To J. D. Hooker   [20 February 1860]¹

My dear Hooker

If you come to Club on Thursday do pray come in good time & agree to sit together & I will say so, if anyone asks me to sit with them, & do you say same.²

I have just read the very curious case by Harvey on the Begonia.³ I suppose of course a wild plant? Considering how often monsters are sterile (as with peloric flowers) & likewise non-inherited, Harveys supposition seems rather bold; but he overlooks that as he omits in all probability not that all the offspring would be similarly characterised, so Natural Selection would have to come in to preserve the new form.—

Here is the evil of an abstract; in my fuller M.S. I have discussed a very analogous case viz of a normal fish like an extremely monstrous Gold Fish. Also I have discussed such cases as the Aspicarpa with two kinds of flowers, & have speculated on the degraded flowers alone being preserved, so that a new genus might thus be suddenly formed.⁴ If my memory is right I have such a case amongst the Campanulaceæ. I remember asking Bentham whether any Leguminosæ existed having degraded flowers alone like those borne on certain Leguminosæ together with perfect flowers.—⁵ I write all this to ask you to keep this subject in mind.⁶

As the “Origin” now stands Harvey’s is a good hit against my talking so much of insensibly fine gradations; & certainly it has astonished me that I sh^d be pelted with the fact that I had not allowed abrupt & great enough variations under nature.⁷ It would take a good deal more evidence to make me admit that forms have often changed by saltum.—

Have you seen Wollaston’s attack in Annals?⁸ The stones are beginning to fly. But theology has more to do with these two attacks than science.

I much enjoyed the day Henslow spent here.—⁹

Yours affect^y— | C. Darwin