Summary

Is leaving tonight for Genoa;

sends a French paper [not identified].

Summary

Progress on his Russian translation of Descent.

Alexander Kovalevsky is at Tor in Sinai, where C. G. Ehrenberg was in 1827.

Has CD seen Ernst Haeckel’s new book [Biologische Studien (1870–7)]?

Summary

CD has complained of pins and needles keeping him from working on his book [Descent]. If he could spend ten days with HBJ, he would be well and fit.

Summary

Requests CD write in support of Government pension for her husband, George Cupples.

Summary

Paris is in the hands of "brigands and socialists", but one grows accustomed to sporadic bombardment,

and VOK is peacefully studying invertebrate palaeontology collections.

Reports on Paul Gervais’ successful cross between a Triton and an axolotl.

Summary

Has received all the proof-sheets of first volume and of second volume to p. 168 [Descent].

Leaves for Paris tomorrow.

Summary

Inquires about arrangements for the German translation and publication of their original Linnean Society papers [Collected papers 2: 3–19].

ARW thinks he has hit upon a solution to problem of geological time.

Summary

Has heard of CD’s forthcoming book [Descent] from J. D. Hooker.

Leaves next week for winter quarters in Sandown.

Summary

Accepts CD’s offer to order books from the Royal Society Library.

VOK asks for information about W. B. Carpenter’s dredging expedition in the Porcupine.

Summary

W. H. Flower is ill and obliged to go off for six months. Wants to return the money Flower contributed to fund for his holiday, asks the amount.

Summary

Hears CD may come to Oxford at Commencement to receive an honorary degree. Invites CD, his wife, and daughter to stay at his house. [CD declined Hon. D.C.L. on grounds of ill health.]

Summary

Wishes to visit Down.

Summary

Criticises a book [W. M. Williams, The fuel of the sun (1870)] whose author does not understand thermodynamics, spectrum analysis, and W. Thomson’s papers.

Summary

Convinced by CD’s Origin.

As a "student of spirit intercourse", he asks CD for more details about the scene of the dancing spoon in Journal of researches [p. 546].

Summary

Surprised at Mivart’s harsh review [Q. Rev. 131 (1871): 47–90], considering courteous tone of his book. Assures CD he has not been converted by Mivart.

Summary

A. J. Gaudry is one of few supporters of Darwinism in Paris.

The climate is so hostile that Kovalevsky must mitigate his views so as not to irritate the French.

Working on Anchitherium, which he believes is intermediate between Palaeotherium and the horse.

His brother-in-law has been arrested.

Summary

Reports on the international support he has obtained for the zoological station [see 7038]. Asks CD whether he will serve on a board of naturalists who would receive an annual report on the station.

Huxley is now convinced by AD’s views on homologies of the nervous system of arthropods, annelids, and vertebrates. Kovalevsky takes the same line but does not go far enough.

Summary

Sorry he will be away when CD comes down.

Congratulations on Henrietta Darwin’s engagement.

Summary

Asks CD if he would screw himself up to inviting A. Newton to Down.

Summary

John Lubbock’s paper [? "Remarks on stone implements from western Africa", Rep. BAAS 40 (1870): 154–5] opposes some of his best sustained conclusions.