My dear Hooker.

Thanks about Calanthe: it must be the old Vaucher, so I am answered.—² Thanks, also, for the aristocratic note about the four B^s.³ Also for your own & Bates’ letter, now returned.⁴ They are both excellent; you have, I think said all that can be said against direct effect of conditions & capitally put. But I still stick to my own & Bates’ side. Nevertheless I am pleased to attribute little to conditions; & I wish I had done, what you suggest, started on the fundamental principle of variation being an innate principle; & afterwards made a few remarks, showing that hereafter perhaps this principle would be explicable.— Whenever my Book on poultry, pigeons, Ducks & Rabbits is published, with all the measurements & weighings of bones, I think you will see that “use & disuse” at least have some effect.—⁵ I do not believe in perfect reversion.—⁶

I rather demur to your doctrine of “centrifugal variation”;⁷ I suppose you do not agree with, or do not remember my doctrine of the good of diversification; this seems to me amply to account for variation being centrifugal— if you forget it, look at this discussion (p. 117 of 3^d edit); it was the last point, which, according to my notions, I made out, & it has always pleased me.—⁸ It is really curiously satisfactory to me to see so able a man as Bates (& yourself) believing more fully in nat. selection, than I think I even do myself. By the way I always boast to you, & so I think owen will be wrong that my Book will be forgotten in 10 years,⁹ for a French Edit is now going through the press¹⁰ & a 2^nd German Edit. wanted.—¹¹ Your long letter to Bates has set my head working & makes me repent of the nine months spent on Orchids;¹² though I know not why I should not have amused myself on them, as well as slaving on bones of Ducks & pigeons &c. The Orchids have been splendid sport, though at present I am fearfully sick of them.

I enclose a waste copy of woodcut of Mormodes ignea; I wish you had a plant at Kew; for I am sure its wonderful mechanism & structure would amuse you. Is it not curious the way the labellum sits on the top of the column; here insects alight & are beautifully shot, when they touch a certain sensitive point, by the pollinia.—¹³ How kindly you have helped me in my work. Farewell my dear old fellow.—

We have been miserably anxious about Horace, but he has been a little better for two days.¹⁴ One day I expected every minute he would go into convulsions or become insane.

Farewell | C. Darwin