Summary

Would like to come to Down on 20th or 21st.

Woolner is unwell.

Summary

Mrs Hooker will not come with him to Down on Saturday.

Summary

Work will prevent his visiting Down as he had planned.

Summary

On his mother’s death.

Summary

Asks whether he ought to write to CD while he is ill.

Wonders if he might use Haast’s notes on introduced animals for a notice he is preparing ["Note on the replacement of species in the colonies and elsewhere", Nat. Hist. Rev. n.s. 4 (1864): 123–7].

Summary

His mother very ill.

Mrs Hooker back from Bavaria.

Hopes marriage [of Henrietta] went well. Is accused of saying he would rather go to two burials than one marriage.

Has heard from Huxley who is threatening to "thin out" Mivart. Huxley is reading Francisco Suarez and finds Mivart misquotes or misunderstands him.

Summary

Pleased to come on 17th.

Is arranging the Aucuba experiment.

Sends some letters for CD’s perusal.

Asks what CD thinks of Huxley’s address [Q. J. Geol. Soc. Lond. 25 (1869): xxviii–liii].

Would be glad to have Drosophyllum plants.

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".