Summary

Invites HNM to Down on 9 May.

Summary

Discusses Pallasian doctrine; considers plants are splendid for making one believe in natural selection.

Summary

Requests a copy of Ray Lankester’s lecture or essay on degeneration (Lankester, E. Ray. 1880. Degeneration: A chapter in Darwinism. London: Macmillan.).

Summary

Hopes that Lankester will come stay next Sunday. Clark, Galton and Moseley will also be there.

Summary

Expresses his delight with and admiration for THH’s "Coming of age [of The origin of species]" in Nature [22 (1880): 1–4].

Summary

Thanks for information.

Summary

Forwards John Lubbock’s letter and hopes WED might influence the men "for the sake of science".

Summary

Cannot offer any assistance in urging Government to aid JT’s experiments. Thinks best chance through [William Edward?] Forster. William Carruthers reported to Royal Agricultural Society that JT’s attempt was hopeless.

Summary

Comments on natural selection. Sometimes he can persuade himself that it is of quite subordinate importance, but so many structures have been explained by it that he can also persuade himself that every structure developed through it. Cites H. G. Bronn’s list [of structures not explicable by natural selection].

Summary

Invites JF to Down.

Summary

Lends BJS Titus Coan’s Adventures in Patagonia [1880].

Thanks him for copies of the missionary journal.

Summary

Thanks GC for having sent his book [La teoria di Darwin criticamente esposta (1880)].

Summary

Cannot precisely explain conditions of existence of any organism.

Summary

Discusses ethics of risking one’s life to save another.

Summary

Thanks for AdeC’s Phytographie [1880]. CD finds in it a number of "philosophical" remarks new to him. The work would have been invaluable to him in dealing with puzzles when writing his cirripede monographs.

Describes his system of keeping notes on separate pieces of paper filed in several scores of large portfolios.

Has just sent MS of Movement in plants to the printer. Thinks he has suceeded in showing "that all the more important great classes of movements are due to the modification of a kind of movement common to all plants from their earliest youth".

Summary

Discusses GHD’s genealogical researches

and his health.

Summary

Still remembers FJH. Thinks no scientific journal would publish her essay on Genesis and science.

Regrets death of her brother [W. D. Fox].