To St G. J. Mivart 21 April [1870]1
Down. | Beckenham | Kent. S.E.
Ap. 21st
My dear Sir
Will you forgive me for troubling you with 2 or 3 questions.—
In some M.S. after discussing the bearing of the amount of modification & the lines of descent on the terms used in classification, & after giving your class. of the Primates in the Phil. Tr., I go on to add, that on genealogical principles alone, & considering whole organisation man probably diverged from the Catarhine stem a little below the branch of the anthropo: apes (i.e. higher up than in your diagram in Phil. Tr.)2 I have then added in my M.S. that this is your opinion, but I cannot remember whether I derived this from you from conversation or inferred it after reading your 2 great papers.—3 Is this your opinion? & may I say (if so) that you tell me so.— I conceive that the line of descent may be as just indicated, & yet from the amount of modification suffered by man, he may perhaps deserve to be called a distinct sub-order or Family.—4
Secondly you describe in Zoo. Tr. in your paper on Lemurs (in which, by the way, I found much very interesting to me on rudiments—variability &c) you describe great differences in the shape of muzzles of the genera; but I want to know whether that structure of the nose, which led Owen to use term “Strepsirhine” (not that I understand how the nose is twisted) holds good in all the genera.—5
Lastly, Büchner in one of his compilations says Rütimeyer has found a fossil ape uniting Catarhine & platyrhine characters; do you know anything about this? I have seen no such account, & I thought that his eocene monkey was apocryphal.6
I left London before your return so could not profit by your kind invitation to call on you.—7 Pray forgive me for being so troublesome & believe me | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin
Footnotes
Summary
On amount of modification and lines of descent in determining the position in man.
Reference to StGJM’s article "On the appendicular skeleton of the primates" Phil. Trans. R. Soc. [157 (1867): 299–430],
and his [and James Murie’s] article on lemurs ["On the anatomy of Lemuroidea"] Trans. Zool. Soc. [7 (1872): 1–114].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-7718A
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- St George Jackson Mivart
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums
- Physical description
- 4pp & photocopy
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 7718A,” accessed on 21 April 2018, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-7718A
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 18