134 EVOLUTION [CiiAr. Ill 



Letter 87 range. Naturally I doubt a little his remarks about diver- 

 gence, 1 and about domestic races being produced under nature 

 without selection. It would take much to persuade me that 

 a Pouter Pigeon, or a Carrier, etc., could have been produced 

 by the mere laws of variation without long continued selec- 

 tion, though each little enlargement of crop and beak are 

 due to variation. I demur greatly to his comparison of the 

 products of sinking and rising islands 2 ; in the Indian Ocean 

 he compares exclusively many rising volcanic and sinking 

 coral islands. The latter have a most peculiar soil, and are 

 excessively small in area, and are tenanted by very few 

 species ; moreover, such low coral islands have probably 

 been often, during their subsidence, utterly submerged, and 

 restocked by plants from other islands. In the Pacific Ocean 

 the floras of all the best cases are unknown. The comparison 

 ought to have been exclusively between rising and fringed 

 volcanic islands, and sinking and encircled volcanic islands. 

 I have read Naudin, 3 and Hooker agrees that he does not 

 even touch on my views. 



Letter 88 J. D. Hooker to C. Darwin. 



[1S59 or 1S60.] 



I have had another talk with Bcntham, who is greatly 

 agitated by your book : evidently the stern, keen intellect is 

 aroused, and he finds that it is too late to halt between two 

 opinions. How it will go we shall see. I am intensely 

 interested in what we shall come to, and never broach the 

 subject to him. I finished the geological evidence chapters 

 yesterday ; they are very fine and very striking, but I cannot 

 see they arc such forcible objections as you still hold them to 

 be. I would say that you still in your secret soul underrate 



1 " Variation is effected by graduated changes ; and the tendency of 

 vanel'ies, both in nature and under cultivation, when further varying, is 

 rather to depart more and more widely from the original type than to 

 revert to it." On the margin Darwin wrote : " Without selection 

 doubtful " {loc. a'/., p. viii). 



2 " I venture to anticipate that a study of the vegetation of the islands 

 witn reference to the peculiarities of the generic types on the one hand, 

 and of the geological conditions (whether as rising or sinking) on the 

 other, may, in the present state of our knowledge, advance other subjects 

 of distribution and variation considerably " {loc. cit., p. xv). 



3 Naudin, Rdvue Hortkole, 185; 



