Summary

Lyell urges CD to publish a sketch of species theory; CD asks JDH’s opinion on best course.

Concerned about opposition, particularly by Owen, to Huxley’s admission to Athenaeum.

Summary

Comments on JDH’s report of Liverpool meeting.

Huxley’s address.

Sir Roderick [Murchison]’s "apotheosis".

Tyndall’s lecture is "grand" except for egotistical beginning. Some Frenchmen have pitched into CD for using the "as if" reasoning, which Tyndall shows is justified.

Has just read George Rolleston’s address in Nature.

Anton Dohrn says German public have high opinion of Lyell.

Summary

Thinks well of Claparède’s criticism; worth publishing as an answer to Wallace. Bates thinks Wallace’s heterodox views have done mischief to the cause of evolution. Wallace thinks Claparède’s article very weak, CD concludes, because Claparède has arrived at an unpleasant judgment very much like Lyell’s about Bentham’s address.

CD would wager Lyell lately has said something about European Proteaceae.

Does not remember anyone before Wallace on Sumatra and Java.

CD does not think he has a chance against Brandt in French Academy election.

Summary

Asks whether JDH can send seeds of Hibiscus africanus and of Nolana prostrata raised at Kew.

Summary

Thanks JDH for offer of lilies.

The paper on orchids is by Hermann Müller [Verh. Naturhist. Ver. Preuss. Rheinlande & Westphalens 25 (1868): 1–62], on Platanthera and Epipactis.

Cites another work by P. Rohrbach [Über den Blüthenbau (1866)].

MS [of Descent] ready for printer.

Has read Bentham’s last Linnean Society [Presidential] Address [Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond. (1870): lxxiv–xciv] with great interest.

Summary

Concern about futures of Willy [Hooker] and Horace [Darwin].

Henrietta [Darwin] back from Cannes.

CD has been to Cambridge to visit Frank [Darwin]. Saw Sedgwick, who took him to the [Geological] Museum and utterly exhausted him. Humiliating to be "killed by a man of 86".

Saw Alfred Newton.

CD has been working away on man, to much greater length (as usual) than expected,

and on cross- and self-fertilisation.

Does JDH happen to have seeds of Canna warszewiczii matured in some hot country?

Sympathises with JDH on Dawson’s paper – amusing that Dawson hashes up E. D. Cope’s and L. Agassiz’s views.

Summary

Has read the notes on Rond [Round] Island which he owes to JDH. What an enigma its flora and fauna present, especially the problem of monocotyledons! Asks JDH’s opinion.

A new book on St Helena confirms CD’s observations.

Summary

Orders seeds, ripened in Algiers; imported seed would be of no use. [Forwarded to Algiers by JDH, see 7272.]

Summary

Has not heard of Curtis on Dionaea.

Duke of Argyll is clever, but it is a sin to speak of a real old Duke as a "little beggar".

"My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent Design."

On spontaneous generation and Bastian.

Summary

Returns H. C. Watson’s letter.

CD must study JDH’s manner of arrangement of varieties and subspecies, etc.

Summary

Would like to see JDH become Sir J. H. Does not think JDH owes his position in science to his father.

Sends questions on Round Island – if JDH should write [to Henry Barkly?].

Has he read Federico Delpino on Marantaceae [Nuovo G. Bot. Ital. 1 (1869): 293–206]?

Summary

Does not think so poorly of Nature as JDH does, by any means; fears Popular Science Review is rather ephemeral but more durable than Nature.

The case of the charlock.

Summary

Discusses books returned

and invites him to Down for a few days.

Summary

Discusses germination of charlock after a long interval.

Summary

Returns pamphlets.

B. T. Lowne’s observation [Mon. Microsc. J. 4 (1870): 326–30] that boiling does not kill certain moulds is curious, but then how account for absence of all living things in Pasteur’s experiment?

Always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis.

Thiselton-Dyer’s paper ["On spontaneous generation and evolution", Q. J. Microsc. Sci. 10 (1870): 333–54] is Spencerian.

The chemical conditions for first production of life are said to exist at present, but in some warm little pond today such matter would be absorbed or devoured, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

Summary

Is drawing up the account of his crossing experiments. Requests JDH to add the families after nine genera, the names of which he encloses. Whenever there is no objection he would like to arrange the families in some sort of natural order.

Recommends Spalding’s article on instinct in Macmillan’s Magazine [27 (1873): 265–81].

Summary

Transmits letter [from Fritz Müller].

Has been asked to permit a French translation of Orchids and Journal of researches.

At work on sexual selection.

Summary

Thanks for Haast’s observations. Particularly glad to get geological evidence of glacial action (in Southern Hemisphere).

Thinks Ramsay’s theory to large extent true, but thinks that in a much disturbed country some lakes would have been formed in depressions.

Summary

The date-palm seed case is important for Pangenesis.

Reports experiments on pollination of Ipomoea.

"Insular floras": A. Murray’s paper in Gardeners’ Chronicle is poor.

John Scott’s work on acclimatisation of plants.

The anomaly of the Azores flora on the migration theory.

Summary

No paradox that unimportant characters are important systematically. This view removes heavy burden from CD’s shoulders. Relief that JDH does not object.