To J. D. Hooker   26 [June 1860]

My dear Hooker

Many thanks for your most interesting letter. I have often speculated loosely about Greenland, so shall be most curious to see your paper;¹ as yet I have not digested your note.—

Etty makes a little progress certainly, but terribly slowly.—

My stomach has utterly failed; & I cannot think of Oxford; on Thursday I go for week of water-cure to “D^r Lanes, Sudbrook Park, Richmond Surrey”: please let me have line to say whether you will be at Kew on Thursday week July 5, or 6^th or 7^th; for on one of those days I shall return home & would come to Kew & spend one hour with you, with list of things to talk over & then by Railway home.— I should so enjoy this.—

I am very proud at being called a “spoiled Botanist”.

I have had such luck to day    saw two small Hymenopterous insects (Sphegidæ?) licking labellum & when they crawled in they touched the rostellum & came out with the pollen masses fixed on forehead.—² On one of them when dead I saw mark where anther had been fixed.— One very minute insect of same Family, which had no business to attempt to walk was caught & fixed to rostellum & was dying there!

I think I have made out whole process as far as insects are concerned in Listera.—³

I was so proud, I dissected the stigmatic horns in Gymnanedia⁴ & found it penetrated by hundreds of pollen-tubes, which I traced up to pollen.—

Farewell    I will scribble no more.—   I am very curious about homologies of anthers of Listera, & must get you to explain further.—

Farewell | C. Darwin