Summary

Is burning to hear CD’s reaction to Wallace’s excellent paper on man ["Origin of human races and the antiquity of man", J. Anthropol. Soc. Lond. 2 (1864): clviii–clxxxvi].

Wallace’s disclaimer of credit for natural selection is high-minded.

Summary

Reread JDH’s letter "with infinite pleasure".

Plans to visit Kew.

Summary

Doubts Decaisne’s report of larkspur self-fertilisation.

Enthusiastically observes climbing plants. Needs to know how novel his observations are. Finds R. J. H. Dutrochet has made similar observations, so he has wasted some time. [See Climbing plants, p. 1 n.]

Summary

Informs JDH of CD’s death.

Summary

Apologises that the house is full this weekend, but next weekend would be good.

Summary

Emma prepares JDH for his visit to Wedgwood factory and Barlaston.

Summary

Request for plants.

CD’s continuing ill health.

Summary

Request for plant.

Receipt of Oliver’s letter.

Summary

John Scott is gratified at Bentham’s proposal that he become an associate of the Linnean Society.

Summary

Congratulates JDH on receipt of Royal Medal.

CD gathering facts on aberrant genera of insects.

Summary

CD finishing Lythrum paper [Collected papers 2: 106–31].

Pleased at Bates’s appointment

and Wallace’s paper.

Summary

Indignant over Owen’s conduct as described in Hugh Falconer’s article on elephants ["On the American fossil elephant of the regions bordering the Gulf of Mexico", Nat. Hist. Rev. (1863): 43–114].

Summary

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

Falconer’s death haunts him. Personal annihilation not so horrifying to him as sun cooling some day and human race ending.

His health has been wretched.

Masters has written his agreement with CD’s "Climbing plants".

Summary

CD too ill to write.

Has evidence of long life of seed transported on a partridge’s foot.

Sends a squib by Samuel Butler on the Origin.

Summary

CD would be pleased to sit for a bust by Thomas Woolner for JDH, but he is too ill now.

Emma’s views on slavery and the Civil War.

Summary

Yellow anthers of Heterocentron produce on the same plant thrice as many seeds as the crimson anthers. Crimson anther seeds produce dwarf plants, others rise high up. Monochaetum ensiferum facts are still more strange. Wants to investigate the case, and asks for a plant of the Melastomataceae just before flowering.

Has JDH a Rhododendron boothii from Bhutan with pistil bent the wrong way?

Summary

George Henslow’s curtness to JDH: "an attack of religion".

Embryonic leaves. Adaptive functions and taxonomic significance of cotyledons.

Asa Gray. Separation of sexes in U. S. trees.

Summary

John Scott’s career.

Huxley’s vicious attack on anthropologists.

Critique of Joseph Prestwich’s theory of rivers.

Bitter feelings between the Hookers and the Veitch family of nurserymen.

Summary

JDH on John Scott.

Curious about the rationale of pollen prepotence.

Working on variation in New Zealand flora.