Ɛpsilon

WCP3353

Letter (WCP3353.3321)

[1]

9, St. Mark’s Crescent

Regent's Park, N.W.

March 14th. 1870

James Croll Esq.

Dear Sir

I must apologise for not having written before to thank you for having kindly sent me copies of some of your papers. The last one on The Old River Channels was exceedingly interesting.1

You will see that I have made use of your tables of Excentricity in a paper in the "Nature",2 and if you have still any copies of the papers containing [2] those tables,3 I should much like to have them, for though I have a very scanty practical acquaintance with Geology, I am exceedingly interested in all the wider problems with which it deals, and one group of which you have done so much to elucidate.

I remain | Dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]

[3]

P.S. Address after March 22nd.

Holly House, Tanner Street

Barking, London. E.

1
Croll, J. 1870. On Two River Channels Buried Under Drift, Belonging to a Period when the Land Stood Several Hundred Feet Higher than at Present. Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society, 1(3), 330-345.
2
Wallace, A. R. 1870. The Measurement of Geological Time. I. Nature 1: 399-401 (17 Feb. 1870) / II. Nature 1: 452-455 (3 March 1870).
3
ARW refers to Croll's tables of the excentricity of the Earth's orbit in his papers 'On the Excentricity of the Earth's Orbit' (1867) and 'Date of the Glacial and the Upper Miocene Period' (1868). See Croll, J. 1867. On the Excentricity of the Earth's Orbit, and its Physical Relations to the Glacial Epoch, Philosophical Magazine. 4, 33:221, 119-131; Croll, J. 1868. On Geological Time, and the Probable Date of the Glacial and the Upper Miocene Period. Philosophical Magazine. 36(244), 362-386.

Editorial information

Status: Edited (but not proofed) transcription [Letter (WCP3353.3321)]

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

Revision history

Transcribed by Lester, Ahren [2013-02-08] Transcription checked by Beros, Matt [2020-03-19] Transcription checked by Chua, Christine [2026-04-18]

Published letter (WCP3353.6819)

[1]1 [p. 247]

9 St. Mark's Cres., Regent's Park, N.W.,

14th March 1870.

James Croll, Esq.

My dear Sir,— I must apologise for not having written before to thank you for having kindly sent me copies of some of your papers. The last one on "The Old River Channels" was exceedingly interesting.

You will see that I have made use of your tables of eccentricity in a paper in Nature; and if you have still any copies of the papers containing those tables, I should much like to have them, for though I have a very scanty practical acquaintance with geology, I am exceedingly interested in all the wider problems with which it deals, and one group of which you have done so much to elucidate.— I remain, dear sir, yours very faithfully,

Alfred R. Wallace.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Published letter (WCP3353.6819)]

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

Revision history

Transcribed by Smith, Charles Hyde [2020-08-13]

Please cite as “WCP3353,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3353