Summary

CD’s Lythrum paper has given him as much satisfaction as working out complemental males in cirripedes.

Response to award of Copley Medal.

Letters from Germany and France support natural selection.

Now that climbing plants are done, CD asks for Drosera.

Summary

John Scott has sailed.

Concurs with Lyell that CD need not reply to Kölliker.

CD’s Bignonia plants cannot be told apart without flowers.

Summary

Reports on personalities at the Bath meeting of BAAS [Sept 1864].

Summary

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

Will CD sit for Woolner?

Summary

Reception of Scott’s paper.

Difficulty of writing Boott’s obituary.

Critical of Edward Frankland’s glacial theory.

Falconer’s and Ramsay’s views on Himalayan lakes lack support of basic evidence.

Taxonomic distribution of climbing plants.

Huxley picks quarrels with minor figures and thus magnifies them.

Summary

JDH’s "shock" that CD was awarded the Copley Medal.

Oliver, Thomson and JDH independently concur mature tendrils of Dicentra are foliar, though JDH remembers they were axial in the spring. Expects he and CD were fooled, but will have to look again next spring.

Praises CD’s Lythrum paper [Collected papers 2: 106–31].

JDH completing F. Boott’s work on Carex [Illustrations of the genus Carex].

JDH now does suspect Mrs Boott is illegitimate daughter of Dr Erasmus Darwin [see 4389].

Summary

Sees difficulty of placing Scott at Kew. Suspects Balfour is prejudiced because Scott is a Darwinian.

CD’s former letter on Clematis [4403] blundered; work now being revised.

Summary

CD’s climbing plant experiments make it impossible to deny nerve force in plants.

Has discussed Frankland’s new glacial theory with Lyell.

Bishop Colenso’s trial.

Possibility of Scott’s coming to Kew as a curator.

Summary

JDH’s opinion of Herbert Spencer.

Rejects CD’s view of inheritance of induced modifications.

Huxley grows fat.

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?