WCP3765

Letter (WCP3765.3679)

[1]1

THE CAMP,

SUNNINGDALE.

May 19th / [18]902

My dear Huxley3

I am right glad to see your "hand of writer" again. What a glorious cruise you have had. I thought Madeira4 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 [1 word illeg.] one (the best of the lot) very much for me & my sister5 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 [1 word illeg.] bloody bank loan[?] years ago — & which now comes out of the what they get.

I had also Reggie6 to guide[.] The app[ointment]ts. to the Indian[?] Education Dep[artmen]t. are [1 word illeg.] few; & or perhaps they won’t find one for him. So he has for the moment taken to private tutoring; first to a [1 word illeg. struck through] [great nephew.] of the G[rand]. O[ld]. M[an]7 he who had broken his leg & could not go back to school, & now the 2nd Belper’s son,8 near Derby, a sickly lad that had to be removed from Harrow.9

We have been [1 word illeg.] with Influenza ever since Xmas [Christmas]. I & wife escaped. We took the 2 youngest first to Folkestone10 — sea good — then to Dawlish.11 The nicest [3]12 bathing[?] place I ever was at[.]

I have been much exercised about the P[resident]. [of the] R[oyal]. S[ociety].13 — Evans14 it is said has been touting for it. Rayleigh15 & Foster16 would not like it, & W. Thomson17 had been too often asked to try him again, as it was thought. So I had put up Strachey18 as a typical [1 word illeg.] scientific man, & had not Thomson relented in time (most happily) I hope Strachey might have been carried. Lubbock19 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 either[?] rare or non-existent, in cool humid climates — a remark I have not seen in any work, & the theme of an unwritten [1 word illeg.] of mine. Your pseudo- Euphorbia20 is no doubt Kleinia neriifolia,21 a Groundsel!22 I saw it in the grand [1 word illeg.] [4] [1 word illeg.] at S[an]ta Cruz23 with Euphorbia. Neither were in Madeira.

Now I must close — we shall meet soon, at the Linnean24 I suppose on Saturday. The Medal25 was (entre nous)26 settled 2 years ago — but the[?] G[rand][?]. O[ld][?]. Naturalist27 had the claim of [MS blotted] "Age before honesty" — As to Medals &c I do think it is time that we were put "hors de ligue"28 —

What a start[?] is this engagement of Dorothy29 to that hybrid Cad[?] — whose true history has still to be written — Venus to a Hottentot30 — Highbred x Hybrid. It is enough to make Venus turn on her Wave (rather clumsy).31

Y[ou]rs affectionately, | J D Hooker32 [signature]

1
The page is numbered 358 in pencil in the top RH corner and the numeral 194, also in pencil is written below.
2
Year deduced from birth and death dates of author.
3
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895). English biologist (comparative anatomist), philosopher and advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
4
An archipelago comprising four islands off the northwest coast of Africa, with a warm, subtropical climate. It is an autonomous region of Portugal.
5
Maria McGilvray (née Hooker) (1819-1889). The only one of Joseph Dalton Hooker’s three sisters to have children, whom he refers to as "my incorrigible nephews and nieces". She married Walter McGilvray in 1846 and their five children were Margaret Greer (b. 1847), Maria (b.1848), Walter (b. 1850), Anne (b. 1851) and William Jackson Hooker MacGilvray (b. 1852).
6
Hooker, Reginald Hawthorn (1867-1944). Fourth son of Joseph Dalton Hooker (see Endnote 32), He was aged 23 years at the date of the letter and had graduated Junior Optime BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1889. He became a civil servant, statistician, and meteorologist.
7
Gladstone, William Ewart (1809-1898). Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister on four separate occasions between 1868 and 1894.
8
Strutt, Henry, 2nd Baron Belper (1840-1914). British businessman, courtier and Liberal politician. He was born at St Helen’s House, Derby and educated at Harrow, so it is likely that his three sons William (b.1875), Reginald (b.1881) and Algernon (b.1883) (respectively aged 15, 9 and 7 years at the date of the letter) were also educated there.
9
Harrow School was founded in 1572 by John Lyon under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I and is a leading independent school for boys.
10
A port town on the English Channel, in Kent, south-east England.
11
A town on the south coast of Devon in England, 12 miles from the county town of Exeter.
12
The page is numbered 359 in pencil in the top RH corner.
13
President of the Royal Society. Sir George Stokes was coming to the end of his term of office in 1890.
14
Evans, John (1823-1908). English archeologist and geologist and Treasurer of the Royal Society 1878-1898.
15
Strutt, John William, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842-1919). English physicist who, with William Ramsay discovered argon, and earned the Nobel Prize for physics in 1904. He was President of the Royal Society 1905-1908.
16
Foster, Michael (1836-1907). British physiologist influential in the organization and development of the Biological School of the University of Cambridge. He was one of the secretaries of the Royal Society 1881-1903.
17
Thomson, William, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824-1907). Irish Mathematical physicist and engineer. He was elected President of the Royal Society 1890-1895.
18
Strachey, Richard (1817-1908). British soldier and Indian administrator. He undertook extensive study of the geology, botany and physical geology of the Himalaya and devoted much time to meteorological research. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1854.
19
Lubbock, John, 1st Baron Avebury (1834-1913), known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900. Banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath. He helped establish archaeology as a scientific discipline and published many articles in which he used archaeological evidence to support Darwin’s theory during the 1860s. During this period he worked with John Evans the other key figure in the establishment of the discipline of archaeology. He was Vice President of the Royal Society in 1871.
20
Euphorbia a very large and diverse genus of flowering plants in the spurge family Euphorbiaceae.
21
One of the flowering plant species of the genus Kleinia in the daisy family Asteraceae. It is native endemic to the Canary Islands (not found in Madeira).
22
Senecio vulgaris, often known by the common name groundsel, is a flowering plant in the daisy family Asteraceae. Kleinia neriifolia in the family Asteraceae was previously known as Senecio kleinia.
23
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, commonly abbreviated as Santa Cruz, is the capital city of the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago 100 km off the coast of north-western Africa.
24
A learned society founded in 1788 for the study and dissemination of taxonomy and natural history, named in honour of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist, who is regarded as the father of modern taxonomy.
25
The Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London was established in 1888, and awarded annually to alternately a botanist or a zoologist or (as has been common since 1958) to one of each in the same year. The Medal was awarded to Thomas Henry Huxley in 1890.
26
Between ourselves (Fr.).
27
Not identified.
28
Out of the league (Fr.).
29
Not identified.
30
Hottentot, first recorded in the late 17th century, was a name applied by Dutch settlers to the Khoikhoi people native to south-western Africa and now regarded as offensive.
31
Venus was the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility. In Roman mythology, Venus arose fully formed from the sea.
32
Hooker, Joseph Dalton (1817-1911). British botanist and explorer, founder of geographical botany. He succeeded his father William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) as Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew on his death and held the post for 20 years.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP3765.3679)]

For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon

Revision history

Transcribed by O'Dell, Sandra [2018-08-15]

Please cite as “WCP3765,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3765