Summary

Received Moritz Wagner’s essays [Das Ausland (May 1875)] and sent him a long letter [10643] disagreeing with his views because they do not explain adaptation.

Thanks for Büchner’s essay [Die Darwin’sche Theorie, 4th ed. (1876)].

Summary

Sends CD parts of the Annales [Soc. Bot. Lyon] in response to his request for a particular article.

States that, despite CD’s work, he does not believe that any plants, including insectivorous ones, can utilise organic material, and that they live solely on mineral elements in the soil and air.

Summary

Thanks CTEvS for photographs of human abnormality;

regrets death of Rudolf von Willemoes-Suhm.

Summary

Sends extract reporting elephants that get drunk on a plant.

Summary

Thanks for another part of Australian orchids.

Summary

Comments on WHL’s paper ["Pontederia cordata", Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 6 (1875–9): 62–3]. Cites Fritz Müller’s conclusion that plant is trimorphic. Has WHL made further observations?

Summary

Encloses statement of sales for Origin, Expression, Descent and Insectivorous plants and sends a cheque for the balance due to CD.

Summary

Credits himself with stimulating most of the American work on plant cross-fertilisation. Sends his review of Cross and self-fertilisation [in Penn Monthly (June 1877)]. Suggests CD, A. Gray, and TM now agree on the extent of self-fertilisation in nature.

Summary

Discusses publication of CD’s essays in three German popular periodicals.

Haeckel is ill.

German translation of George Darwin, "Marriage between first cousins" [1875] has sold 250 copies.

Summary

Thanks GdeS for communicating his discovery. It is especially important at a time when several naturalists have declared that development occurs quite suddenly at intervals. Joseph Le Conte in N. America urges that even new families and orders are developed within an extremely short period.

Summary

CD has written to [Charles] Wyville Thomson in favour of PPCH’s request [for duplicates of Pycnogonida collected by the Challenger expedition], and hopes it will be successful.

Summary

CD has harangued the Down Friendly Club. Does not think it will dissolve.

Summary

Thanks for GOS’s memoir on Brisinga [1875].

Summary

CD, who has acted as treasurer of the Down Friendly Club for the last 27 years, urges the members not to dissolve the Club, but to continue it and retain about £1000 of the funds on hand to ensure its safety and ability to give assistance to members when they are ill or invalided, or to provide for their burial when dead.

Summary

Thanks for the reviews, particularly the one in the Times.

CD will be pleased to receive Mr Wallace.

Summary

Fertilisation of orchids. Believes some plants so constituted as to dispense with cross-fertilisation.

Summary

Expresses his gratitude and admiration for AK’s and M. G. Retzius’s Studien in der Anatomie des Nervensystems und des Bindegewebes (2 vols. 1875–6).

Summary

In Descent [1: 12] CD discusses intoxication among animals. South African elephants reportedly eat a plant that makes them wild.

Summary

Has read a large part of the Novara voyage [Narrative of the circumnavigation of the globe by the Austrian frigate "Novara" (1861–3)] with pleasure. CD was particularly interested in the scandalous French behaviour at Tahiti.

Summary

Pleased with CD’s interest in temperance. Can he quote CD? Sorry the elephant story is a myth. It fits his argument for temperance: a passion for alcohol is natural [primitive]. Only the morally developed can resist. Moral development will take a long time. Thus education cannot cure alcoholism now. Thus public sale of alcohol must be outlawed. Although he is a follower of J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer he has been forced to this conclusion.