Ɛpsilon

From J. D. Hooker   15 August 1871

Royal Gardens Kew

Aug 15th/71

Dear Darwin

I was disappointed in not getting to you on Saturday, & find that I cannot go next Saturday either as my Curator is going to Belgium and one of us should be here.— I doubt in fact whether I shall get to Albury at all.1

I fancy that the Violet & Honey-suckle cases are different.2 Many Honeysuckles have lobed leaves when young,— some species always, & its behavior on the normal oak is normal— The Violet has no such proclivities & its companion was a similarly abnormal Fern.

Ever yrs affec | J D Hooker

Huxley rates Thompson’s the “Cock-shy” theory— God makes a cockshy of the world.3 I hear that he baisted T. awfully in section D.4

1
See letter to J. D. Hooker, 6 August [1871]. The curator at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was John Smith.
3
See letter to J. D. Hooker, 6 August [1871] and n. 4. Hooker refers to Thomas Henry Huxley and to William Thomson’s suggestion that life could have arrived on earth carried by meteors (Thomson 1871).
4
Huxley attended the meeting of section D, the biology section, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Edinburgh in August 1871, as one of the section vice-presidents (Report of the 41st meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1871): xlvi). William Thomson, in his presidential address to the British Association, accepted evolution but rejected CD’s theory of natural selection (Thomson 1871; see letter from J. D. Hooker, 5 August 1871, and letter to J. D. Hooker, 6 August [1871]). Baisted: i.e. basted, beat with a stick (Chambers).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-7905,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-7905