Summary

Applies sexual selection to origin of dog race [deerhound]. Proposes descent from a large extinct dog.

Summary

Sends specimens of a Tertiary sandstone from Tierra del Fuego in which there are leaves; CD thought they were beech. What is JDH’s opinion?

Asks whether JDH can make sense of a note on silicified wood.

Has read Vestiges [of creation (1844)]; "his geology strikes me as bad, & his zoology far worse".

Would like to see lists [of plants] from Society and Sandwich Islands.

Doubts JDH’s information regarding imagination of mother affecting offspring.

Summary

Returns Geikie’s letter; is glad he has accepted settlement of gravel through melting of snow. Is trudging around with hammer and bag with help of Ramsay’s book. Describes visits to Kenilworth and Stratford. Sara consulted a physician. Called on Reginald D. and enjoyed meeting relations and seeing picture of Erasmus. Reginald very taken with George.

Summary

Encourages DO to publish his paper and put his name to it. [Paper apparently not published.] Concurs with his views on primordial nature of hermaphroditism.

Summary

Sends a number of questions (to put to his father), mainly concerned with transmission of diseases, between Europeans and natives, "people packed together", etc.

Is investigating how to get Government support [for Zoology].

Summary

Discusses the power of land covered with snow to radiate heat.

Criticises CL’s discussion of slavery [in Travels in North America (1845)]. A review of CL’s book is in Gardeners’ Chronicle.

Mentions John Lindley’s views on carbonic acid gas and extinction;

refers to the discussion of multiple and single creations in Humboldt’s Kosmos.

The origin of volcanic craters of elevation.

There is a popular demand for a new edition of Principles.

Praises palaeobotanical work of C. J. F. Bunbury.

Summary

Sends some historical data to illustrate the elevation of the coast at Valparaiso in recent times.

Summary

Suggestions and information helpful to CD in preparation for Beagle voyage. David Brewster’s meteorological papers. Suggests an oyster-trawl for collecting marine animals. Recommends CD see R. E. Grant. For meteorological observations suggests F. W. Beechey’s Voyage to the Pacific [1831] and an interview with J. F. Daniell of King’s College.

Summary

Was joined by Colonel Burgh Leighton when walking in the quarry. Plans to make caves next summer to store "warlike instruments" and "relicks". Sketches a design for a signalling device. May go with his father to visit the Earl of Powys at Walcot; visited Mrs and Miss Reynolds and William Pemberton Cludde.

Summary

EAD wants changes made and shelves built to improve the laboratory at the Mount [Darwin residence]; sends drawings and will bring chemical instruments, a book, and his record of experiments done in his chemistry course.

He has now been matriculated.

Summary

Observations from a fortnight in Lochaber. Found the entrance to Loch Treig to present the clearest evidence of intense glacial action. States, in contradiction of David Milne-Home, that there is glacial scoring in Glen Spean, as Louis Agassiz described, and moraine around the mouth of Loch Treig. There is little sign of water erosion on the rocks crossed by the lines in Glen Roy. Believes the smoothed rocks at the eastern end of Loch Laggan are due to flow from the lake and not tidal action. The lines in Glen Roy are too neat for a lake shore subject to tides. Given the glacial scoring sweeping round from Glen Spean into Glen Treig, and all the boulders, TFJ is astonished that anyone could deny that there had been glaciers there. [See 3247.]

Summary

Describes the appearance and occurrence of imperfect flowers of "Hex.[?] Trigynia".

Summary

Thanks for agreeing to propose Frank as F.R.S.

Would have enjoyed discussing Island life.

Summary

Sends his paper on "Willow-galls" [Proc. Entomol. Soc. Philadelphia 3 (1864): 543–644].

Lengthy criticism of Agassiz’s views on species as stated in his Essay on classification [1857].

Interested by CD’s trimorphism in Lythrum. Thinks some great mystery may lie in the fact that in some genera, some species are tri-, some di-, and some monomorphic, and in other genera, Apis, Vespa, Bombus, all the known species are dimorphic.

Summary

Thanks CD for letter of 5 April and specimens; did not know the Falklands and Patagonia were so interesting geologically.

Will answer CD’s queries about S. Brazil in another letter. Names Friedrich Sellow, A. Saint-Hilaire, and Andrew Mathews as naturalists who travelled there. Directs CD to Alexander Caldcleugh in Santiago.

Summary

Erasmus Alvey Darwin is good tempered and their sisters have "not abused at all". Hopes the recipient will help "in looking out and washing the fossils out of the plate closet".

Summary

Answers CD’s objections with botanical and geological arguments supporting the existence of an ancient post-Miocene land extending over what is now the Mediterranean and past the Azores in the Atlantic [EF’s "Atlantis" theory in "On the connexion between the distribution of the existing fauna and flora of the British Isles and the geological changes which have affected their area", Mem. Geol. Surv. G. B. 1 (1846): 336–432].

Summary

On the declining population of the Hawaiian Islands [see Descent (1875), pp. 186–7, 187–8 n. 43].

Summary

Thanks for Edward Forbes’s letter. Botanical evidence conflicts with parts of his theory but supports others. Is becoming more of a migrationist.

Bentham agrees with JDH on polymorphism.

Summary

Asks AG to confirm whether Ipomoea leptophylla "makes a great tuber as big as a mangel-wurzel".

Petioles of Cotyledons behave partly like those of Megarrhiza.