B7

GH Darwin

My father & Sedgwick started on their geological walking tour through Wales from Bangor. For his first six miles Sedgwick would only answer yes & no to any remarks made to him & my father thought he must have done something to offend him, when at last Sedgwick broke out — "Damn that waiter I know he won't give that shilling to the chamber-maid." Whereon they both laughed & good humour was restored. He used to illustrate the uselessness of observations without some framework of theory on which to hang them by this same tour. Speaking of I think the neighbourhood of Moel Trifan, I think, he said that they were surrounded by every mark of glaciation — "There were the moraines, the scored rocks & perched boulders, and I declare to heaven if the glacier had been there the evidence would have been less complete. And yet we never saw anything of it"

[note in margin:] I'll go back & see — It was some time before S. cd be persuaded not to go back & accuse the waiter

I remember another geological story which I think he told a propos of the absurdity of any council of sages (as proposed by Auguste Comte) directing the investigations of scientific men — a plan as he said which would have crushed the application of the spectroscope to the stars.

B7v

[calculations by G. H. Darwin]

B8

In the market place of one of the towns of Shropshire, perhaps Ludlow or Oswestry (Shrewsbury), there is an erratic boulder. My father was with a friend, whose name I forget, older than himself and a man a great intelligence. The friend remarked when looking at the stone "There, — the world will pass away and no man will ever know, how that stone got there. To recognise that the presence of the stone was strange was as my father said a proof of intelligence, but so false is the dictum that maps have now been made showing with certainty all the great glacier streams by which such boulders have been brought from the northern mountains. He spoke of this patient constructive work of Mr¹            who made these maps with great enthusiasm within the last few years.

¹ Possibly D. Mackintosh 1879.

B8v

[calculations by G. H. Darwin]

Barrett, P. H. 1974. The Sedgwick-Darwin geologic tour of North Wales. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118, No. 2. (19 April): 146-164. Text   

Clark, J. W. and T. M. Hughes eds. 1890. The walking tour in North Wales. In The life and letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. 1: 379-81. Text  

Darwin, C. R. 1890. [Letters to and about Adam Sedgwick and the Origin of Species]. In J. W. Clark and T. M. Hughes eds., The life and letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. 2 vols. Cambridge: University Press, vol. 1, pp. 380-1, vol. 2, pp. 356-9.   Text

Darwin, F. ed. 1887. The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter. vol. 1. London: John Murray.   Text   

Roberts, M. B. 2023. A longer look at the Darwin-Sedgwick tour of North Wales, August 1831. Darwin Online PDF