WCP5318

[1]¹

Royal Gardens Kew

July 10 / [18]70

Dear Darwin

Enclosed seeds & note² just arrived from Playfair³ of Algiers, I do not quite understand it. as [sic] I asked only for what you told me. & here are a whole lot of others seeds — all were in duplicate parcels, so I ^have kept one set; assuming that he means one for us & one for you[.]

[2] Delpino⁴ writes asking me where a Mr Curtis⁵ has published physiological observations⁶ on Dionea[sic], I cannot guess, do you know. I have an obscure recollection of some leaf observations by W[illiam]. Curtis⁷ in his introduction to Botany, a book⁸ I have not — Have you any reference to any such observations on Dionaea [3] Cephalotus or Nepenthes?

Very many thanks for the Orchid papers⁹ which I will return when done with.

I had a talk with the D[uke]. of Argyll¹⁰ last night, with whom I dined, about Wallace ^{origin of man}, & found him in a "cleft stick" about Wallace, believing him to be right in the fact about man; but allowing that he must be wrong in his argument! (he had not read that paper¹¹ of Wallace[']s) — What a clever little beggar it is! — but I cannot follow his views about man, or quite see what he would [4] have us to believe — His chief quarrell with the "Origin"¹² is that you do not state that the order of evolution is preordained though he believes that you would admit this. — I told him that I did not think this was any business of your's [sic] — that you did not pretend to go into the origin of life, only into it's [sic] phenomena. I could not, before his wife¹³ & children especially, go into this matter, & avow my own (& I suppose your) belief that all speculations on preordination are utterly idle in the absence of better materials than theologies ^{& cosmogonies} supply us with — that in fact the whole subject is beyond the range of our conceptions:¹⁴

Thanks for telling me of Sach's¹⁵ Lehrbuch¹⁶ which I will order.

Ev[er] y[ou]r[s] affect[tionately] | J D Hooker [signature]