To J. D. Hooker   10 October [1872]1

Miss Woodington’s | The Common | Sevenoaks

Oct 10—

My dear Hooker

I am very much vexed about the Droseras. I am sure it was an oversight of Lettington’s & not carelessness, as he was very proud of the state of D. Capensis.2

I will send your mem– to Parslow today, but I am very doubtful whether he will be able to aid you.3 I was very much struck with Mallet’s paper, but do not remember it enough to see how it bears on the inward dipping of mountain basal strata.4 In none of the theories founded on secular refrigeration can I understand how the same area should have been repeatedly lifted up & down.5 The admission of water to the heated rocks seems now universally accepted as the immediate cause of volcanic outbursts; but the moon, now destitute of aquieous(!) vapour, & yet so studded with craters seems to me difficult to reconcile with this theory.6

I forgot in my last note to thank you & Prof. Dyer for his paper, which interested me immensely; by its aid & my own reflections I have managed to shake off pretty well Dr Bastian; but I never did for a moment admit his extreme cases—7

He seems to me a very able man & I think spontaneous gen. to a confined extent will some day be proved—8

yours affectionately | Ch Darwin

LS

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from J. D. Hooker, 7 October 1872.
2
See letter from J. D. Hooker, 7 October 1872. Henry Lettington was CD’s gardener. CD refers to Drosera capensis.
3
See letter from J. D. Hooker, 7 October 1872. Hooker hoped that CD’s butler, Joseph Parslow, could assist him in finding a horse to buy.
4
See letter from J. D. Hooker, 7 October 1872 and n. 5. CD refers to Robert Mallet and Mallet 1872.
5
Secular refrigeration theories accounted for the formation of mountains as a result of the contraction of the earth’s crust due to cycles of cooling (see Mallet 1872, pp. 153–7).
6
George Poulett Scrope attributed the fluidity of magmas to water in 1825; this view later gained support from other prominent geologists, notably Charles Lyell (see Scrope 1825 and C. Lyell 1872, 2: 230–1). For more on nineteenth-century theories on the role of water in volcanic activity, see Sigurdsson 1999, pp. 219–24. Lunar craters were at this time generally believed to be the result of volcanic action (see Koeberl 2001 for a review of theories of the origin of craters).
7
William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, in his paper ‘On spontaneous generation and evolution’ (Thiselton-Dyer 1870), criticised Henry Charlton Bastian’s theory of and experiments on spontaneous generation. CD had commented briefly on the paper in his letter to J. D. Hooker, 1 February [1871] (Correspondence vol. 19). CD’s annotated offprint of the article is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. CD discussed Bastian’s theory in more detail in his letter to A. R. Wallace, 28 August [1872].
8
For more on Bastian’s theory and other contemporary theories of spontaneous generation, see Strick 1999 and Strick 2000.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-8552,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-8552