The red notebook of Charles Darwin / edited, with an introduction and notes by Sandra Herbert.

  • Charles Darwin
Date:
1980
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The red notebook of Charles Darwin / edited, with an introduction and notes by Sandra Herbert. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    147/184 (page 133)
    NOTES 133 of Tasco and Moran, which are all western veins (spathgänge). The inclination of the vein of Guanaxuato, is 45 or 48 degrees to the south west. Also pp. 186-187: The veta madre of Guanaxuato, bears a good deal of resemblance to the celebrated vein of Spital of Schemnitz, in Hungary. The European miners who have had occasion to examine both these depositories of minerals, have been in doubt whether to consider them as true veins, or as metalliferous beds (erzlager).... If the veta madre was really a bed, we should not find angular fragments of its roof contained in its mass, as we generally observe on points where the roof is a slate charged with carbone, and the wall a talc slate. In a vein, the roo/and the wall are deemed anterior to the formation of the crevice, and to the minerals which have successfully filled it ; but a bed has undoubtedly pre-existed to the strata of the rock which compose its roof. [Hence] we may discover in a bed fragments of the wall, but never pieces detached from the roo/. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (4th ed.; London, 1799), vol. 1, p. 18: The air, like all other bad conductors of electricity, is known to be a bad conductor of heat.... Also see p. 11 on the subject of shooting stars and fireballs and pp. 249- 258 for a discussion of meteors. 219 Woodbine Parish (note 143). See note 187 and see also Parish, 'Notice as to the supposed Identity of the large Mass of Meteoric Iron now in the British Museum, with the celebrated Otumpa Iron described by Rubin de Celis in the Philosophical Transactions for 1786', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 124 (1834), pp. 53-54. Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni, ' Supplément au catalogue des météores, à la suite desquels des pierres ou des masses de fer sont tomhéç.s\ Journal des mines, vol. 26 (1809), pp. 79-80. Speaking of meteorites Chladni wrote (p. 80), Il paraît qu'on doit aussi ranger parmi les masses dont il s'agit, celle d'un fer malléable, du poids de 97 myriagrammes, qu'un minéralogiste saxon, M. Sonnenschmidt, a trouvée dans la ville de Zacatecas, dans la Nouvelle-Espagne, oij il était directeur des mines. Alexander von Humboldt (note 38) also reported the existence of this stone. See Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. 2, p. 293. Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny, Voyage dans Г Amérique méridionale.. .1826- 1833, vol. 5, part 1 (Paris and Strasbourg, 1847), pp. 140-144 and plate 10. Individual sections of this volume were published separately earlier. According to a typewritten list compiled in 1933 by Charles Davies Sherborn of the British Museum (Natural History), the section which includes pp. 140-144 was published in 1835 and plate 10 in 1834. The three species described by d'Orbigny were Sagitta triptera, Sagitta exaptera, and Sagitta diptera. In this entry Darwin was noting the similarity of one of his unidentified specimens to Sagitta triptera. The genus Sagitta or ' Flèche' had been established by Jean René Constantin Quoy and Paul Gaimard in their 'Observations zoologiques faites à bord de l'Astrolabe, en Mai 1826, dans le Détroit de Gilbraltar',