Summary

JDH pursues the coffee plantation job for Scott.

Wrote 14 letters today. JDH’s work load.

Summary

Returned from Ireland, JDH wishes to visit Down.

Summary

The Kew agent has looked into ships to Calcutta for Scott, who should come to Kew.

Summary

Replies to CD’s queries on climbing plants.

Summary

Replies to queries on climbing plants.

JDH meets Scott and finds him an intelligent and superior-looking man. Scott wishes to come to Down before leaving England.

Summary

Hookers and Lyells will visit Lubbocks so he cannot see CD in London.

Will CD sit for Woolner?

Summary

John Scott has sailed.

Concurs with Lyell that CD need not reply to Kölliker.

CD’s Bignonia plants cannot be told apart without flowers.

Summary

R. I. Murchison’s address [see 4595] smashes Ramsay’s glacial theory.

JDH defends his view that CD should not answer Kölliker.

Summary

Rejoices that CD is beginning "the book of books", Variation.

Suggests that changes in colour of pollen, stigma, and corolla, as Scott reports in his Primula paper, may be related to changes in the insects required for pollination.

Supports Gärtner translation by Ray Society.

Comments on recent addresses by Lyell [Rep. BAAS 34 (1864): lx–lxxv], Bentham [Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond. 8 (1864): ix–xxiii], and Murchison [Rep. BAAS 34 (1864): 130–6].

Summary

Reports on personalities at the Bath meeting of BAAS [Sept 1864].

Summary

Sends Nepenthes laevis.

Wallace for the Royal Medal is a good thought.

W. H. Harvey is at Kew and JDH has asked him about desert climbers.

Summary

Morphological differences only partly define species; physiological differences, e.g., incompatibility results in Primula, are far more interesting.

T. Thomson’s review of Agardh’s muddled book ["Agardh’s classification of plants", Nat. Hist. Rev. (1864): 536–51].

Summary

Comments at length on Ramsay’s glacial paper ["On the erosion of valleys and lakes", Philos. Mag. 4th ser. 28 (1864): 293–311]. Prefers it to Tyndall, but unconvinced about sea action and unwilling to grant that ice power sculptures the totality of landscape.

Unwilling to support Wallace for Royal Medal.

Herbert Spencer’s noisy vacuity.

Garden varieties that are constant and infertile with parent deserve to be called species.

Scott ineligible to be Linnean Society associate because he is not in England.

George Busk’s incoherent talk on Gibraltar cave fossils.

Summary

JDH’s "shock" that CD was awarded the Copley Medal.

Oliver, Thomson and JDH independently concur mature tendrils of Dicentra are foliar, though JDH remembers they were axial in the spring. Expects he and CD were fooled, but will have to look again next spring.

Praises CD’s Lythrum paper [Collected papers 2: 106–31].

JDH completing F. Boott’s work on Carex [Illustrations of the genus Carex].

JDH now does suspect Mrs Boott is illegitimate daughter of Dr Erasmus Darwin [see 4389].

Summary

JDH is making inquiries for CD on temperate climbing plants.

Discusses politics of Royal Society Council in awarding CD the Copley Medal.

Summary

Recounts row at the Royal Society over exclusion of mention of Origin from Sabine’s address awarding Copley Medal to CD.

Encloses two letters to JDH from James Hector in New Zealand.

Summary

Sabine’s address, printed in the Reader [4 (1864): 708–9], is good on the whole. Sends Huxley’s account of the row.

Praises John Ruskin’s eloquent reply to Jukes.