Francis Darwin; see letter to J. D. Hooker, 1 December 1880 and n. 2. George Dickie was proposed for fellowship in the Royal Society of London by Hooker on 7 February 1881 and elected on 2 June 1881 (Royal Society archives, GB 117 EC/1881/09).

Thomas Henry Huxley.

In his article ‘A chapter in the history of the coniferæ’, Nature, 1 July 1880, pp. 199–202, John Starkie Gardner hypothesised that trees of the genus Araucaria, which was restricted to the southern hemisphere, originated and became differentiated in the northern hemisphere. A letter from Samuel Haughton published in Nature, 7 October 1880, pp. 532–3, referred to Gardner’s article and challenged geologists of the uniformitarian school to explain how the climate of Bournemouth could have been similar to that of Queensland, Australia. Letters to the journal continued the discussion on climate (see Nature, 4 November 1880, pp. 8–9; 18 November 1880, pp. 53–4; 2 December 1880, pp. 98–9). Further letters on the topic by Gardner, Haughton, and others appeared in Nature up to 24 February 1881. Araucaria cunninghamii (Moreton Bay pine) is a tree species native to parts of New Guinea and Australia (Queensland).

Asa and Jane Loring Gray had been in Paris from around October 1880; they travelled through Italy with Hooker and his wife, Hyacinth Hooker, in the spring of 1881 (J. L. Gray ed. 1893, p. 701).