From J. D. Hooker 28 November 1874
Kew
Nov 28/74
Dear Darwin
I saw Huxley yesterday— he declares that the Lecturing in Edinburgh will be less severe than those in S. Kensington & the examination there— both of which, & the Secy RS. duties, he will be free of for the time.1
He cites the “pot of Gold” as a strong inducement,—& the desire to show the Edinburgh folk what a course of good Lectures should be is I suspect the strongest stimulus of any.2 I couple the latter with another matter he told me of, that he was preparing for the Linnæan Soy, a paper on the classification of animals, which will uphold Evolution & go to show that there are no sharp lines of demarcation throughout: that the Kingdom consisted of series, each with its degraded types. He added that he had thrown overboard all his old ideas of definite lines of demarcation & would make a clean breast of it. His conversation was most interesting he is going to bear hard on the necessity of abandoning all such ideas as Hæckel’s in dealing with systematic zoology.—3
I enclose documents referring to my excessive duties at Kew—& have given you them quite informally.4 I could of course put them into official language if required.
We are getting on quite smoothly.
Ever yours affec | J D Hooker
Footnotes
Bibliography
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and phylogeny. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Haeckel, Ernst. 1866. Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie. 2 vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer.
Summary
Huxley feels he can accept the Edinburgh lecture invitation.
Also tells JDH he is preparing a paper for Linnean Society on classification which will uphold evolution ["On the classification of the animal kingdom", J. Linn. Soc. Lond. (Zool.) 12 (1876): 199–226]. He has thrown overboard all his old ideas of definite demarcation. He will make a clean breast of it, and will bear hard on necessity of all such ideas as Haeckel’s in dealing with systematic zoology.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-9736
- From
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Kew
- Source of text
- DAR 103: 230–1
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9736,” accessed on 28 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9736.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 22