DAEWIN'S ESTIMATE OF HOOKER 489 



bond between them was as strong as ever. In 1881 Darwin 

 writes : 



Your letter has cheered me, and the world does not look 

 a quarter so black as it did when I wrote before. Your 

 friendly words are worth their weight in gold. 



One of the starting points of Darwin's * presumptuous work' 

 had been the striking impression made on him by the distri- 

 bution of the Galapagos organisms ; hence his eager desire 

 to know whether the botany of this isolated group was as 

 suggestive as the zoology. 



The correspondence began in December ; by January the 

 momentous confession was made : 



At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost con- 

 vinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that 

 species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. 



He had instantly recognised Hooker's capacity. ' I am 

 pleased to think,' he writes on Hooker's rejection at Edinburgh 

 in 1845, ' that after having read a few of your letters, I never 

 once doubted the position you will ultimately hold among 

 European Botanists.' And in the next letter, * It is absurdly 

 unjust to speak of you as a mere systematist.' More than this, 

 he recognised that Hooker also believed, as he put it in the 

 Preface to his Flora Antarctica, that * Geographical Distribution 

 will be the key which will unlock the mystery of the species.' 



But true views of geographical distribution were impossible 

 without full and accurate Floras. Here no doubt was a re- 

 doubled motive for the ardour with which Hooker flung him- 

 self into his unending labours, the extent of which called forth 

 the first of many anxious warnings from Darwin as early as 

 1845, to beware of overwork, doctor though he be, 1 and a novel 

 prescription, ' You ought to have a wife to stop your working 

 too much, as Mrs. Lyell peremptorily stops Lyell.' The per- 

 fecting of his great Floras involved the re-examination of 

 his vast materials and the more or less incomplete work of 

 his predecessors, so as to sweep away the existing synonymy 

 and overlapping, and to readjust the systematic details by 



