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From M. C. Stanley   24 May 1878

23. St. James’s Square. | S.W.

May 24/78

Dear Mr. Darwin

My brother who has just returned from S. America has brought from the River Plate the accompanying fragment of bone from a fish’s head called Corbin; he is very anxious to know if it ever came under your notice.1 There are two of these bony substances in the head of every fish. Fibrous threads diverge from the rough part in to interior— As if this substance were the covering of the brain!.2 if one can venture to speak of the brain of a fish:

Forgive me for troubling you & for daring to suppose I am mentioning any thing that can be new to you.—

Believe me | Yrs Very sincerely | M C Derby

Footnotes

1
Lionel Sackville Sackville-West had been British envoy at Buenos Aires from 1873 until January 1878 (ODNB). The Río de la Plata (River Plate) is an estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers; it forms part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay (Columbia gazetteer of the world). The bone fragment has not been found; the fish was probably Micropogonias furnieri (whitemouth croaker), known locally as corvina.
2
Sackville-West’s bone fragment was probably from an immature fish. In teleost or bony fishes, ossification of the bones occurs differentially, with those bones subject to greater stress being the first to ossify. For more on the sequence of ossification in the neurocranium of Micropogonias furnieri from larval to adult stages, see Jardim and Santos 1994.

Bibliography

Columbia gazetteer of the world: The Columbia gazetteer of the world. Edited by Saul B. Cohen. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998.

ODNB: Oxford dictionary of national biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000. (Revised edition.) Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. and index. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.

Summary

Sends fragment of bone from the head of a fish called "Corbin", brought from River Plate by her brother.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-11528
From
Mary Catherine Sackville-West, countess of Derby/Mary Catherine Gascoyne-Cecil, countess of Derby/Mary Catherine Stanley, countess of Derby
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
London, St James’s Square, 23
Source of text
DAR 162: 170
Physical description
ALS 3pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 11528,” accessed on 26 September 2022, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-11528.xml

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