From James Shaw 17 February 1868
Tynron Thornhill N.B.
17 Feb 1868
Dear Sir,
Modern thought drifting to new lands bursts out in mutiny betimes like Columbus’s sailors.1 Still I scarcely expected the Athenæum to be so infallible this week.
“The reduction of the numbers of so-called Species is the daily business of Zoologists” &c Then why does it know that “man never originated a species” when it confesses that species are not determined?
It seems you don’t acknowledge “an inherent tendency not to vary” & yet you are a storehouse “on the transmission of peculiarities once acquired through successive generations”.2 Well that seems scarcely “fair fighting” on the critics’ part.
You have your battles & we in this outlandish quarter have our skirmishes. Our antiquarian Soc. was quite hot here one night because I had taken up the Subject of the Right Hand as a specialization of an organ still going on, although it might have commenced thousands on thousands of years ago.3 I had a list of tools made to suit the right hand only— a list of customs requiring the special use of the right hand, as writing. &c &c
Then I had the case of rude people as drivers having far less difference between the value or amount of differentiation of the hands than engravers, &c
I had the ratio of left handed folk given in the book of Judges of the tribe of Benjamin being greater than the ratio now4 & the ratio of elephants left-tusked as we might say greater than that of left-handed men. Then I had the puzzle of left-handedness not well explained by non-symmetrically of lungs &c.5
One gentleman said it was rank Darwinism disguised & therefore I suppose he would know its value.
I am | Dear Sir | Yours most respectfully | Jas. Shaw.
P.S. | I was trying to break a lance on the oft repeated dogma that an impassable gulf exists bet. man & other beings because man alone has mental progress. This was brought up against poor Page.6 I was surprised that the Athenaeum Dec 21 admitted my terrible statement.7
That the advent of a being like man who is protecting angel or most cunning adversary of beasts should modify their instincts so that cunning &c competes best with cunning—intelligence best serves intelligence—seems fair enough reasoning.8 True, parrots & gorillas &c rank high for brain and don’t seem either to serve or fight man, but we don’t know the antecedents of their ancestors. Peru & Mexico had once an immense population to whom parrots feathers were luxuries.9
Excuse me | J. S.
Footnotes
Bibliography
Berdan, Frances. 2006. Circulation of feathers in Mesoamerica, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos 6 (2006). Published online 21 January 2006. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document1387.html. Accessed 22 January 2007.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1942. Admiral of the ocean sea: a life of Christopher Columbus. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
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.
Variation: The variation of animals and plants under domestication. By Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray. 1868.
Summary
Mentions review [of Variation] in the Athenæum [15 Feb 1868, pp. 243–4].
Comments on adaptive utility of the right hand, an organ still undergoing specialisation.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-5884
- From
- James Shaw
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Tynron
- Source of text
- DAR 177: 152
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 5884,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-5884.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 16