For a translation of this letter, see Appendix I.

CD was nominated in three elections (to replace Louis Agassiz, François Jules Pictet de la Rive, or Félix-Archimède Pouchet) for correspondent to the anatomy and zoology section of the Académie des sciences in Paris. He lost to Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup by thirty-eight votes to six, to James Dwight Dana by thirty-five votes to ten, and to William Benjamin Carpenter by thirty-five votes to twelve, with Thomas Henry Huxley gaining one vote as a third candidate in the third election (Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 77 (1873): 33). CD had also been nominated in 1870 and 1872 (see Correspondence vols. 18 and 20). He was elected to the botanical section of the Académie des sciences in 1878 (see Stebbins 1988, pp. 147–9).