Summary

Jamieson has revisited Glen Roy and confirmed his theory of glacier lakes.

A. G. More considers CD the most profound of reasoners.

Summary

Thanks for Lythrum paper [Collected papers 2: 106–31].

T. S. Cobbold’s book on the Entozoa [1864].

Remarks on development of the tapeworm.

Summary

Tristan da Cunha flora.

Aquatic plants.

Density and diversity of plants in small plots in Kent, Keeling Islands, and Himalayas.

Summary

Likes JDH’s review of Alphonse de Candolle [Mémoires et souvenirs de A. P. de Candolle (1862)].

Falconer’s article on Lyell ["Primitive man. What led to the question?", Athenæum 4 Apr 1863, pp. 459–60] too severe.

CD has written a letter to the Athenæum "to say, under the cloak of attacking Heterogeny, a word in my own defence" [Collected papers 2: 78–80].

Bates’s Travels [Naturalist on the river Amazons (1863)] are excellent.

Summary

The Aldrovanda has arrived. Has examined the leaves. It is an aquatic Dionaea which has acquired some structures identical to those of Utricularia!

Summary

The stone hatchets are a great muddle. Would like a copy of Jacques Boucher [de Crèvecoeur] de Perthes’s book [Antiquités Celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847–64)].

Is studying action of carbonate of ammonia on Drosera. Asks if this has been done.

Summary

CD very ill.

Suspects F. Boott’s widow is illegitimate granddaughter of Erasmus Darwin.

CD, like JDH, has speculated that agrarian weeds have become adapted to cultivated ground. Suggests comparison with country of origin.

Wallace’s praise of Herbert Spencer’s Social statics baffles CD.

[Letter completed by E. A. Darwin.]

Summary

Wrote a "frightful screed" about aristocracy’s being a necessary consequence of natural selection, and then burnt it.

H. W. Bates is the only man "thinking out" natural selection to any purpose. "I think I have driven Bates back to Nat. Sel. as the only way of solving his difficulties."

HWB’s mimetic butterflies.

JDH wishes he had time to do the same thing with plants.

Owen and Huxley involved in a "contemptible" squabble in the Edinburgh newspapers.

Maximovitch reports Stellaria bulbifera is a Siberian form which never ripens its seeds.

Summary

Praises CL’s work on human species.

A critical review of Origin in Saturday Review [24 Dec 1859].

A letter from J. G. Jeffreys criticises CD’s geological statements.

A note from William Whewell concerning Origin.

Summary

CD’s divergent series explains those anomalous plants that hover between what would otherwise be two species in a genus.

Inclined to see conifers as a sub-series of dicotyledons that developed in parallel to monocotyledons, but retained cryptogamic characters.

Mentions H. C. Watson’s view of variations.

Man has destroyed more species than he has created varieties.

Variations are centrifugal because the chances are a million to one that identity of form once lost will return.

In the human race, we find no reversion "that would lead us to confound a man with his ancestors".

Summary

Has received second part of AG’s Atlantic Monthly article ["Darwin on the origin of species", 6 (1860): 109–16, 229–39], and would like to have it reprinted in England with the first part.

Regrets no reviewer has touched upon embryology, which he feels provides one of his strongest arguments.

Summary

John Lubbock’s lecture on man a success [Not. Proc. R. Inst. G. B. 4 (1863): 29–40].

JDH on the effect of the Civil War on Asa Gray.

JDH’s opinion of Lyell on glaciers is improving.

Summary

Praise for Movement in plants, lately arrived.

Praise for Wallace’s Island life

and astonishment that he could be a spiritualist.

Differs with Wallace on age of SW. Australian flora. JDH ascribes its peculiarities to isolation by an inland sea.

Summary

Comments on Richard Owen’s review of the Origin [in Edinburgh Rev. 111 (1860): 487–532]. Considers Owen unfair to CD and most ungenerous toward Hooker.

Expects Sedgwick to be fierce against him. Sedgwick also misrepresented CD in his Spectator review [24 Mar and 7 Apr 1860].

Compares natural selection to the undulatory theory of light as a hypothesis explaining a large number of facts.

Summary

CD finds GB’s address interesting; assures him that he has never said GB was wrong on any point, but that there were differences between them, which he now thinks are not great.

Comments on specific parts of the address [see 6793]: colonisation, variability of large and small genera, descent from a single parent or pair of parents, rapid multiplication and change in species, isolation.

Summary

Would welcome American edition of Origin.

Summary

Comments on QdeB’s Unité de l’espèce humaine [1861].

Discusses acceptance of his theory among scientists, especially geologists.

C. V. Naudin did not show how selection applied in nature, but Patrick Matthew clearly anticipated CD’s views.

Summary

CD preparing historical sketch, which will go into second American edition of Origin.

Asks JDH to copy out Naudin’s line on finality.

Summary

Pleased JDH will come next Saturday.

Asks him to return Adam Bede.