Summary

Request for plant.

Receipt of Oliver’s letter.

Summary

John Scott is gratified at Bentham’s proposal that he become an associate of the Linnean Society.

Summary

Request for plants.

CD’s continuing ill health.

Summary

Emma prepares JDH for his visit to Wedgwood factory and Barlaston.

Summary

CD very ill.

Suspects F. Boott’s widow is illegitimate granddaughter of Erasmus Darwin.

CD, like JDH, has speculated that agrarian weeds have become adapted to cultivated ground. Suggests comparison with country of origin.

Wallace’s praise of Herbert Spencer’s Social statics baffles CD.

[Letter completed by E. A. Darwin.]

Summary

John Scott has left Edinburgh Botanic Garden.

Asks JDH to ask Tyndall whether Frankland exaggerates the effect of snowfall on advance of European glaciers.

Huxley and Falconer squabble too much in public.

Summary

JDH on John Scott.

Curious about the rationale of pollen prepotence.

Working on variation in New Zealand flora.

Summary

CD finishing Lythrum paper [Collected papers 2: 106–31].

Pleased at Bates’s appointment

and Wallace’s paper.

Summary

CD has told Scott not to hope for help from JDH.

Health improving.

Hopes to write Lythrum paper soon.

Summary

Forwards a letter from H. W. Bates to JDH announcing HWB’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society.

Summary

Scott would be very welcome at Down for a short visit.

Summary

Does not know Scott’s qualifications to be curator at Kew.

Frankland’s theory of glaciers is absurd.

Has JDH heard claim that plants in Northern and Southern Hemispheres turn in opposite directions?

Are there plant families with no twining and climbing plants?

Summary

JDH’s opinion of Herbert Spencer.

Rejects CD’s view of inheritance of induced modifications.

Huxley grows fat.

Summary

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

Will CD sit for Woolner?

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

Is burning to hear CD’s reaction to Wallace’s excellent paper on man ["Origin of human races and the antiquity of man", J. Anthropol. Soc. Lond. 2 (1864): clviii–clxxxvi].

Wallace’s disclaimer of credit for natural selection is high-minded.

Summary

CD is not well enough to sit for Woolner.

Two Bignonia plants, which JDH does not distinguish as species, can be separated by differences in climbing and sensitivity behaviour.

Wants to write a non-quarrelsome reply to R. A. Kölliker ["Darwin’sche Schöpfungstheorie", Z. Wiss. Zool. 14 (1864): 174–86] in the Reader. Lyell opposes, but E. A. Darwin and Hensleigh Wedgwood support the idea.

Summary

List of four plants sent.

Summary

CD’s illness.

The difficulty of getting John Scott to publish his work. Has sent Scott’s paper [on Primulaceae] to Linnean Society. CD is sure it is valuable.

Summary

Requests climbing plants.

Asks that Oliver be told that he now does not care "how many tendrils he makes axial".