My dear Hooker

I have written you so many letters, that I fear you will hate the sight of my hand-writing— I now write to ask a favour, but I ask it in the full belief that you will not do it if anyways disagreeable.— Did you not say that you had some relation in Oxford, who w^d. take lodgings in Oxford for my wife & self— She does not of course come, but I found at Southampton¹ that it made so great a difference in fatigue lodging at some distance from the meeting rooms, that I am anxious to secure lodgings as near as easily possible to the meeting-rooms of the Geolog. & Zoolog. sections. I sh^d. want a bed-room & sitting room in some quiet & small house. where I c^d. get dinner . Now if you can assist me, this w^d. be a favour, for I know of no one to whom to apply; but I beg you not to think of it, without you have some relation there, to whom you can without scruple apply.

I send you a tuft of the quasi-hybrid Laburnum, with two kinds of flowers on same stalk,² & with what strikes as very curious (though I know it has been observed before) namely a flower bilaterally different: one other I observe has half its calyx purple. Is this not very curious & opposed to the morphological idea that a flower is a condensed continuous spire of leaves.³ Does it not look, as if flowers were normally bilateral; just in the same way as we now know that the radiating star-fish &c are bilateral? The case reminds me of those insects with exactly half having secondary male characters & the other half female.⁴

I received your letter the other day, full of curious facts, almost all new to me, on the coal-question:⁵ I will bring your note to Oxford & then we will talk it over: I feel pretty sure that some of your purely geological difficulties are easily solvable, & I can, I think, throw a very little light on the shell difficulty.—⁶ Pray put no stress in your mind about the alternate, neatly divided, strata of sandstone & shale &c &c— I feel the same sort of interest in the coal-question, as a man does watching two good players at play; he knowing little or nothing of the game.— I confess your last letter, (& this you will think very strange) has almost raised Binney’s notion (an old, growing hobby horse of mine) to the dignity of an hypothesis; though very far yet below the promotion of being properly called a theory.—⁷

I will bring the remainder of my species sketch to Oxford to go over your remarks.—⁸ I have lately been getting a good many rich facts.

I saw the poor old Dean of Manchester⁹ on Friday & he received me very kindly: he looked dreadfully ill & about an hour afterward died! I am most sincerely sorry for it.

Ever yours | C. Darwin

Do not trouble yourself to write.—