Summary

Protests against FJW making the struggle for existence still more odious by calling it ‘selfish competition’.

Summary

Congratulates WP on the success of his lectures.

Discusses the phrase "struggle for existence".

Sends a list of his papers.

Summary

Thanks AG for Considérations générales [sur les animaux fossiles] de Pikermi [1866]. The observations on the various intermediate fossil forms seem most valuable.

AG does not fully understand what CD means by "the struggle for existence, or concurrence vitale".

Summary

Has forwarded some plants of Nitella opaca. Has observed their struggle for existence for several years in the gravel-pit pools at Mitcham.

Summary

Thanks him for copy of book [Der Kampf um’s Dasein am Himmel (1874)].

Summary

Delighted by curious case of inheritance in the weeping ash [cited in missing letter from TR] "which produced weeping seedlings and itself lost the weeping peculiarity!" Wishes he could get authentic information on the weeping elm.

What TR says of seedlings conquering each other well illustrates struggle for existence and natural selection.

Summary

Has given a lecture series on Darwinism which was attended by 200–500 students.

Would like to compile a list of CD’s works.

Summary

He is surveying the literature on the struggle for existence among pasture plants. Asks CD for the "many cases on record" of changed relations among plants under slightly changed conditions alluded to in the Origin. [See M. T. Masters, J. B. Lawes and J. M. Gilbert "Agricultural, botanical, and chemical results of experiments on the mixed herbage of permanent meadow, conducted for more than twenty years in succession on the same land (pt 2, The botanical results)", Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 173 (1883): 1181–413.]

Summary

"Law" [see 2092] correlating variability and abnormal development not confirmed by JDH for plants.

CD studies struggle for existence in his weed garden.

Scotch fir observed at Moor Park.

Summary

There is a primary law of growth and innate improvement. Natural selection is a secondary law that operates to "arrange the details". This is not Lamarckian, because will is not involved.

Thanks for Chauncey Wright’s pamphlet [Darwinism (1871)].

Amused by critics who say CD is metaphysically unsophisticated.

Summary

Does not think females give preference to any males. Coloration, pugnacity; cases of use of colour in struggle for existence. [see Descent 1: 395.]

Summary

ARW responds to CD’s list of queries about expression. Suggests acquiring informants through publishing the queries in newspapers. His doubts about their importance.

Has submitted caterpillar question to Entomological Society.

Summary

Praises WG’s Creed of science.

He disagrees that the existence of natural laws implies purpose, but his "inmost conviction" is that "the Universe is not the result of chance". But then has horrid doubt whether convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from lower animals, are at all trustworthy.

Believes natural selection is doing more for progress of civilisation than WG admits.

Summary

"Throttled off" Welwitschia paper at Linnean Society [Trans. Linn. Soc. Lond. 24 (1863): 1–48].

Has read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America [1835–40] – disagrees with it. Tocqueville says democracy in America is a success. Democracy has persisted because there has been no cause for its overthrow (i.e., no struggle for existence, too much mobility).

Sends J. W. Dawson’s unsatisfactory letter.

Summary

Sends copy of a paper on his flock of sheep, which confirms much of what CD says in Variation,

together with a note he made of an instance of cattle "determining the existence" of a tree [cf. Origin, ch. 3].

Summary

Birthday greetings.

Summary

Thanks for Dawson’s letter. Doubts his evidence that climate of land was not glacial when upheaved after submergence.

Encloses memorandum of questions for C. V. Naudin.

Expression of the emotions.

Is building a hothouse for plant experimenting.

JDH’s ideas on America are more atrocious than his. What a new idea that struggle for existence is necessary to try to purge a government! Probably true. Slavery draws him one way one day, another the next. Yankees are "detestable toward us". Tocqueville.