To J. D. Hooker   12 August 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 1^st 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 sh^d 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