WCP3818

Letter (WCP3818.3736)

[1]

Pen-y-Bryn1, St. Peter’s Road, Croydon.

August 8th. 1880

My dear Sir Joseph2

I have been away from home all the week & should have written sooner to thank you for your very kind & flattering letter & the valuable corrections & suggestions on my proofs3 which shall be carefully attended to.

As to the identification of Australian genera of plants in Europe I was aware that Mr Bentham4 and yourself discredited them, but on the other hand they seem to me so perfectly accordant with the general bearing of paleontological discoveries and are now supported by so many [2] distinct observers that I do not think I sh[oul]d— be justified in omitting all reference to them. I will however add a note that they are considered doubtful.

I shall look forward with great interest to the publication of your views as to the more recent origin of the Western than the Eastern Australian flora. At present I do not see how that will will so well explain all the facts.

I should have liked to have gone through the whole Australian "flora" & tabulated the distribution of the species but I shrunk from the enormous [3] labour of doing so, more especially as to do it properly requires knowledge of the general distribution of the genera & species which I have no means of obtaining. No doubt you will get this done, & give us the result in the work you appear to be contemplating.

I took the height of Young Island (12 000 ft.) from the South Polar Chart (by Peterman)5 in Stieler’s Hand-Atlas (part 10.)6 published last year.

Many thanks for your paper on Kerguelen Botany.7

Again thanking you for your valuable assistance | I remain | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]

Sir Joseph Hooker

1
ARW referred to the house he rented between 1880 and May 1881 as "Pen-y-Bryn". The house would later be numbered 44.
2
Great 19th century British botanist and explorer Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, KCB, FRS (1817 — 1911). Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and one of Charles Darwin’s closest friends. Hooker, along with Charles Lyell, played a vital role in the relatively peaceful co-publication of Darwin and Wallace’s papers on the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858.
3
The proofs were likely for ARW’s Island life: or, the phenomena and causes of insular faunas and floras, including a revision and attempted solution of the problem of geological climates. Published in 1880 and dedicated to Hooker, Island life was a sequel to ARW’s 1876 text The Geographic Distribution of Animals.
4
English Botanist George Bentham, CMG, FRS (1800 — 1884). Bentham has been called "the premier systematic botanist of the 19th century". Initially an adherent to the idea of the immutability of species, over time Bentham came to accept Darwin’s ideas regarding evolution and natural selection.
5
German cartographer August Heinrich Peterman (1822 — 1878).
6
Named for Adolf Stieler (1775 — 1836), Stieler’s Handatlas was the leading German world atlas of from the 1870s into the first half of the 1900s. Published by German publishing firm Justus Perthes, it went through ten editions. The atlas was issued in parts (above, ARW refers to "part 10"), a common phenomenon for 19th century publications.
7
This line of text is written in ARW’s hand vertically up the left margin of the third and final page. During his voyage to the Antarctic between 1839 and 1843, Hooker spent time on the Kerguelen Islands, a group of islands in the southern Indian Ocean also called the Desolation Islands. There, he identified and recorded for the first time many plants, mosses, and algae.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP3818.3736)]

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

Revision history

Transcribed by Clerx, William [2012-08-17] Transcription checked by Catchpole, Caroline [2013-01-15]

Please cite as “WCP3818,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 2 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3818