Summary

Local affairs.

Summary

Praise for a paper on the Entomostraca by Lubbock (Lubbock 1862). Thanks for the compliment paid to the Origin and for his general comments.

Summary

CD’s reaction to review of the Origin [by Samuel Wilberforce] in Quarterly Review [see 2881].

Summary

CD’s statement in Origin that clover is utterly dependent on humble-bee for fertilisation has been questioned by his friend’s evidence of visits by other insects. Asks CD’s opinion.

Summary

Will take Natural History Review, but cannot write for it.

Has mass of notes on irritability in orchids,

but he ought to work on Variation.

Drosera was an interlude while away from home. Expectations for effect of carbonate of ammonia on Dionaea. The important phenomenon in Drosera is the segregation of the red fluid within the leaf, not action of carbonate of ammonia on the red fluid.

Summary

Orders Richard Owen’s Anatomy of vertebrates [1866–8],

subscribes to Annals and Magazine of Natural History,

and orders three back numbers of Medical Times and Gazette.

Summary

Has read MS of AM’s review [of Origin, read at Edinburgh Royal Society, 20 Feb 1860]; has no complaints. Has never heard of a hostile reviewer’s doing so kind and generous an action [as sending his MS for CD’s criticism?]. Sends some remarks on details.

Summary

Comments on BAAS meeting: "our side seems to have got on very well". Asa Gray, too, is fighting nobly.

Comments on review [by Samuel Wilberforce] in the Quarterly [Rev. 108 (1860): 225–64].

Mentions a favourable review in the London Review.

Wonders if German translation [of the Origin] by Bronn has drawn attention to the subject.

The Natural History Review to be edited by Huxley and others.

Expects CL’s book [Antiquity of man (1863)] to be a bombshell.

Summary

Writes regarding the possibility of banking partnership for WED; second note arranges a meeting between the involved parties in London.

Summary

Family and local news, and memories of old times.

CD’s youngest son, Horace, is too delicate to go to school.

CD has had a bad summer, is still ill, can do very little work – "Botany … is all that I am good for".

Summary

Has heard, through Lubbock, of a gentleman who is offering a partnership in a bank.

Summary

News of Etty’s health and of neighbours.

Pleased that JBI likes Origin.

CD never expected to convert people in less than 20 years, though now convinced he is "in the main right". Bishop of Oxford’s review made "splendid fun" of him.

Summary

Returns a borrowed extract from the [Zoological?] Record.

Summary

JL’s MS at printer’s [Prehistoric times (1865)].

Apologises for failure to post letter.

Summary

Sends an account of the destruction of wild rabbits by rats introduced from a wrecked ship.

Summary

His better opinion [of work of Boucher de Perthes].

Explains his position on CL’s treatment of species.

Mentions positive response to his ideas on the part of a German professor [Ernst Haeckel], Alphonse de Candolle, and a botanical palaeontologist [Gaston de Saporta].

Notes negative reaction of entomologists.

Mentions Falconer’s objections [to Antiquity].

Mentions work of Hooker.

Comments on paper by Owen ["On the aye-aye", Rep. BAAS 32 (1862) pt 2: 114–16]

and CD’s review of Bates’s paper [Collected papers 2: 87–92].

Thinks Natural History Review is excellent.

Summary

Attacks the doctrine of "heterogeny" (spontaneous generation during each geological period) as completely lacking in evidence.

Defends natural selection as connecting large classes of facts in natural history. That certain forms have not changed since remote epochs is not an objection of any force.

Summary

Hyaena remains show how recently Sicily was joined to Africa.

Reports on the Oxford meeting of BAAS.

Summary

Glad CL plans trip to Amiens to investigate flints and post-glacial period.

Mentions support by Huxley, Hooker, and Lubbock at Oxford BAAS meeting. Asa Gray also goes on fighting.

Likes article by William Hopkins ["Physical theories and the phenomena of life", Fraser’s Mag. 61 (1860): 739–52; 62 (1860): 74–90].

Comments on hybrids of hare and rabbit.

Summary

The Witness attacks THH’s lecture.

Assures CD he spoke more favourably of his doctrines than the reports show.

Agrees with CD’s arguments on sterility of hybrids and predicts physiological experiments will produce physiological species sterile inter se. Has come even closer to CD’s view especially since Primula paper. Will soon be more Darwinian than CD.