From J. D. Hooker 20 August 1862
Kew
Aug. 20/62
My dear Darwin
I can well appreciate your frightful suspense— There is nothing my wife dreads so much, or I for her, as an attack of scarlet fever.1 You know perhaps that Belladonna is a prophylactic in opinion of good medical men—a drop or 2 of tincture in water, 3 times a day. Poor little Lenny, I did not know he had been ill— I thought it was Horace alone—who had made you uneasy lately.2
We are all pretty well, my wife remarkably so, though she has a little palpitation & short breath occasionally—3 her aunt (Miss Henslow) is here now suffering much from it, so it is completely hereditary,4 & I recognize a tendency to it in one of my boys. I have had a great deal to do since my return with Examinations—all over now,5 & had some very hard work with this Welwitschia & its pollen tubes, corpuscula, Embryo-sacs, & all that horrid complexity of Gymnospermous Embryology.6 I have sat 5 hours together at microscope at least 6 times lately, besides all the odd days & hours I have spent over it, & am very far from finished yet. Every part is so curious, how the pollen gets to nucleus of ovule is absolutely unintelligiable— dozens of pollen grains, get down a microscopic tube nearly inch long & settle on top of nucleus— they must get in before tube elongates, but if so the development of ovule is very difft from other plants. By good luck just as I am at work on it, I receive 5 splendid specimens from a Mr Monteiro of Luando,7 to whom I wrote 5 months ago asking him to send down the Coast to Cape Negro for it, & like a trump he has done so! I have just written to thank him, sent him a few books, & asked him for Honey comb & bees.8 I will also ask Mann for these—to whom I am writing—9
We (wife Willy10 & self) go to Scotland on Saturday, & shall be back 15th. Sept.
Lindley11 sent me yesterday two totally difft. flowers from one spike of Vanda Lowei—12 I have sent them to be drawn & bottled.
What do you think of Ramsay’s glacial Lake origin?13 I like it in print, but did not on hearsay—but am not mechanic enough to rely on my own opinion— We are quite overrun with visitors, & never a day alone.
Ever Yrs affec | J D Hooker
Huxley is about to publish a [curious] amusing as well as clever book on Monkey Man14 it will be a great success. I am hugely pleased with A Grays Review of my Arctic Essay15
CD annotations
Footnotes
Bibliography
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 27 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Desmond, Ray. 1995. Kew: the history of the Royal Botanic Gardens. London: Harvill Press with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Jenyns, Leonard. 1862. Memoir of the Rev. John Stevens Henslow, late rector of Hitcham, and professor of botany in the University of Cambridge. London: John Van Voorst.
Variation: The variation of animals and plants under domestication. By Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray. 1868.
Summary
Observations on Welwitschia.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-3690
- From
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Kew
- Source of text
- DAR 101: 52–3
- Physical description
- 4pp †
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 3690,” accessed on 5 March 2021, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-3690.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 10