The name of the correspondent is suggested by CD’s endorsement: ‘M^r. Edwards | Surgeon.’ He has not been further identified.

The date is conjectured from the date at which the Wilkins family adopted the name de Winton (see n. 3, below).

Probably Charles Lorenzo Wilkins, son of Walter Wilkins of Hay Castle, Brecon, Wales. The family adopted the name de Winton in 1839. (Burke’s landed gentry 1846 s.v. de Winton.)

CD was soliciting information on the transmission of characteristics between, and instances of reversion in, crossbred animals from at least 1839, and this memorandum may have been written in answer to his printed questionnaire ‘Questions about the breeding of animals’, probably circulated between 1 January and 6 May 1839 (see Correspondence vol. 2, Appendix V). The information was probably for the chapters on variation under domestication in CD’s manuscript on species (see Correspondence vol. 6, Appendix III).

The annotation may refer to a numbered portfolio of notes, possibly on hybridism or heredity. CD kept a number of such portfolios, amassed over a long period of time and since dispersed. The likely contents of some portfolios, but not one numbered ‘16’, were reconstructed when some of CD’s papers were catalogued in 1932 (see DAR 220: 13).