My dear Hooker

I heartily wish you joy of the Birth being over.¹ The Horners are all here; & the Breakfast party was charmed with the scientific & brief way of showing the sex of the new seedling.² This morning, also, I have received your magnificent present of the Flora Indica:³ I do not know how you publish it but if on your own responsibility it is a perfect shame that you do not make me buy a copy. (I see on title it is published by Authors.) What a splendidly long introduction; it will be, if it be like everything else you have written, to me most interesting & valuable. By the way I have just been reading to my mind a capital little Essay, (which must be by you) on the Madeira Flora in the London Journal of Botany,⁴ & I see you bring forward a crushing (as it appears to me) argument (as I, also, inferred from parallel facts in Wollaston’s Insects)⁵ against the Forbesian doctrine!⁶

Have you ever read Eyres Journey from Spencers Gulf to K. George Sound:⁷ it is very interesting; it impressed me with a very strong notion of the desert character of intermediate country. A desert ought to be a more effectual barrier to migration than an arm of the sea, like Basse’s St. on the idea of sea-borne seeds.—

Very many thanks for your writing to Daubeny;⁸ I am really anxious on that head. I shall, also, be glad of the seeds.

What an odd coincidence; I wrote some weeks ago to D^r. Bell Salter for seeds of the hybrid Geum!⁹ I wish simply to ascertain fertility according to Gærtner’s process.— Several of my most foolish experiments are failing just as might have been expected; but I sh^d. never have been easy without trying them.—

Adios | C. Darwin

Hurrah I got yesterday my 41^st Grass.—¹⁰

P.S. Next time you write, show a bold face, & say in how many years, you think, Charlock seed would probably all be dead.— A man told me the other day, of as I thought, a splendid instance,—& splendid it was for according to his evidence the seed came up alive out of the lower part of the London Clay!!! I disgusted him by telling him that Palms ought to have come up.—¹¹

You ask how far I go in attributing organisms to a common descent; I answer I know not; the way in which I intend treating the subject, is to show (as far as I can) the facts & arguments for & against the common descent of species of same genus; & then show how far the same arguments tell for or against forms, more & more widely different: & when we come to forms of different orders & classes, there remain only some such arguments as those which can perhaps be deduced from similar rudimentary structure, & very soon not an argument, is left.—

I think I am getting a mild case about Charlock seed;¹² but just as about salting, ill-luck to it, I cannot remember how many years you would allow that Charlock seed might live in the ground.—