Summary

JDH half through Origin. High praise for facts and reasoning.

Lyell told JDH his criticisms: small matters JDH did not appreciate.

Reactions of G. Bentham, J. S. Henslow, and C. C. Babington.

Summary

Praise for Movement in plants, lately arrived.

Praise for Wallace’s Island life

and astonishment that he could be a spiritualist.

Differs with Wallace on age of SW. Australian flora. JDH ascribes its peculiarities to isolation by an inland sea.

Summary

CD’s photograph looks like J. R. Herbert’s Moses in the fresco in the House of Lords.

JDH is delighted about oxlip, but hybridity does not explain some large patches that are uniform and do not vary towards either cowslip or primrose.

Encloses letter from W. H. Harvey discussing Myosotis sylvatica and the common dandelion.

Summary

JDH requests specimens from Miss [Sophy] Wedgwood.

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

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

JDH on John Scott.

Curious about the rationale of pollen prepotence.

Working on variation in New Zealand flora.

Summary

John Scott’s career.

Huxley’s vicious attack on anthropologists.

Critique of Joseph Prestwich’s theory of rivers.

Bitter feelings between the Hookers and the Veitch family of nurserymen.

Summary

JDH on Asa Gray’s sanguine view of the Civil War and slavery.

Wishes to discuss variation with CD, a subject that Huxley does not understand.

Summary

Is in a mess with his correspondence and will get no assistance before 1 April.

Has agreed to give an address on the Darwinian theory at Nottingham [meeting of BAAS].

Summary

Falconer’s elephant paper.

Owen’s conduct.

Falconer’s view of CD’s theory: independence of natural selection and variation.

JDH on Tocqueville,

the principles of the Origin,

and the evils of American democracy.

Summary

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

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

Pleased CD accepts continental extension for New Zealand, whose flora has many genera like Rubus with great diversity and connecting intermediates. Suggests geological uplifting creates more space, hence opportunities for preservation of intermediates. Sees clash with CD on causes of extreme diversity of form in a group.

JDH’s attitude toward democratisation of science.

Summary

Refers to enclosure from Asa Gray

with whom he can talk calmly now that war is over. North had no right to resort to bloodshed.

Startled by CD’s attendance at Royal Society soirée.

Has asked E. B. Tylor to make up questions for consuls and missionaries, through whose wives a lot of most curious information [for Descent?] could be obtained.

Tying umbilical cord has always been a mystery to JDH.

John Crawfurd’s paper on cultivated plants is shocking twaddle ["On the migration of cultivated plants in reference to ethnology", J. Bot. Br. & Foreign 4 (1866): 317–32].

R. T. Lowe back from Madeira.