1855.] GERMINATION EXPERIMENTS. 55 



while. If my success seems to make it worth while, I will 

 send a seed list, to get you to mark some different classes 

 of seeds. To-day I replant the same seeds as above after 

 fourteen days' immersion. As many sea-currents go a mile 

 an hour, even in a week they might be transported 168 miles ; 

 the Gulf Stream is said to go fifty and sixty miles a day. 

 So much and too much on this head ; but my geese are 

 always swans. . . . 



C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker. 



[April 14th, 1855.] 



. . . You are a good man to confess that you expected the 

 cress would be killed in a week, for this gives me a nice little 

 triumph. The children at first were tremendously eager, and 

 asked me often, "whether I should beat Dr. Hooker!" The 

 cress and lettuce have just vegetated well after twenty-one 

 days' immersion. But I will write no more, which is a great 

 virtue in me ; for it is to me a very great pleasure telling you 

 everything I do. 



... If you knew some of the experiments (if they may be 

 so called) which] I am trying, you would have a good right 

 to sneer, for they are so absurd even in my opinion that I dare 

 not tell you. 



Have not some men a nice notion of experimentising ? 

 I have had a letter telling me that seeds must have great 

 power of resisting salt water, for otherwise how could they 

 get to islands ? This is the true way to solve a problem ! 



C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker. 



Down, [1855.] 



My dear Hooker, You have been a very good man to 

 exhale some of your satisfaction in writing two notes to me ; 



on the germination of seeds after treatment in salt water, appeared in the 

 * Linnean Soc. Journal,' 1857, p. 130. 



