To J. D. Hooker [16 April 1846]
Down Bromley Kent
Thursday
My dear Hooker
It would give me great pleasure to help you even in the construction of a sentence, though if you knew what a bad hand I am in building my own, you would apply to some better workman.— I find I am more disabled than usual in this instance from not knowing the precise facts.— In many respects I like your expression centrifugal, & it is a striking one which is a great advantage; I would use “centrifugally” & avoid the word force.— I doubt more about “centripetal”, as it appears that the Gnaphaliums tend to revert to more than one centre or type. I presume in the case of Senecio you actually mean that the species differ in rough proportion to the distance from some one country inhabited by your typical form; if you mean that the groups of species differ in different countries in proportion to their distances apart, I wd certainly altogether avoid “centrifugal”, as it irresistibly leads the mind to one type & tends to the notion of one central spot whence the species have spread; in this case one naturally wishes to know what is your typical form, & what is its country.— The whole case strikes me as eminently curious.— Shall you elsewhere enlarge on Gnaphalium? I do not quite understand why you state that the species return in each country to a few typical forms, instead of supposing that the same typical forms have been originally widely spread, & have in each country varied a little.—1
I wish with all my heart I could aid you; I am often myself driven half-desperate over a paragraph.— I have made one or two most trifling pencil suggestions: I do not understand what you mean by “its recognized states”.—
I shall be proud to append my name to your certificate on Wednesday.—2 I shall not be able to return your Books quite so quickly as I anticipated, as Bailliere has no copy of M. Tandon.3
Ever yours | C. Darwin
Would it not be adviseable when you remark on the confined ranges of species of Senecio, though belonging to a genus, of univers⟨al⟩ diffusion & numerous in species,—to point out why this is remarkable, viz in as much as the species of most genera which are large in number & have very wide ranges have themselves wide ranges.—4
Footnotes
Bibliography
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1844–7. Flora Antarctica. 1 vol. and 1 vol. of plates. Pt 1 of The botany of the Antarctic voyage of HM discovery ships Erebus and Terror in the years 1839–1843, under the command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross. London: Reeve Brothers.
Moquin-Tandon, Horace Bénédict Alfred. 1841. Eléments de tératologie végétale, ou, histoire abrégée des anomalies de l’organisation dans les végétaux. Paris: P.-J. Loss.
Summary
CD’s suggestions for improving a paragraph by JDH.
On distribution of certain species and their variation relative to a central, typical form.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-974
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- DAR 114: 60
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 974,” accessed on 13 September 2023, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-974.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 3