My dear Sir.

Your letter has pleased me very much. & I truly feel it an honour that any thing which I wrote on the drift &^c. should have been of the least use or interest to you.— Pray make any use of my letter; I forget whether it was written carefully or clearly, so pray touch up any passages that you may think fit to quote—¹

All that I have seen since near Southampton & elsewhere has strengthened my notion— Here I live on a Chalk platform gently sloping down from the edge of the escarpment to the S. (which is about 800 f^t in height.) to beneath the tertiary beds to the north— The beds of the large & broad valleys (& only of these) are covered with an immense mass of closely packed broken & angular flints; in which mass the skull of the Musk Ox & wooly elephant have been found—² This great accumulation of unworn flints must therefore have been made when the climate was cold, & I believe it can be accounted for by the larger valleys having been filled up to a great depth during a large part of the year with drifted frozen snow—over which rubbish from the upper parts of the platforms was washed by the summer rains—sometimes along one line & sometimes along another; or in channels cut through the snow all along the main course of the broad valleys.³

I suppose that I formerly mentioned to you the frequent upright position of elongated flints in the red Clayey residue over the chalk, which residue gradually subsides into the troughs & pipes corroded in the solid chalk— This letter is very untidy, but I am tired—

Pray believe me, My dear Sir. | Yours sincerely. | Ch: Darwin.

P.S. | Several palæolithic celts⁴ have recently been found in the great angular gravel-bed near Southampton in several places—