Summary

HCW’s criticisms of CD’s theory.

Summary

On the problem of want of sterility in crosses of domestic varieties. Refers to discussion in Origin, pp. 267–72 ["Fertility of varieties when crossed"]. We do not know precise cause of sterility in species.

Andrew Murray has attacked Origin [see 2647].

H. C. Watson objects to natural selection on grounds of limitless diversification of species.

Summary

Comments on the travels of JDH.

Genera plantarum a most worthy undertaking.

Criticisms of the Darwin–Hooker understanding of HCW’s views of convergence.

Summary

Thanks GG for specimens of Goodyera. The rostellum structure is near to that of Epipactis and CD is almost certain that the action is the same.

Summary

Artificiality of orders and genera in botany.

Difficulties in numerical analysis of close species in large and small genera.

HCW has "pretty strong bias towards the view that species are not immutably distinct".

Summary

Sends a list of plants with stamps to pay the Hitcham girls who will collect seeds for him.

Describes his work with seeds in salt water.

For his experiments he would like seeds collected from plants that grow both near Hitcham and in the Azores.

Explains again what JSH should do in marking "close species".

Summary

CD experiments: sowing seeds in fields; "breaking" seeds’ constitution with coloured light; plant hybridisation. Compiling works on hybridism.

Respect for W. B. Carpenter.

Note on "nectar secreting" to Gardeners’ Chronicle [Collected papers 1: 258–9].

Summary

Sends a list of 22 plants that grow at Hitcham and in the Azores and are, according to H. C. Watson, least likely to have been imported [by man]. Will pay the little girls of Hitcham liberally to collect the seeds for his experiments.

Summary

Discusses the possibility of "convergence" occurring; believes it could be only very limited.

Summary

CD’s opinion of minor critics and commentators on Origin.

H. C. Watson’s notion of genera converging is dismissed.

Summary

CD’s divergent series explains those anomalous plants that hover between what would otherwise be two species in a genus.

Inclined to see conifers as a sub-series of dicotyledons that developed in parallel to monocotyledons, but retained cryptogamic characters.

Mentions H. C. Watson’s view of variations.

Man has destroyed more species than he has created varieties.

Variations are centrifugal because the chances are a million to one that identity of form once lost will return.

In the human race, we find no reversion "that would lead us to confound a man with his ancestors".

Summary

Sends proofs [of "On the tendency of species to form varieties … ", read 1 July 1858, Collected papers 2: 3–19]. CD could publish his abstract [later the Origin] as a separate supplemental number of [Journal of the Linnean Society].

JDH has studied in detail CD’s manuscript on variable species in large and small genera and concurs with its consequences. Discusses methodological idiosyncrasies of systematists, e.g., Bentham, Robert Brown, and C. C. Babington, which complicate CD’s tabulations.

Summary

Sends a copy of his paper in Ibis [2d ser. 2 (1866): 88–109] on the birds of the Azores,

and one by G. R. Crotch on the Coleoptera [Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. (1867): 359–91].