli[ined] to the iceberg theory for the glacial phenomena of this[?] district. I think no one doubted this till James Geikie6 came down [1 word illeg] from the scotch tile[?] & turned our heads.

Unfortunately I made a mistake in a numerical value I took out of Thomson & Tait7 for my paper on Darwin's8 theory of the Genesis of [1 word illeg] Moon9 & afterwards referred to[?] in a paper in the Amer[ican]. Journ[al]. [of] Science10. I am writing a short apology11. for the latter and I intend to insert something like the enclosed in it. Will you kindly tell me what you think of the argument.

Becker12 fell foul of my theory [3]13 about dissolvent[?] gas in the magma14 referring to your article in the Fortnightly15. He says it is founded on a mistake but does not say what the mistake is. I know however from a private letter from him what he means & I am by no means sure the mistake is not his. If what he asserts is true there could be no such thing as a water barometer.

Believe me | Sincerely yours | Osmond Fisher16 [signature] [4]17, 18

1
Text in another hand in the top right corner reads "316".
2
Fisher was a tutor at Jesus College Cambridge, and from 1867 lived at Harlton. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
3
Wallace. A. R. (1893). The Ice Age and its work. II Erosion of Lake Basins. Fortnightly Review, 54, (n.s.; 60, o.s.): 750-774, (1 December 1893: no. 324 n.s.).
4
Wallace. A. R. (1893). The Ice Age and its work. I. Erratic Blocks and Ice-sheets. Fortnightly Review, 54, (n.s.; 60, o.s.): 616-633, (1 November 1893: no. 323 n.s.)
5
The text "boulder clays being tile" and "boulder clay within" is underlined in pencil in another hand.
6
Geikie, James Murdoch (1839-1915). Scottish geologist. In 1882 he was appointed director-general of the geological survey and moved from Edinburgh to London. He upheld the importance of land ice, as opposed to pack ice and icebergs. ODNB and Wikipedia.
7
Thomson, Sir William, and Tait, Peter Guthrie. (1867). Treatise on Natural Philiosophy. Oxford, Clarendon Press. xxiii, 727pp.
8
Darwin, Sir George Howard (1845-1912). Mathematician and geophysicist, son of Charles Darwin. ODNB.
9

George Darwin first proposed the fission theory of moon formation. He speculated that the moon's mass had been ejected from a fluid and rapidly spinning protoearth when centrifugal force and solar tides, acting on matter in the earth's equatorial plane, exceeded the force of gravity. In time, the moon moved out to its present orbit and attained its coincident period of rotation and revolution as a result of tidal interactions between the two bodies. H. Darwin, "On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid," Nature,Vol. 18, 1878, pp. 580-582. <http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4210/pages/App_A.htm> [accessed 19 August 2015].

In 1892, the Rev. Osmond Fisher suggested that the Pacific Basin marked the point of this separation, and that this material, having been drawn from the earth's mantle, explained the lower density of the moon. Fisher, Osmond. (1892). On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins. Nature, January 12, 1892, and, Communication, Hypothesis of a Liquid Condition of the Earth's Interior Considered in Connexion with Professor Darwin's Theory of the Genesis of the Moon. Cambridge Philosophical Society Proceedings, Vol. 7, 1892, p. 335. <http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4210/pages/App_A.htm> [accessed 19 August 2015].

10
The American Journal of Science (AJS) is the United States of America's longest-running scientific journal, first published in 1818 by Professor Benjamin Silliman who edited and financed it himself. Wikipedia.
11
Possibly the paper was, Fisher, Rev. Osmond. (1893). Rigidity not to be relied upon in estimating the Earth's Age. American Journal of Science, 3rd series, 45, 464-468.
12
Becker, G. F. (1893). Fisher's new hypothesis. American Journal of Science, 3rd series, 46, 137-139. <ajsonline.org> [accessed 19 August 2015].
13
Text in another hand in the top right corner reads "317".
14
Fisher regarded volcanic gases as origial contituents of magma. Sigurdsson, H. et al. (2015). The Encyclopedia of Volcanoes. Elsevier, 1456 pp. [p. 31].
15
The Fortnightly Review was an influential English-language periodical started by Anthony Trollope and designed to free journalists from the views of an editor or political party. The first issue appeared on 15 May 1865. <fortnightlyreview.co.uk> [accessed 20 August 2015].
16
Fisher, Osmond, Reverend (1817-1914). Church of England clergyman, geologist and geophysicist. ODBN.
17

Text in another hand in the top fourth of the page reads

"p.1 foot[?] — [1 word illeg] mean wholly covered ?

18
There is a British Museum stamp mark in red ink in the middle of the page.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP2479.2369)]

For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon

Revision history

Transcribed by Ghosh, Susan [2018-08-15]

Please cite as “WCP2479,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP2479