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To Daniel Mackintosh   21 December 18801

Down, Beckenham, Kent,

[A letter on botanical matters … writes to thank the recipient for his ‘… interesting letter.2 I write now to send you an article, I just received from J. [Geikie], which may interest you & may be returned at your leisure.’3 Perhaps referring to a botanical experiment, he continues: ‘You will see that it is important to know whether the laminae of slate has ever been bent up-hill.’4]

Footnotes

1
The date is given in the sales catalogue. The correspondent has been identified by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 24 December 1880.
2
The letter from Mackintosh has not been found, but see the letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 21 November 1880. The subject matter was geological rather than botanical. In geology, laminae are layers of rock; in botany, they are leaf blades (see n. 4, below).
3
CD had mentioned Mackintosh’s paper on drift-deposits (Mackintosh 1879) to James Geikie in a letter of 13 December 1880. Geikie was not convinced by Mackintosh’s view that the intercrossing of erratic boulders was a result of changes in sea level; he sent CD a paper by Washington Carruthers Kerr in which Kerr proposed that the uplift of slaty rocks was caused by a phenomenon he called ‘frost drift’ (Kerr 1880; see letter from James Geikie, 20 December 1880). CD sent the paper to Mackintosh (letter from Daniel Mackintosh, 24 December 1880).
4
CD evidently thought that the bending of laminae, or thin layers of rock, resulted from the process of alternate freezing and thawing that Kerr described as ‘frost drift’ (see n. 3 above).

Bibliography

Kerr, Washington Caruthers. 1880. The gold gravels of North Carolina—their structure and origin. Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 8 (1879–80): 462–6.

Mackintosh, Daniel. 1879. Results of a systematic survey, in 1878, of the directions and limits of dispersion, mode of occurrence, and relation to drift-deposits of the erratic blocks or boulders of the West of England and east of Wales, including a revision of many years’ previous observations. [Read 26 March 1879.] Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 35: 425–55.

Summary

The recipient is thanked for his "interesting letter".

CD sends an article received from [James Geikie?]. "You will see that it is important to know whether the laminae of slate have ever been bent up-hill."

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-12930F
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Daniel Mackintosh
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Christie’s, New York (dealers) (9 June 1999)
Physical description
ALS ** 1p

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12930F,” accessed on 24 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12930F.xml

letter

Darwin Correspondence Project
darwin@lib.cam.ac.uk

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