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. 29 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.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1862d. On Welwitschia, a new genus of Gnetaceæ. [Read 16 January and 18 December 1862.] Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 24 (1863–4): 1–48.
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
- ALS 4pp †
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 3690,” accessed on 1 September 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3690.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 10