Summary

Notes and extracts relating to "bloom".

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Forwards letters.

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Has not yet heard from Cambridge. Thinks perhaps they do not intend to give him the degree.

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Notes on variation and selection; discussion of how selection could act to the advantage of a group but not to that of an individual within the group.

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Sends extract abusing CD, from a sermon by a Greek priest.

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Encloses a memorandum [missing] drawn up by W. H. Flower, Huxley, and himself, defending Charles Wyville Thomson against an attack made upon him.

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Thanks for an extract from a sermon, in which CD is abused by an archimandrite: he considers it a great honour.

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C. E. Bessey’s case [see 10969] came too late, as the sheets had been printed, but CD thinks it should be carefully investigated as a possible case of incipient heterostyly.

Is trying to make out the function of "bloom", the waxy secretion on leaves and fruits.

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Sends quotation from Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique [(1809), 2: 318] on effects of habit.

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Wants to subpoena CD in a case pending against himself and Annie Besant, to be tried 18 June. [Bradlaugh and Besant were indicted for issuing an "obscene libel".]

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Urgently requests a pair of braces. "Please remember that I am 6. ft high & require rather long bracers."

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Sends six photographs of himself as a contribution to correspondent’s charity.

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Sends MS notes on intercrossing.

Describes different reactions of rabbits and guinea-pigs to stinging nettles.

Has made a number of grafts at Kew.

Encloses notes on natural selection; discussion of factors mitigating the swamping influence of intercrossing on incipient variations.

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Sends holly specimens.

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CD would prefer not to be a witness in court. In any case CD’s opinion is strongly opposed to that of CB and Annie Besant. Has read only notices of their book [Charles Knowlton, Fruits of philosophy, with preface by the publishers A. Besant and C. Bradlaugh (1877)] but believes artificial checks to the natural rate of human increase are very undesirable and that the use of artificial means to prevent conception would soon destroy chastity and, ultimately, the family.

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Thanks correspondent for his essay and kind allusions [to Cross and self-fertilisation].

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CD is going away and has asked FD to thank GJR for his amusing letter [of 6 June], which CD thinks should be published in Nature. CD thinks the guinea pig theory very probable.

CD thinks there may be something in the ‘veneration’ theory.

Summary

All young intelligent French naturalists support CD. But the professors are afraid of being called materialists, atheists, or communists.

A paper of his ["Sur l’origine paléontologique", C. R. Hebd. Acad. Sci. 84 (1877): 534–7] met with silence, except from Bureau. If only France had become Protestant!

Summary

Is honoured that the Council wish to offer a Grace to the Senate [of the University of Cambridge] conferring upon him an honorary LL.D. degree.

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Thanks LHM for his Ancient society [1877].