My dear Lyell

I have nothing particular to tell you & I do not know whether you are still at Kinnordy, but I must write a few lines, if it is only to tell you that we are alive. I have not been up to town for a long time, owing to our daily-expected confinement, which I heartily wish was over. Beseech M^rsLyell to write from your dictation some account of your doings, since leaving London.— The geolog. department of the Brit. Assoc struck me as rather poor; but the other sections very interesting: Zoology was better than it usually is.² Talking of zoology reminds me that I have had sanguine letters from Waterhouse, who speaks most gratefully (as he ought) of your exertions for him. He expresses a strong hope, that if he gets the place through you, that he may be thrown into your acquaintance & he adds in that case he “shall enjoy his seven shillings a day from the British Museum, as much as most men would ten times the sum”.³

I heard from Lonsdale yesterday; the end of his letter is written in a forlorn spirit He says he is working at a very fine series of Touraine corals (I suppose yours) & that he thinks he is arriving at satisfactory conclusions. Forbes has lent him his recent Mediterranean species.—⁴ As yet he has only made (if I understand rightly) one identification with recent species & that with a curious, undescribed Escharina from Dartmouth harbour!—

An interesting fact, has lately, as it were, passed through my hands; a M^r Kemp (almost a working man) who has written on “parallel roads” & has corresponded with me, sent me in the Spring some seeds,⁵ with an account of the spot, where they were found, namely in a layer at the bottom of a deep sand pit, near Melrose, above the level of the river, & which sand-pit he thinks must have been accu- mulated in a lake, when the whole features of the valleys were different— —ages ago, since which whole barriers of rock, it appears, must have been worn down— These seeds germinated freely; & I sent some to Hort. Soc. & Lindley writes to me, that they turn out to be a common Rumex & a species of Atriplex, which neither he, or Henslow (As I have since heard) have ever seen, & certainly not a British plant!!⁶ Does this not look like the revivification of a fossil seed? It is not surprising, I think, that seeds sh^d last ten or twenty thousand, as they have lasted two or three in the Druidical mounds & have germinated.—⁷

When not building, I have been working at my volumecito on the volcanic islands, which we visited; it is almost ready for press; I began working at the M.S. last October, which M.S. I thought two years previously was fit for publication! I have cut away & shortened at a good rate: Lonsdale is going describe a few corallines from a (mountain limestone?) series from Van Diemen’s Land:⁸ I hope you will read my volume for if you don’t, I cannot think of anyone else who will!—

We have at last got our house & place tolerably comfortable; & I am well satisfied with our anchorage for life. What an autumn we have had; completely Chilian; here we have had not a drop of rain, or a cloudy day for a month— I am positively tired of the fine weather & long for the sight of mud, almost as much as I did when in Peru.

With kind remembrances to M^rs Lyell | Ever yours C. Darwin

If still at Kinnordy pray give my respectful compliments to M^r. Lyell.