Summary

Responding to GG’s offer to aid CD’s natural history researches on New Zealand, CD suggests that limestone caverns should be examined for fossils and that observations on the presence and range of erratic boulders in New Zealand would be very valuable.

Summary

Description of the months at Tierra del Fuego. His first sight of the primitive Fuegians. Geological and zoological observations and specimens.

The Falklands: geological and zoological observations.

Convinced the [Megatherium] sent to Royal College of Physicians [by Woodbine Parish] belongs to same formation as bones he sent home.

Summary

Asks whether Crustacea from temperate parts of the Southern Hemisphere are more strongly analogous to those in same latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere than are Arctic to Antarctic Crustacea.

Discusses astonishing finds of mammalian and reptilian remains in Purbeck beds; notes reactions of Lyell.

Has doubts about Richard Owen’s recent classification of mammals [J. Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond. (Zool.) 2 (1858): 1–37].

Works away [on Natural selection].

Asa Gray has given valuable assistance.

Summary

JDH’s grandfather’s death.

Collecting testimonials for the Edinburgh chair.

Summary

Urges CD to visit Flores Island near Montevideo if he has not already done so. Describes formation of greenstone and the granite formations on small islands in the Uruguay channel.

Sends specimens from Pôrto Alegre [Brazil] for identification by CD.

Summary

In reply to CD’s query [see 2072], JDD describes what little is known about the crustacea of the Antarctic and southern lands.

Knows of no species of the cold temperate south identical with those of the cold temperate north.

Summary

Thanks for CD’s experimental suggestions. Will count seeds of hybrid crosses.

Requests suggestions for Edinburgh Botanical Society expedition to British Columbia.

Summary

Discusses CD’s and J. D. Hooker’s letters to Lyell concerning Louis Agassiz’s theory of the glaciation of the Amazon basin in Brazil.

Summary

Thanks for use of CD’s collection.

Comments and queries on the botany of the Southern Hemisphere.

Looks forward to seeing CD’s Galapagos plants.

Summary

A French collector [Alcide d’Orbigny] has been at the Rio Negro and will probably have "taken the cream". CD’s luck with fossil bones, among them a large extinct armadillo-like animal. Describes some birds, toads, Crustacea, and other marine specimens. Nearly all plants flowering at Bahia Blanca were collected. Is sending two large casks of fossil bones by packet.

Summary

Comments on an article in Edinburgh Review [by David Brewster, 67 (1838): 271–308] on Comte’s Philosophie positive.

Discusses falsity of Élie de Beaumont’s views of contemporaneous parallel lines of elevation and subsidence.

Owen’s views of relationship of reptiles to birds.

On "question of species" CD has filled notebook after notebook with facts, "which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws".

Summary

Instances of sexual differences in viviparous fishes, suggested by reading chapters on sexual selection [in Descent] and by Mivart’s Genesis of species.

Notes on echinoderms.

Summary

Sends on CD’s list of enquiries about native breeds of animals in South Africa.

Summary

Comments on and corrections for chapter 13, "Mammals", of Descent.

Summary

Reports on a strange breed of sheep at Aden,

a Brazilian plant naturalised in Ceylon,

the Australian Casuarina equisetum spreading in Taiwan,

and an excrescence on wing of several thrushes of Taiwan similar to a growth on wing of a Syrian species.