My dear F.

I cannot answer your question about Drysdale & D.—² I remember that the organisms on which they chiefly worked were flagellate & were developed from decayed fish.— I think the papers were published in the J. of Microscop. Soc. 4 or 5 years ago.— I suppose that we have the papers at home. & I could look for them when there.³

We leave this place on the 4^th & reach home on the 5^th. & are to have a special engine from Willesden to Herne Hill.— Good Lord forgive me for such extravagance, but it is not my fault.—⁴ I certainly do not think what you have said about movements of multicellular & unicellular organisms too strong.⁵ You may be proved wrong of course; but the probability seems to me very strong that there never was an entire change in the means of movement, when so simple a change originated as a unicellular becoming a multicellular organism.— There seems to me no great improbability in sugar or acid, as well as water, accumulating in the stretched side. I wish that I had attended more to the movements of the coloured fluid in the tentacles of Drosera, which I saw, when the basal part was bending.—⁶

I shall like much to see the mucor stolo: moving like a worm.— The Cress experiment seems a very nice one.—⁷

I have had a very interesting letter from Hannay of Glasgow (the diamond man) to whom I wrote suggesting something about his diamonds, & urging him to observe the production of any protein substance. He tells me a wonderful fact, that under great pressure the most intense heat will not decompose albumen!⁸

Might not organisms have lived on our globe when it was red hot & pressed by an atmosphere a 100,000 heavier than our present one?!!!— I suppose that this fact is strictly private. I had suggested to him to place raw meat in his iron-tubes & thus get the carbon & nitrogen for his diamonds, & to observe what chemical product was formed in his tubes after they had cooled.—⁹

M^rs Ruck has just started. Bessy must tell you Bernard’s speeches to M^rs R. about the persons he knows best.¹⁰

Good Bye I must go on with my proof-sheets. I have had a very long & curious letter from a Portugeese, who is working on the distribution & evolution of the land-shells of the Azores, of which he is a native!¹¹ Here is a prodigy—

Farewell | C. Darwin