Summary

A sheep-breeder friend has found that he can produce twins and triplets in his flock by "a sudden supply of improved feeding stuff" at time of conception. This would appear to remove the objection CD refers to in Descent that animals supplied with an excess of food become sterile.

Summary

Offers to send green insects that give off a powerful odour of napthalene.

Summary

Sends a drawing [missing] of alleged fossil man found in Colorado. JM is certain it is a hoax perpetrated by P. T. Barnum. It was designed to conform to CD’s well-known views of man’s ancestor.

Summary

Sends his paper ["Die selbst-sterilität des Roggens", Landwirtsch. Jahrb. 6 (1877): 1073–6] on self-sterility in Secale cereale. AWR was wrong in claiming Beta vulgaris was perfectly self-sterile.

Reports results of crossing wheat varieties. In the first generation offspring are always uniform; some are intermediate, some resemble one parent. In the second generation, on the contrary, he got a diversity of parental and intermediate forms.

Summary

Sends the name of a plant: Cotyledon stolonifera.

Summary

He has heard CD is about to be elected to the Académie des Sciences.

Cross and self-fertilisation, with its emphasis on insect pollination, helps explain the problem he has worked on for so long: i.e., the rapid diversification of angiosperms in the fossil record occurs in conjunction with the diversification of insects.

Summary

JCC and his young daughter have observed that blossoms of Drosera rotundifolia open in afternoon, which contradicts Forms of flowers.

Summary

Thanks for letter. Values CD’s opinion more than that of anybody else.

Perfectly astonished at reception CD got among popular audiences at GJR’s lectures.

Summary

Thanks for Origin, 6th ed.

Summary

A misprint in Variation.

Summary

BJS was pleased to see CD’s son [William] and his wife at Charles Langton’s.

His own son is preparing for marriage.

Reports meeting a former Beagle shipmate.

Summary

Informs CD of his work on the "unity of language in its development".

Summary

Speculation on the process by which tails have been lost; believes he has evidence from man that it is related to spina bifida.

Summary

Sends details of H. H. R. Koch’s work on bacteria, including first photographs.

J. S. Burdon Sanderson’s and Koch’s collaboration on systemic fever.

Thinks movement of Francis Darwin’s Dipsacus filaments is an artifact.

Summary

Thanks CD for his specimen of "self-containedness". Some of the bromeliads will flower under similar treatment, but MTM does not know whether they seed.

Summary

Reprint of Origin will bring number to 19500 – so title-page may safely read "Twentieth Thousand".

Summary

Describes her and W. E. Darwin’s honeymoon.

Summary

Messrs Clowes will make CD’s corrections and adjust index of Cross and self-fertilisation. Of this work only 1500 copies have been printed. Edition is sold out and account is enclosed.

Of 500 copies of Climbing plants [2d ed.] printed in June 1876, 450 were still unsold as of June 1877.

Summary

Offers to sell CD a portrait of Dr Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby.