life.

A sentence from a letter to Hooker written in 1845 shows, quite as well as
more serious utterances, how quickly the acquaintance grew into friendship.

"Farewell! What a good thing is community of tastes! I feel as if I had
known you for fifty years. Adios." And in illustration of the permanence
of the sympathetic bond between them, we quote a letter of 1881 written
forty-two years after the first meeting with Sir Joseph in Trafalgar Square
(see "Life and Letters," II., page 19). Mr. Darwin wrote: "Your letter
has cheered me, and the world does not look a quarter so black this morning
as it did when I wrote before. Your friendly words are worth their weight
in gold.")


LETTER 13. TO J.D. HOOKER.
Down, Thursday [January 11th, 1844].

My dear Sir

I must write to thank you for your last letter, and to tell you how much
all your views and facts interest me. I must be allowed to put my own
interpretation on what you say of "not being a good arranger of extended
views"--which is, that you do not indulge in the loose speculations so
easily started by every smatterer and wandering collector. I look at a
strong tendency to generalise as an entire evil.

What you say of Mr. Brown is humiliating; I had suspected it, but would not
allow myself to believe in such heresy. Fitz-Roy gave him a rap in his
preface (13/1. In the preface to the "Surveying Voyages of the 'Adventure'