From J. D. Hooker   11 August 1881

My dear Darwin

Your letter & Memos have been unspeakable comforts—for I was beginning to despair of making of my Address any thing but a budget of snippets of facts & ideas, & you have both helped & encouraged me to give one part of it at any rate, a consecutive & scientific character.¹

Then too the revival of our scientific correspondence & interchange of ideas is extraordinarily pleasing to me who regard myself as your pupil.

I am indeed glad that your old appreciation of Humboldt is no more dimmed than is mine. I have been rereading all his Geog. Bot Essays, & it is impossible to deny their supreme ability & approach to originality.² I wish I had time to write, & space to give to all I think of them— his “Distributio Arithmetices” of the great groups, expressed in definite proportions, is a stroke of originality, if not of genius, & I have called it a sort of (I can’t find a good word!) parallel? to his Isothermal lines.³

I cannot find a reference to the permanence of continents in your “Coral Reefs”,⁴—a book by the way that shook my confidence in that theory more than all others put together, & the effect of which it has required years of thought to eliminate or rather only to overlay. I thought the idea was first published in your “Geological Observations”, of which I cannot find my copy.⁵ (but shall)— any of Dana’s works must have been long after both— Where does he “reclaim”, & where does T. Mellard Reade publish his views.—⁶

I may have to allude to this subject from the Chair at York in view of the papers to be read on the progress of Geog. discovery in the great continents.⁷ In respect of these, I have long cogitated over the fact that the main water parting of Asia is not coincident with the greater elevation of that continent, but runs obliquely across from S.W. to N.E—& is sometimes determined by huge sedimentary deposits as in Upper India at others by very low mountains— does not this imply vast oscillations over an already formed land of continental Extension

Thanks for the hint about Keg. Land fossils,⁸ Sir W. Thomson’s neglect of that is unpardonable, & all through jealousy of Moseley, for I urged it on his attention.⁹

Of course I shall allude to Alph^s DC^ns. book in praise,¹⁰ though it does rile me in many ways, the paltry little chapters of padding:— the want of grasp, & above all the leaving such a desideratum as is supplied by Grisebach, as in his “Végétation du Globe”—¹¹ yet you are right, the book is full of very valuable matter.—

I am doubtful about going into the Flora of past ages, beyond the tertiary. I quite believe in the sudden development of the mass of phanerogams being due to the introduction of flower feeding insects, though we must not forget that insects occur in the coal & may have been flower-feeding too.¹²

I have dealt with Saporta’s view of the polar origin of Floras in my last R.S. Address.¹³

I do not see the connection between an isolated S. Polar continent & Saporta’s views on the influence of flower frequenting insects.— to what do you allude   Axel Blytt’s essays I shall certainly allude to, I had them on the table, his last at any rate.¹⁴

I hope we may talk over these & many other such matters when too late for my address!

I cannot read a word of importance in your Memo.— “Have not some Australian extinct forms been lately found in (word?)” what is this last word?, it reads like Australia again

It appears to me that the great Botanical question to settle is, whether the main endemic Southern temperate types originated there & spread northwards, or whether they originated in the North, & have only just reached the South, & have increased & multiplied there (to be turned out in time by the Northern, perhaps) The balance of evidence seems to favor the latter view—& if Palæontologists are to be believed in crediting our tertiaries (even polar ones?) with Proteaceae, &c. it would tend to confirm this view, as does the Cycadeae, now almost extinct in the N. hemisphere & surviving in the South¹⁵

Buffon’s & Saporta’s views of life originating at a pole, because a pole must have first cooled low enough to admit of it, is perhaps more ingenious than true—but is there any reasoning opposed to it?¹⁶ If conceded the question arises did life originate at both Poles or one only? or if at both was it simultaneously?— but this is the deepest abyss of idle speculation.

Ever affecy Yrs | J D Hooker.