To J. D. Hooker 12 August 1881
Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.)
Augt 12th 1881
My dear Hooker
I can answer hardly any of your questions,1 but am able to send you by this post Blytt’s first essay, which please at some time return.—2 My memory deceived me; I can find nothing about permanence of continents & oceans in my Coral Book; but as in 1st Edit. of Origin (p. 309) when I allude to this subject I refer to Coral Reefs, this, I suppose, deceived my memory.3 I am almost sure that Dana’s letter was in Nature, I think in the current year.4 Reades article, I believe, was in the Geological Mag.,5 but as I resolved never again to write on great & difficult subjects, I unfortunately kept no record & read the articles merely for amusement.
I think that I must have expressed myself badly about Humboldt:6 I shd have said that he was more remarkable for his astounding knowledge than for originality.— I have always looked at him as in fact the founder of the geographical distribution of organisms.—
I thought that I had read that extinct fossil plants belonging to Australian forms had lately been found in Australia, & all such cases seem to me very interesting as bearing on development.— I have been so astonished at the apparently sudden coming in of the higher phanerogams, that I have sometimes fancied that development might have slowly gone on for an immense period in some isolated continent or large island, perhaps near the S. Pole.— I poured out my idle thoughts in writing, as if I had been talking with you.—
No fact has so interested me for a heap of years, as your case of the plants on the equatorial mountains of Africa;7 & Wallace tells me that some one (Baker?) has described analogous cases on the mountains of Madagascar. I think that you ought to allude to these cases. Wallace thinks that the seeds have been blown to these mountains from those of equatorial Africa!!!!!!8
I most fully agree that no problem is more interesting than that of the temperate forms in S. hemisphere common to the North.— I remember writing about this after Wallace’s book appeared, & hoping that you would take it up.9 The frequency with which the drainage from the land passes through Mountain-chains seems to indicate some general law, viz the successive formation of cracks & lines of elevation between the nearest ocean & the already upraised land; but that is too big a subject for a note.
I doubt whether any insects can be shown with any probability to have been flower-feeders before the middle of the Secondary Period—10 Several of the asserted cases have broken down..—
Your long letter has stirred many pleasant memories of long-past days when we had many a discussion & many a good fight
Yours ever affectionately | Ch. Darwin
Footnotes
Bibliography
Blytt, Axel. 1876. Essay on the immigration of the Norwegian flora during alternating rainy and dry periods. Christiania: Albert Cammermeyer.
Coral reefs: The structure and distribution of coral reefs. Being the first part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle, under the command of Capt. FitzRoy RN, during the years 1832 to 1836. By Charles Darwin. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1842.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1863b. On the plants of the temperate regions of the Cameroons Mountains and islands in the Bight of Benin; collected by Mr Gustav Mann, government botanist. [Read 5 November 1863.] Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany) 7 (1864): 171–240.
Origin 6th ed.: The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. 6th edition, with additions and corrections. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1872.
Origin: On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1859.
Reade, Thomas Mellard. 1880. Oceans and continents. Geological Magazine n.s. 2d decade 7: 385–91.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1880a. Island life: or, the phenomena and causes of insular faunas and floras, including a revision and attempted solution of the problem of geological climates. London: Macmillan.
Summary
Responds to JDH on history of plant geography.
Opinion of Humboldt.
Origin of higher phanerogams.
Importance of the occurrence of south temperate forms in the Northern Hemisphere.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-13288
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- DAR 95: 524–7
- Physical description
- ALS 8pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13288,” accessed on 21 October 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13288.xml