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Darwin Correspondence Project

From H. W. Bates   19 December 1866

Royal Geographical Society | 15, Whitehall Place, S.W.

Decem 19th 1866

My dear Mr Darwin

On the other side is the extract you require.1 I presume “saigak” means the same as “saiga”, therefore the animals were the saiga antelope.2 The islands were new discoveries; the Kirghises of the Aral shores did not know of their existence.3

Yours sincerely | H W Bates

I am now reading Lyells 1st vol. New Ed. Principles, with intense pleasure & great profit4

Footnotes

See letter to H. W. Bates, 18 December [1866]. Bates evidently affixed a separate piece of paper with a short extract from the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (Butakoff 1852, pp. 94–5) to the verso of the letter, but the extract is now missing.
In Russian, ‘saigak’ is a slightly older variation of ‘saiga’ (Saiga tatarica; SSRLI).
Butakoff found the saigas on a newly discovered island in the Aral Sea that he named Nicolas 1st Island. The Kirghiz are a Mongolian people of west central Asia who inhabit the area around the Aral Sea.
Bates refers to the first volume of the tenth edition of Principles of geology (C. Lyell 1867–8), which appeared in November 1866 (Publishers’ Circular, 15 November 1866, p. 722).

Bibliography

Butakoff, Aleksey Ivanovich. 1852. Survey of the Sea of Aral. By Commander Alexey Butakoff, of the Imperial Russian Navy. Communicated by Sir Roderick I. Murchison. [Read 13 December 1852.] Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 23 (1853): 93–101.

Lyell, Charles. 1867–8. Principles of geology or the modern changes of the earth and its inhabitants considered as illustrative of geology. 10th edition. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

Summary

HWB sends a copy [missing] of Boutakoff’s letter, explaining that the deer were saiga antelopes and the islands were new discoveries.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-5313
From
Henry Walter Bates
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
R. Geogr. Soc.
Source of text
DAR 160: 82
Physical description
ALS 1p

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 5313,” accessed on 28 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-5313.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 14

letter