To J. D. Hooker   25 January [1877]1

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

Jan. 25th

My dear Hooker

I have just read with great interest your R. Soc. address, for it told me much that was new, & how wonderfully active the Soc. is.2 I cannot think what will be done in the future, the work augments so much that it can hardly be done by volunteers. As Owen sneered, I think hereafter the Pres. will have to be a paid officer, & then it will be frightfully difficult to get a good one!3

You were a good man to write to me the other day & to tell me about the seeds exposed to intense cold.4 By an odd chance I had been speculating a few days before whether any degree of cold would kill the germs of Bacteria & such like, & had supposed it wd. not; though there cannot be many such germs in Esquimauxs’ dens, otherwise all the inhabitants would perish.

You ask what I & we all are about, & I have nothing to say, as I am only working up & adding to old matter about Dimorphic & Trimorphic plants.5 In about a month’s time I shall ask you to let Frank to come to Kew to examine the dried specimens of certain genera, about which I know of indications of dimorphism; & to beg, if you have sufficient specimens, to give me a flower of each form; for I will rank no plant as dimorphic without comparing pollen-grains & stigmas. Frank has nearly finished his paper on the protrusion of Protoplasmic filaments from the glands of Dipsacus, & the discovery seems to me a very remarkable one.6 I know that it will make you savage, but I think the great honour of its being printed in the R. Soc. Transactions, (shd. the referees so order) would stimulate his zeal & make him think better of his work, so that I have resolved to communicate it to Socy.7

Ever yours affectionately | C. Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from J. D. Hooker, 18 January 1877.
2
Hooker had delivered the president’s address to the Royal Society of London on 30 November 1876 (J. D. Hooker 1876).
3
CD alludes to Richard Owen’s address on 3 December 1873 to the fellows of the Royal Society on the questions of income, elections, presidents, and payment of secretaries (R. Owen 1873). Owen had hinted that Hooker, who was elected president on 1 December 1873 (The Times, 2 December 1873, p. 7), would accept payment as president of the Royal Society (see Correspondence vol. 21, letter to J. D. Hooker, 20 December [1873]).
5
Much of the material from CD’s earlier papers, ‘Dimorphic condition in Primula’, ‘Three forms of Lythrum salicaria’, and ‘Illegitimate offspring of dimorphic and trimorphic plants’, was reworked in Forms of flowers, which was published on 9 July 1877 (Freeman 1977).
6
Francis Darwin had discovered protoplasmic filaments protruding from the glandular hairs of leaves of common or fuller’s teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris, a synonym of D. fullonum; see Correspondence vol. 24, letter from Francis Darwin, [28 May 1876]). In the published paper (F. Darwin 1877b, p. 272), he hypothesised that the protrusion of the filaments in some way corresponded to the process of aggregation seen in insectivorous plants like those of the genus Drosera (sundews).
7
CD communicated Francis’s paper to the society and it was read on 1 March 1877; an abstract of it was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (F. Darwin 1877a). The Council of the Royal Society later decided not to print the full paper (see letter to G. J. Romanes, 23 May 1877). The full paper was published in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, July 1877 (F. Darwin 1877b).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.4 a] interl
2.2 before] above del ‘ago’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-10814,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-10814