Dear Ramsay.—

Absence from home & severe illness in my family have prevented me from sooner answering your note & thanking you for your paper.—² It has interested me much, & I am surprised, if you are not, that the Council sh^d. hesitate about publishing it—³ I dispute that the Council have any right to set up their opinion against yours.— I have been the more interested in your paper from years ago marvelling what could be the meaning of so many lakes in Finland, Scandinavia & N. America.— I could form no conjecture.— As far as I can judge your theory must be right to a large extent, possibly wholly. Would it not be worth while for you to look at maps of rocky mountainous countries within the Tropics. I cannot remember lakes in Brazil. How is it in Ceylon, Sumatra, the Neilgherries? Years ago I worked through all the reported cases of erratic boulders within the Tropics, & all seemed to be mere weathering of granitic rocks in situ, as shown in appendix to 1^st Edit of my Journal.—⁴ Would not something of same kind be worth your consideration? As no doubt you will attend for future to all lakes; it may possibly be worth your notice, that I always heard in T. del Fuego that sealers &c always searched for anchorage at the mouths of the deep fiords which penetrate so deeply the land; & that if they passed the bank at the mouth, no soundings could be obtained. This, I believe, is simply due to detritus there alone being formed & accumulated, from the wear of the exposed coasts on each side of entrance:⁵ during upheaval, such vast mounds of detritus might possibly bank up the water & form a lake.—

No doubt the great depth of the Italian Lakes is rather a staggerer; but I think your theory must be true to very great extent & seems to me very ingenious & satisfactory. The only doubt which occurs to me is the a priori probability in a much troubled country, that some areas would be lifted up less than others & depressions thus left. I sh^d. have doubted whether such irregular depressions could be detected by the lines of stratification, & perhaps in part be due to faults.— I remember years ago being struck with frequency of large lakes at base of volcanos, which fact, conjoined with frequency in all parts of world of interstratification of volcanic & lacustrine deposits, led me (together with a few other facts) to believe that very generally large areas subside at the base or near active volcanos.⁶ Might there not be same tendency near points or ranges, into which much fluid rock has been injected, instead of ejected? Could such depressed areas be detected by stratification? An examination of several mountainous countries within the Tropics would throw much light on this doubt.—

I was pleased to see your concluding sentence on cause of Glacial Period:⁷ it is an old opinion of mine, over which I have fought battles with Hooker, but never dared with Lyell.⁸ In M.S. I have even gone into details, in attempting to show that there has been no such vast recent geographical change as could account for such vast climatal change.—⁹ As for Hopkin’s Gulf-stream change; it is, in my opinion, an empty hypothesis—¹⁰

Excuse this scribbling paper worthy of the scribble written on it.—

Again I thank you for your valuable paper & remain | Dear Ramsay | Yours very sincerely | C. Darwin

Jamieson has smacked my marine view of Glen Roy in splendid & most satisfactory style: he seems a real good observer—¹¹ The shelves are a magnificent record of the Glacial period—