From Lawson Tait 16 March [1875]1
7, Great Charles St. | Birmingham.
March 16
Dear Sir,
Thanks for your kind note. I shall send you a copy of my little paper.2
I am keeping a number of white mice to try to unravel the use of the peculiar tail of mice & rats but I am completely beaten3
My view does not preclude any other modification or use of the tail: but it seems to me to be important as illustrating how correlation of growth (that is thick fur leading to a bushy tail) will bring out a new circumstance favourable to survival & truly lead to a total alteration of some important habits—as the curling up of these animals when going to sleep4
Yours faithfully, | Lawson Tait
PS. I had missed the Yak in my search for animals with a bushy tail.5 But he has a long abdominal fringe of hair nearly touching the ground. When he lies down with his limbs drawn up to or under him, as all ruminants do, his tail & fringe would act as a railway rug, preventing loss of heat from the limbs & damage to them from frost bite—as the tissue outside the bone is thin & there is nothing but a rather weak circulation to resist loss of heat. He lives close to the line of perpetual snow—the very condition under which such an epithelial appendage would conduce to survival
L.T.
Footnotes
Summary
Uses of tails of mice. Functions of tails generally.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-9889
- From
- Robert Lawson (Lawson) Tait
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Birmingham
- Source of text
- DAR 178: 3
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9889,” accessed on 26 September 2022, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9889.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 23