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To Oswald Heer   8 March [1875]1

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

March 8th

My dear Sir

I thank you for your very kind & deeply interesting letter of March 1 received yesterday; & for the present of yr work which no doubt I shall soon receive from Dr Hooker.2 The sudden appearance of so many Dicotyledons in the Upper Chalk appears to me a most perplexing phenomenon to all who believe in any form of Evolution, & especially to those who believe in extremely gradual Evolution, to which view I know that you are strong⁠⟨⁠ly⁠⟩⁠ opposed.3 The presence of even one true Angiosperm in the Lower Chalk makes me inclined to conjecture that plants of this great Division must have been largely developed in some isolated area; whence owing to Geographical changes they at last succeeded in escaping & spread quickly over the World. But I fully admit that this case is a great difficulty in the views which I hold. Many as have been the wonderful discoveries in Geology during the last half Century I think none have exceeded in interest your results with respect to the plants which formally existed in the Arctic regions. How I wish that similar collections could be made in the Southern Hemisphere for instance in Kerguelen’s Land.4

The death of Sir C Lyell is a great loss to Science, but I do not think to himself, for after parlysis & epilepsy it was scarcely possible that he could have retained his mental powers, & he would have suffered dreadfully from their loss.5 The last time I saw him he was speaking with the most lively interest about his last visit to you & I was grieved to hear from him a very poor account of your health.6 I have been working for some time on a special subject namely insectivorous plants; I do not know whether the subject will interest you but when my book is published I will have the pleasure of sending you a copy.7

I am very much obliged for your photograph & enclose one of myself.

With the highest esteem | I remain my dear Sir | Yours very faithfully | Charles Darwin

Footnotes

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Oswald Heer, 1 March 1875.
2
See letter from Oswald Heer, 1 March 1875 and n. 2. Heer had included a copy for CD of the third volume of his work on fossil flora (Heer 1868–83) in a parcel he sent to Joseph Dalton Hooker.
3
See letter from Oswald Heer, 1 March 1875. In his earlier studies of Tertiary floras (Heer 1855–9), Heer had argued that sudden, inexplicable change and the appearance of monstrosities were causal factors in the production of new species. CD had argued that the existence of so many coadaptations in plants and animals was evidence against Heer’s view (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 11, letter to Asa Gray, 31 May [1863]).
4
CD had an interest in the flora of Kerguelen Island because of its close relation to the flora of the geographically distant Tierra del Fuego (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 5, letter to J. S. Henslow, 17 November [1854]). Kerguelen is the largest of the three hundred Kerguelen Islands, in the south Indian Ocean, over 3000 miles south-east of the southern tip of Africa (Columbia gazetteer of the world).
5
Charles Lyell died on 22 February 1875 (ODNB). He had been in poor health since the end of 1874 (K. M. Lyell ed. 1890, 2: 438–9). Hooker had reported to CD in mid-February that Lyell was too unwell to see him and that his mind was confused (see letter from J. D. Hooker, 17 February 1875).
6
CD’s last recorded visit to Lyell was on 4 December 1874 (Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)). Heer suffered from pulmonary disease and from the early 1870s worked mostly from home ([A. Gray] 1884, p. 558).
7
Heer’s name is on CD’s presentation list for Insectivorous plants (see Appendix IV).

Bibliography

Columbia gazetteer of the world: The Columbia gazetteer of the world. Edited by Saul B. Cohen. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998.

Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.

[Gray, Asa.] 1884. Oswald Heer. [Obituary.] Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 19 (1883–4): 556–9.

Heer, Oswald. 1855–9. Flora tertiaria Helvetiae. Die tertiäre Flora der Schweiz. 3 vols. Winterthur, Switzerland: J. Wurster.

Heer, Oswald. 1868–83. Flora fossilis arctica. Die fossile flora der Polarländer. 7 vols. Zurich: J. Wurster & Comp.

Insectivorous plants. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1875.

ODNB: Oxford dictionary of national biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000. (Revised edition.) Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. and index. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.

Summary

Thanks OH for his book [see 9876]; agrees that the sudden appearance of many dicotyledons in the Upper Chalk is a perplexing phenomenon for the evolutionist.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-9881
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Oswald Heer
Sent from
Down
Source of text
Zentralbibliothek Zürich (Nachlass Oswald Heer 213.2)
Physical description
LS 4pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 9881,” accessed on 20 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9881.xml

Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 23

letter

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