96 CHARLES DARWIN. 



all through this period he was making fresh observa- 

 tions whenever an opportunity occurred. Thus we 

 find him writing to Hooker about the thistle-down 

 blown out to sea and then back to shore again ; about 

 the migrations of slave-making ants which he had 

 been watching ; about the bending of the pistil into 

 the line of the gangway leading to the honey when 

 this latter " is secreted at one point of the circle of 

 the corolla," etc. And on March 2nd, 1859, he writes 

 about " an odd, though very little, tact " : Large nuts 

 had been found in the crops of some nestling Petrels 

 at St. Kilda, which he suspected the parent birds had 

 picked up from the Gulf Stream. He arranged lor 

 one of these to be sent, and asked Hooker for the 

 name and country. He asks forgiveness for the 

 trouble, "for it is a funny little fact after my own 

 heart." The nuts turned out to be West Indian. 



When the proposal for publication had been ac- 

 cepted by Murray and the manuscript was assuming its 

 final form, the letters to Hooker were more frequent 

 than ever. Writing on May llth, 1859, Darwin again 

 raises the question of the relative importance of varia- 

 tion and selection. 



"I imagine from some expressions . . . that you look at- 

 variability as some necessary contingency with organisms, 

 and further that there is some necessary tendency in the 

 variability to go on diverging in character or degree. If you 

 do, I do not agree." 



Darwin's splendid confidence in the future appears 

 in a letter written about this time (September 2, 1859) 



