From Hugh Falconer 3 January [1863]1
21 Park Crescent N.W.
3d. Jany.
My Dear Darwin
A happy new year to you—and many happy returns of the season to you and yours!
I ought long ago to have replied to your query about cases of dimorphism.2 I wanted to overhaul my notes—and see if they contained any thing worth sending to you. But I have found nothing sufficiently precise to bear upon the case. There is a large showy species of Linum, L. trigynum, common in India—with large yellow flowers—which is very variable in the number of the styles—and if my recollection is right—in their development also.3 You could easily get the plant through Hooker4—and it would not trouble you much to rear it, as it flowers with Green House heat. I have a notion that it might yield you something in your line worth observing.
Nor can I give you a more satisfactory reply, to your query, about ‘sporting buds’5 I have no case, that I can bring to mind.
I was sorry to hear from your brother, of the efflorescence which has been troubling you—and which he tells me is one of the reasons, that has prevented you from coming to town.6 You were never more missed—at any rate by me—for there has been this grand Darwinian case of the Archæopteryx for you and me to have a long jaw about. Had the Solenhofen quarries been commissioned—by august command—to turn out a strange being ‘a la Darwin—it could not have executed the behest more handsomely—than in the Archæopteryx.7 This is sober earnest—and that you should not have been in to town—and see it and talk over it with me, is a criminal proceeding. You are not to put your faith in the slip-shod and hasty account of it given to the Royal Society.8 It is a much more astounding creature—than has entered into the the conception of the describer—who compares it with the Raptores & Passeres. & Gallinaceæ, as a round winged (like the last) ‘Bird of flight.’9 It actually had at least two long free digits to the fore limb—and those digits bearing claws as long and strong as those on the hind leg. Couple this with the long tail—and other odd things,—which I reserve for a jaw—and you will have the sort of misbegotten-bird-creature—the dawn of an oncoming conception ‘a la Darwin.10 But I will not say more about it till you show yourself in town. A ludicrous event has turned up. John Evans appears to have hit upon the very obvious cast of the interior of the skull—undetected by the describer, and before Owen’s paper is out, we have Mr. Mackie describing the hemispheres—and optic lobes of Archæopteryx! Look at the Geologist.11
The Germans generally have a spite at Darwinianism. It killed poor Wagner. but on his death-bed, he took consolation in denouncing it as a phantasia.12 Even Von Martius13 has a shot at you. I send the paper containing it—being a sort of éloge upon Wagner.14 Kindly return it when done with.
You will have seen my elephant paper out in the Nat Hist. Review15—with some of the evidence given which you thought to be wanting in what I sent you. I have not altered the latter, but I have gone into the value of the American measure of variety—and some other points.16
Lyell is hard at work in finishing his book.17 I fancy he has had much to alter and adjust—and I have got a quagmire-ish kind of feeling, that he—and the Subject Homo—will be bogged in it—alike.
My Dear Darwin | Yours very Sinly | H Falconer
P.S. The last parag. is entre nous—so please do not repeat it.—
Footnotes
Bibliography
ADB: Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. Under the auspices of the Historical Commission of the Royal Academy of Sciences. 56 vols. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. 1875–1912.
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
De Beer, Gavin. 1954. Archeopteryx lithographica. A study based upon the British Museum specimen. London: British Museum (Natural History).
Desmond, Adrian. 1982. Archetypes and ancestors: palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. London: Blond & Briggs.
Desmond, Ray. 1994. Dictionary of British and Irish botanists and horticulturists including plant collectors, flower painters and garden designers. New edition, revised with the assistance of Christine Ellwood. London: Taylor & Francis and the Natural History Museum. Bristol, Pa.: Taylor & Francis.
‘Dimorphic condition in Primula’: On the two forms, or dimorphic condition, in the species of Primula, and on their remarkable sexual relations. By Charles Darwin. [Read 21 November 1861.] Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany) 6 (1862): 77–96. [Collected papers 2: 45–63.]
DSB: Dictionary of scientific biography. Edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie and Frederic L. Holmes. 18 vols. including index and supplements. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1970–90.
Evans, Joan. 1943. Time and chance. The story of Arthur Evans and his forebears. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Evans, John. 1865. On portions of a cranium and of a jaw, in the slab containing the fossil remains of the Archæopteryx. Natural History Review n.s. 5: 415–21.
Gregory, Frederick. 1977. Scientific materialism in nineteenth century Germany. Dordrecht, Netherlands, and Boston, Mass.: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Mackie, Samuel Joseph. 1863. The aeronauts of the Solenhofen age. Geologist 6: 1–8.
Martius, Karl Friedrich Philipp von. 1862. Denkrede auf Joh. Andreas Wagner. Gehalten in der öffentlichen Sitzung am 28. November 1862. Munich: [Könighlich-bayerische] Akademie [der Wissenschaften].
Origin: On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray. 1859.
Rupke, Nicolaas A. 1994. Richard Owen, Victorian naturalist. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press.
‘Two forms in species of Linum’: On the existence of two forms, and on their reciprocal sexual relation, in several species of the genus Linum. By Charles Darwin. [Read 5 February 1863.] Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany) 7 (1864): 69–83. [Collected papers 2: 93–105.]
Wagner, Johann Andreas. 1862. On a new fossil reptile supposed to be furnished with feathers. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 3d ser. 9: 261–7. Translated by W. S. Dallas. [Originally published as ‘Ein neues, angeblich mit Vogelfedern versehenes Reptil’ Sitzungsberichte der königl. bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München 2 (1861): 146–54.]
Summary
Describes an astounding "sort of mis-begotten-bird-creature", the Archaeopteryx, a grand Darwinian case.
His elephant paper is out in Natural History Review [(1863): 43–114].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-3899
- From
- Hugh Falconer
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- London, Park Crescent, 21
- Source of text
- DAR 164: 10
- Physical description
- ALS 7pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 3899,” accessed on 1 September 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3899.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 11