Dear very old Darwin

because it is so long since I have written to you that, if alive, you must now be really very old.— I have such lots to write to you about myself, that I put off & off the boring you over & over again. Then too I have been worked to death with that British Flora, & all manner of things. & now Willy is back from New Zealand & that costs time & thought—² as this last is the best news I shall begin with it— the lad is “fat & well-liking” & apparently not in the least hurt by his rough life & voyagering— he is as nice & simple as ever; & beyond that a very few Colonial phrases have replaced many school ones, & his voice is breaking, he is quite unchanged in mind & manners. I quite expected that some roughness at least would have resulted from contact with rough people, but I do not find a trace of it— Hector certainly managed splendidly for him, I am under a very great obligation to him.³ Mentally I find little development, but he has ability & if I could only get him to take the smallest interest in any one subject, I should not despair. I have not settled what to do with him: he enjoyed his life, & talks most nicely of all the people he was thrown into company with,—but has no wish to go abroad again.

Have I told you of the jolly tour I took with Huxley to the Eifel, with my boy Charlie, to whom H. has taken a great fancy— we dabbled a little in the Geology, which is most curious, took long walks, ate very heartily & came back quite as well as we went.⁴

I am now in a frightful state of mind. The R.S. have referred to me Dawsons Bakerian lecture & I find it so full of perfect trash that I am compelled to recommend it’s non publication, it will be a knock-down blow to the poor man— The systematic part is very meagre indeed, the vegetable anatomy miserable & often utterly wrong; the affinities more often mere guess work, than not; & as to the theories & speculations, they would make your hair stand on end.⁵

What do you say to the Appalachian chain being “the centre of Plant-distribution from the Carboniferous era onwards” and the N.E. corner of that chain being “the point of origin of the Palæozoic Flora”.— Dawson’s discovery of many fossil plants of the Carboniferous type, low down in the Devonian, is a very excellent one, & if he had but contented himself with the proper summation of that, & accompanied it with sufficient evidence his paper would have been a valuable one but he has overloaded the systematic portion with generic & specific names from the merest scraps of tissue, & utterly misunderstood the structure of the most complete specimens. Then too he has page after page of the wildest speculations upon Archaic & synthetic types, on origination of species by “embryonic retardation & advance”, on “conditions of compression & expansion”, upon “advanced & postponed maturity”— & on “tendency of synthetic types to become specialized in the direction of their constituents elements” upon “types comparable to a chemists allotropic forms” & so forth. The blessed lecture cost me 2$\frac{1}{2}$ days hard work, & I am excessively sorry for the poor man, whose reception was enthusiastic by Lyell & Murchison,⁶ & whose fall will be proportionally heavy & headlong. He has brought the paper all the way from Canada & was invited to make the Bakerian Lecture of it! Altogether the affair has cut me up terribly, & I would rather have burnt my fingers than performed so hateful a duty.— It is a very small consolation, that D^r. D. has a wonderfully good opinion of—himself. He & his wife spent half a day here;— she must have been very pretty, & that, to me, makes matters worse— & worse still, their son is deformed & I know that he too will feel hurt—⁷ The curse of Cain will cleave to me.— By the way he pooh-poohed my Greenland paper,—⁸ this has only just come into my head, & does not mend matters— for he will if he hears of it, put my sinister report down to spite, whereas I would fain have heaped coals of fire on the poor devils head by a gushing (not crushing) report—

We have had Cinthea Symonds⁹ here for a fortnight & I still find her very charming— My Uncle John Gunn has just returned from the Mediterranean, he had collected largely fossils at Marathon & Electra in Greece, but they were all stolen off his caleche¹⁰ at Naples!— what a sell for the theives—

Charlie has come out top of his form at Marlborough,¹¹ & is promoted— I cannot tell you how happy this has made me.

I am at a monograph of Nepenthes for DC. Prod. & then shall go to long suspended Gen. Plant.—¹²

Do write me a line & tell me what you are doing & how you all fare.

Ever Yr aff | J D Hooker