Ɛpsilon

To J. D. Hooker   3 and 4 September [1881]

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

Sept. 3d

My dear Hooker

I have this minute finished reading your splendid, but too short, Address.—1 I cannot doubt that it will have been fully appreciated by the geographers at York: if not they are asses & fools

Sept. 4th. After letting my enthusiasm thus escape, I suddenly felt burst up & had to stop.—

I am sorry that I forgot to remind you in relation to A. Blytt that S. B. Skertchly (of the Geolog. Survey) has observed analogous facts in the peat bogs of the Cambridgeshire fens; & I believe that he had come to this conclusion before he knew of Blytts views; at least I remember writing to tell him of them.2

You speak (p. 10) of a glacial period being “inferred” in the S. hemisphere: surely this is too weak a term considering the enormous number of huge angular erratic blocks of crystalline rocks on the Tertiary plains of Patagonia far from the Andes, & on the Isd of Chiloe, likewise lying on a Tertiary formation & far from the Andes.—3 That seems to me a capital argument (p. 11) “the several S. temperate floras are more intimately related &c &c.4

I shd like to see this argument worked out in detail.

But my chief motive for writing is as follows: a young Portuguese a native of St. Michaels in the Azores seems to be an enthusiast about Geograph. Distribution, Evolution &c (& such a man in such a place is a prodigy) & he has published on land Mollusca & insects. He wrote to me to ask for hints, so I have told him to attend to all chance introductions & have given him hints, (which he is following) & I sent him Wallaces big book. Amongst other points I told him to collect the plants from the highest mountains of the several islands.5 He writes that he has made a collection from 2 hills, but these are only 480 & 384 metres high, & offers to send them to anyone whom I might suggest.6 I have told him that I would mention this to you, but that I thought that the heights were not nearly great enough.7 Please tell me whether they are worth sending to Kew, or shall I tell him to keep them, until he can get other collections. His name is F. d’Arruda Furtado.

I have no large note-paper with black edging, so have written on this.8

Ever yours | Ch. Darwin

By the way you pile in your Address honours on my old bald head.—9

Endorsement: ‘/81’

1
Hooker was serving as president of the Geography section at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in York between 31 August and 7 September 1881 (see letter from J. D. Hooker, 12 June 1881). CD appears to have received a separately paginated offprint of Hooker’s address to the geographers before the meeting (Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL); it was twelve pages long and was also published in the Report of the 51st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at York (Hooker 1881).
2
Hooker praised Axel Blytt’s work on the immigration of the Norwegian flora in alternate rainy and dry periods as an advance in knowledge of the laws of plant distribution; Blytt had based his argument on different layers of peat in bogs containing the remains of different assemblages of plants (Hooker 1881, pp. 734–5; Blytt 1876). CD had brought Blytt’s work to Hooker’s attention after reading a draft outline of Hooker’s address, but did not mention Sydney Barber Josiah Skertchly’s discussion of peat and climate (Miller and Skertchly 1878, pp. 555–61) at that point (see letter to J. D. Hooker, 6 August 1881). The letter in which CD told Skertchly about Blytt’s work has not been found.
3
CD had described these erratic blocks in his 1841 article ‘Distribution of the erratic boulders’.
4
Hooker had written, ‘the several south temperate floras are more intimately related to those of the countries north of them than they are to one another.’ Page 11 of the separately paginated offprint corresponds to Hooker 1881, p. 737.
5
See letter from Francisco de Arruda Furtado, 13 June 1881, and letter to Francisco de Arruda Furtado, 3 and 6 July 1881. CD had sent Arruda Furtado a copy of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Geographical distribution (Wallace 1876; letter to Francisco de Arruda Furtado, 2 September 1881).
8
CD was in mourning for Erasmus Alvey Darwin, who had died on 26 August 1881. This letter is written on sheets of headed notepaper with no black mourning border.
9
In his address on geographical distribution, Hooker described CD as the ‘greatest of naturalist-voyagers’ and considered him the ‘latest and greatest lawgiver’ in the science of geographical distribution (Hooker 1881, pp. 728 and 733).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.1 reading] interl
2.1 I] over ‘&’
4.4 a Tertiary] ‘a’ interl
4.4 & … Andes.] interl
4.5 floras] interl
6.3 such] after del ‘th’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13316,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13316