milk and water. Have you read 'Cosmos' yet? The English translation is wretched, and the semi-metaphysico-politico descriptions in the first part are barely intelligible; but I think the volcanic discussion well worth your attention, it has astonished me by its vigour and information. I grieve to find Humboldt an adorer of Von Buch, with his classification of volcanos, craters of elevation, &c., &c., and carbonic acid gas atmosphere. He is indeed a wonderful man. I hope to get home in a fortnight and stick to my wearyful South America till I finish it. I shall be very anxious to hear how you get on from the Horners, but you must not think of wasting your time by writing to me.. We shall miss, indeed, your visits to Down, and I shall feel a lost man in London without my morning "house of call" at Hart Street. . . Believe me, my dear Lyell, ever yours, C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker. Down, Farnborough, Kent, Thursday, September, 1846. MY DEAR HOOKER,—I hope this letter will catch you at Clifton, but I have been prevented writing by being unwell, and having had the Horners here as visitors, which, with my abominable press-work, has fully occupied my time. It is, indeed, a long time since we wrote to each other; though, I beg to tell you, that I wrote last, but what about I cannot remember, except, I know, it was after reading your last numbers,* and I sent you a uniquely laudatory epistle, considering it was from a man who hardly knows a Daisy from a Dandelion to a professed Botanist. I cannot remember what papers have given me the impression, but I have that, which you state to be the case, firmly fixed on my mind, namely, the little chemical importance of the soil to its vegetation. What a strong fact it is, * Sir J. D. Hooker's Antarctic Botany. as R. Brown once remarked to me, of certain plants being calcareous ones here, which are not so under a more favourable climate on the Continent, or the reverse, for I forget which; but you, no doubt, will know to what I refer. Bythe-way, there are some such cases in Herbert's paper in the 'Horticultural Journal.'* Have you read it it struck me as extremely original, and bears directly on your present researches. To a non-botanist the chalk has the most peculiar aspect of any flora in England; why will you not come here to make your observations? We go to Southampton, if my courage and stomach do not fail, for the Brit. Assoc. (Do you not consider it your duty to be there?) And why cannot you come here afterward and work? . . . . THE MONOGRAPH OF THE CIRRIPEDIA, October 1846 to October 1854. [Writing to Sir J. D. Hooker in 1845, my father says: “I hope this next summer to finish my South American Geology, then to get out a little Zoology, and hurrah for my species work. . . . This passage serves to show that he had at this time no intention of making an exhaustive study of the Cirripedes. Indeed it would seem that his original intention was, as I learn from Sir J. D. Hooker, merely to work out one special problem. This is quite in keeping with the following passage in the Autobiography: "When on the coast of Chile, I found a most curious form, which burrowed into the shells of Concholepas, and which differed so much from all other Cirripedes that I had to form a new sub-order for its sole reception. . . . To understand the structure of my new Cirripede I had to examine and dissect many of the common forms; and this gradually led me on to take up the whole group." In later years he seems to have felt some doubt as to the value of these eight years of work,—for instance when *Journal of the Horticultural Society,' 1846. † Sir J. D. Hooker was at this time attending to polymorphism, variability, &c. he wrote in his Autobiography-"My work was of considerable use to me, when I had to discuss in the 'Origin of Species,' the principles of a natural classification. Nevertheless I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time." Yet I learn from Sir J. D. Hooker that he certainly recognised at the time its value to himself as systematic training. Sir Joseph writes to me: "Your father recognised three stages in his career as a biologist: the mere collector at Cambridge; the collector and observer in the Beagle, and for some years afterwards; and the trained naturalist after, and only after the Cirripede work. That he was a thinker all along is true enough, and there is a vast deal in his writings previous to the Cirripedes that a trained naturalist could but emulate. . . . He often alluded to it as a valued discipline, and added that even the 'hateful' work of digging out synonyms, and of describing, not only improved his methods but opened his eyes to the difficulties and merits of the works of the dullest of cataloguers. One result was that he would never allow a depreciatory remark to pass unchallenged on the poorest class of scientific workers, provided that their work was honest, and