WCP3765

[1]

THE CAMP,

SUNNINGDALE.

May 19/90

My dear Huxley¹

I am right glad to see your "hand of writer" again. What a glorious cruise you have had. I thought Madeira would enchant you. It was a Garden of Eden to me 50 years ago, though it did give me rheumatic fever, proving that the Devil holds his own. I wish I could have gone with you — but have been very otherwise engaged. — Clearing out of my Trusteeship to my incorrigible nephews & nieces, which will leave the [illeg.] one (the best of the lot) very much for me & my sister to provide for. Also cancelled mortgages cost me a pretty penny to replace. I am well out of the £800 for which I was [2] guarantor to the Bank to get two of them out of the [illeg.] bloody bank seven years ago — & which now comes out of the what they get.

I had also Reggie to guide[.] The appts. to the Indian Education Dept. are [illeg.] few; & or perhaps they won’t find one for him. So he has for the moment taken to private tutoring; first to a [illeg.] ^{great nephew}. of the G. O. M. who had broken his leg & could not go back to school, & now Sir Lord Balfour’s son, near Derby, a sickly lad that had to be removed from Harrow.

We have been harassed with Influenza ever since Xmas. I & wife escaped. We took the 2 youngest first to Folkestone — no good — then to Dawlish. The nicest [3] watering place I ever was at[.]

I have been much exercised about the P. R. S. – Evans² it is said has been touting for it. Rayleigh³ & Foster⁴ would not like it, & W. Thomson⁵ had been too often asked to try ^him again, as it was thought. So I had put up Strachey⁶ as a typical [illeg.] scientific man, & had not Thomson relented in time (most happily) I hope Strachey might have been carried. Lubbock⁷ was I fancy the only alternative to keep Evans out.

You are right, herbs are rare in Oceanic Islands, & rarer still are animals, this goes with another part, that they are also rare or non-existent, in cool humid climates — a remark I have not seen in any work, & the theme of an unwritten essay of mine. Your pseudo- Euphorbia is no doubt Kleinia neriifolia, a Groundsel! I saw it in the grand sea [4] [illeg.] at S^ta Cruz with Euphorbia. Neither were in Madeira.

Now I must close — we shall meet soon, at the Linnean I suppose on Saturday. The medal was ^{(entre nous)} settled 2 years ago — but the G. O. Naturalist had the claim of "Age Age before honesty" — As to medals &c I do think it is time that we were put "hors de ligue" —

What a start is this engagement of Dorothy to that hybrid Cad — whose true history has still to be written — Venus to a Hottentot — Highbred x Hybrid. It is enough to make Venus turn on her wave (rather clumsy).

Yrs affectionately, | J D Hooker⁸ [signature]