I have some little
doubt about the "Principles of Geology." People here do not like your
"enduring value": it sounds almost an anticlimax. They do not much like
my "last (or endure) as long as science lasts." If one reads a sentence
often enough, it always becomes odious.

God help you.

LETTER 574. TO OSWALD HEER. Down, March 8th [1875].

I thank you for your very kind and deeply interesting letter of March
1st, received yesterday, and for the present of your work, which no
doubt I shall soon receive from Dr. Hooker. (574/1. "Flora Fossilis
Arctica," Volume III., 1874, sent by Prof. Heer through Sir Joseph
Hooker.) The sudden appearance of so many Dicotyledons in the Upper
Chalk appears to me a most perplexing phenomenon to all who believe
in any form of evolution, especially to those who believe in extremely
gradual evolution, to which view I know that you are strongly opposed.
(574/2. The volume referred to contains a paper on the Cretaceous
Flora of the Arctic Zone (Spitzbergen and Greenland), in which several
dicotyledonous plants are described. In a letter written by Heer to
Darwin the author speaks of a species of poplar which he describes as
the oldest Dicotyledon so far recorded.) The presence of even one true
Angiosperm in the Lower Chalk makes me inclined to conjecture that
plants of this great division must have been largely developed in
some isolated area, whence owing to geographical changes, they at last
succeeded in escaping, and spread quickly over the world. (574/3. No
satisfactory evidence has so far been brought forward of the occurrence
of fossil Angiosperms in pre-Cretaceous rocks. The origin of the
Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons remains one of the most difficult and
attractive problems of Palaeobotany.) (574/4. See Letters 395, 398.) But
I fully admit that this case is a great difficulty in the views which I
hold. Many as have been the wonderful discoveries in Geology during the
last half-century, I think none have exceeded in interest your results
with respect to the plants which formerly existed in the Arctic regions.
How I wish that similar collections could be made in the Southern
hemisphere, for instance in Kerguelen's Land.

The death of Sir C. Lyell is a great loss to science, but I do not think
to himself, for it was scarcely possible that he could have retained his
mental powers, and he would have suffered dreadfully from their loss.
The last time I saw him he was speaking with th