good of its kind. I have always regarded it as one of the finest traits of his character, this generous appreciation of the hod-men of science, and of their labours . . . and it was monographing the Barnacles that brought it about." Professor Huxley allows me to quote his opinion as to the value of the eight years given to the Cirripedes : "In my opinion your sagacious father never did a wiser thing than when he devoted himself to the years of patient toil which the Cirripede-book cost him. "Like the rest of us, he had no proper training in biological science, and it has always struck me as a remarkable instance of his scientific insight, that he saw the necessity of giving himself such training, and of his courage, that he did not shirk the labour of obtaining it. "The great danger which besets all men of large speculative faculty, is the temptation to deal with the accepted state ments of facts in natural science, as if they were not only correct, but exhaustive; as if they might be dealt with deductively, in the same way as propositions in Euclid may be dealt with. In reality, every such statement, however true it may be, is true only relatively to the means of observation and the point of view of those who have enunciated it. So far it may be depended upon. But whether it will bear every speculative conclusion that may be logically deduced from it, is quite another question. "Your father was building a vast superstructure upon the foundations furnished by the recognised facts of geological and biological science. In Physical Geography, in Geology proper, in Geographical Distribution, and in Paleontology, he had acquired an extensive practical training during the voyage of the Beagle. He knew of his own knowledge the way in which the raw materials of these branches of science are acquired, and was therefore a most competent judge of the speculative strain they would bear. That which he needed, after his return to England, was a corresponding acquaintance with Anatomy and Development, and their relation to Taxonomy-and he acquired this by his Cirripede work. "Thus, in my apprehension, the value of the Cirripede monograph lies not merely in the fact that it is a very admirable piece of work, and constituted a great addition to positive knowledge, but still more in the circumstance that it was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which manifested itself in everything your father wrote afterwards, and saved him from endless errors of detail. "So far from such work being a loss of time, I believe it would have been well worth his while, had it been practicable, to have supplemented it by a special study of embryology and physiology. His hands would have been greatly strengthened thereby when he came to write out sundry chapters of the 'Origin of Species.' But of course in those days it was almost impossible for him to find facilities for such work." No one can look at the two volumes on the recent Cirripedes, of 399 and 684 pages respectively (not to speak of the volumes on the fossil species), without being struck by the immense amount of detailed work which they contain. The forty plates, some of them with thirty figures, and the fourteen pages of index in the two volumes together, give some rough idea of the labour spent on the work.* The state of knowledge, as regards the Cirripedes, was most unsatisfactory at the time that my father began to work at them. As an illustration of this fact, it may be mentioned that he had even to re-organise the nomenclature of the group, or, as he expressed it, he "unwillingly found it indispensable to give names to several valves, and to some few of the softer parts of Cirripedes." It is interesting to learn from his diary the amount of time which he gave to different genera. Thus the genus Chthamalus, the description of which occupies. twenty-two pages, occupied him for thirty-six days; Coronula took nineteen days, and is described in twenty-seven pages. Writing to Fitz-Roy, he speaks of being "for the last half-month daily hard at work in dissecting a little animal about the size of a pin's head, from the Chonos archipelago, and I could spend another month, and daily see more beautiful structure." Though he became excessively weary of the work before the end of the eight years, he had much keen enjoyment in the course of it. Thus he wrote to Sir J. D. Hooker (1847 ?) : "As you say, there is an extraordinary pleasure in pure observation; not but what I suspect the pleasure in this case is rather derived from comparisons forming in one's mind with allied structures. After having been so long employed in writing my old geological observations, it is delightful to use one's eyes and fingers again." It was, in fact, a return to * The reader unacquainted with Zoology will find some account of the more interesting results in Mr. Romane's article on "Charles Darwin" ('Nature' Series, 1882). + Vol. i. p. 3. |