Summary

Congratulates CD on Beagle appointment as an "opportunity … of studying all the natural sciences at once, after your own taste".

Summary

Forwards, on behalf of the Birmingham Philosophical Society, an address offering CD the first honorary membership of the Society. Encloses formal record of this meeting.

Summary

Plants in Venezuelan plains.

Observations on Turnera: heterostyly, leaf-base glands’ secretion eaten by ants.

Observations on role of leaf secretions in fertilisation of Marcgravia and Passiflora.

Summary

Potatoes will be lost unless JT has immediate authority to proceed.

Summary

Thanks CD for his cheque for £100. Has told Secretary of BAAS Committee [for the Station], so that he may report it. [See O. J. R. Howarth, The British Association (1931), pp. 196–7.]

Summary

Thanks for CD’s appreciation of his work on family history. Sends one of his books [unidentified].

Summary

Writes on family matters and researches.

Mentions construction of a pendulum

and completion of a paper he will send to the Royal Society.

Summary

Wonders whether Lord Derby would advance him the money to continue his work.

Summary

Is prepared to continue his work, if financial help is forthcoming.

Summary

Has sent off paper to the Royal Society

and begun work on a new problem which he feels contains the meaning of Bode’s Law, concerning the mean distances of the planets from the sun. There are mathematical difficulties, however, which he may be unable to surmount.

Will get to work on the pendulum next week.

Summary

Writes of the weather,

his reading of Huxley’s Crayfish [1880],

and domestic matters.

Summary

Sends seeds of Megarrhiza and gives details of species.

Summary

Hopes to finish his report tomorrow; last year’s crosses were failures.

Summary

Sends pheasant tail coverts, which he believes are unusual in pattern, resembling those of a peacock.

Summary

Sends details of Netter 1879 (Abraham Netter. 1879. De l’intuition dans les découvertes et inventions. Strasbourg: Treuttel & Wurtz.)

Summary

A letter of resignation from the Down Schools Committee. He will send a cheque for balance in hand when he is informed as to whom it is to be sent.

Summary

Wishes to see some small appointment found for A. R. Wallace, whose present labours are trying.

Summary

German edition of Erasmus Darwin delayed because Murray has not sent phototypes and galvanographs.

Two of CD’s articles from Nature to appear in April Kosmos ["Sexual colours in butterflies", Collected papers 2: 220–2, Kosmos 7 (1880): 72–4;

"Fertility of hybrids from the Chinese goose", Collected papers 2: 219–20, Kosmos 7 (1880): 77–8].

Moritz Wagner will begin a series criticising natural selection.

Summary

Offended by F. V. Dickins’ review [Nature 21 (1880): 350] of his Omori mound paper. Asks CD to have it reviewed elsewhere and encloses a letter to Nature he wants CD to forward. [See 12571.]

Summary

Is impressed by the scale of Torbitt’s experiments. Discusses financial assistance. If Torbitt’s work succeeds, they will be amply repaid.