The Dell, Grays, Essex. July 21, 1875.
Dear Darwin,—Many thanks for your kindness in sending me a copy of your new book.[100] Being very busy I have only had time to dip into it yet. The account of Utricularia is most marvellous, and quite new to me. I'm rather surprised that you do not make any remarks on the origin of these extraordinary contrivances for capturing insects. Did you think they were too obvious? I daresay there is no difficulty, but I feel sure they will be seized on as inexplicable by Natural Selection, and your silence on the [pg 285]point will be held to show that you consider them so! The contrivance in Utricularia and Dionæa, and in fact in Drosera too, seems fully as great and complex as in Orchids, but there is not the same motive force. Fertilisation and cross-fertilisation are important ends enough to lead to any modification, but can we suppose mere nourishment to be so important, seeing that it is so easily and almost universally obtained by extrusion of roots and leaves? Here are plants which lose their roots and leaves to acquire the same results by infinitely complex modes! What a wonderful and long-continued series of variations must have led up to the perfect "trap" in Utricularia, while at any stage of the process the same end might have been gained by a little more development of roots and leaves, as in 9,999 plants out of 10,000!
Is this an imaginary difficulty, or do you mean to deal with it in future editions of the "Origin"?—Believe me yours very faithfully,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
The Dell, Grays, Essex. November 7, 1875.
Dear Darwin,—Many thanks for your beautiful little volume on "Climbing Plants," which forms a most interesting companion to your "Orchids" and "Insectivorous Plants." I am sorry to see that you have not this time given us the luxury of cut edges.
I am in the midst of printing and proof-sheets, which are wearisome in the extreme from the mass of names and statistics I have been obliged to introduce, and which will, I fear, make my book insufferably dull to all but zoological specialists.
My trust is in my pictures and maps to catch the public.
Hoping yourself and all your family are quite well, believe me yours very faithfully,