Summary

Wife’s health better.

Visited Duke of Argyll.

Thanks CD for Cruciferae diagram; will ponder it.

Staggered by complexity of Welwitschia.

Summary

Asks his opinion of A. C. Ramsay’s glacial lake theory. Encloses Julius Haast’s communication on glacial phenomena.

Summary

Has sent two Impatiens flowers; curious to know what CD makes of the floral whorls and their vascular bundles.

Cassia is another genus that has different [coloured] anthers in same flower.

Continues to work on Welwitschia.

Feels as CD does about his work, which after a time seems flat and stale. He could never have done what CD did in his Orchids.

CD’s facts about Verbascum have horrible bearing on JDH’s practice of lumping species together.

Summary

Does CD want Masdevallia?

Sends addresses of persons in S. America who would send Melastomataceae seeds.

Has ordered Matthieu Bonafous on maize [Histoire naturelle du maïs (1836)].

Summary

Has sent Masdevallia and other plants.

J. J. F. W. v. Parrot’s Ararat [(1834), trans. W. D. Cooley, in The world surveyed in the XIXth century, vol. 1 (1845)] refreshing in its simple faith in the ark.

Summary

Stupefied by CD’s five forms of Lythrum.

Asa Gray busy with Cypripedium. JDH offers some to CD if he wants to challenge Gray.

J. W. Dawson’s review of JDH’s paper on Arctic plants.

Louis Lucien Bonaparte’s views on Basque and Finnish language [Langue basque et langues finnoises (1862)] suggest to JDH that Basques are Finns left behind after the glacial period, like the Arctic plants!

Summary

JDH admits he wrote Gardeners’ Chronicle and Natural History Review articles on orchids [Gard. Chron. (1862): 789–90, 863, 910; Nat. Hist. Rev. n.s. 2 (1862): 371–6].

JDH’s objections to CD’s idea of how Greenland was repopulated. Temperate Greenland has as Arctic a flora as Arctic Greenland – a fact of astounding force. Why should certain Scandinavian species be absent? Migration by sea-currents can no more account for the present distribution in Greenland than can special creation.

Summary

Samuel Haughton was the prejudiced reviewer of the Origin. JDH’s opinion of SH.

Has heard from a W. African collector that P. B. Du Chaillu’s accounts [Explorations and adventures in equatorial Africa (1861)] are all false.

R. F. Burton has impudently stolen credit for Gustav Mann’s Cameroon expedition.

Summary

Sends CD West Ireland soundings.

More detail on his review "a la Lindley" [see 3797].

Bates’s paper ["Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley", Trans. Linn. Soc. Lond. 23 (1862): 495–566] is capital.

Andrew Murray’s article plays into CD’s hands through sheer ignorance.

JDH is on Royal Society Council.

Has no recollection of applying natural selection to Polynesians. None but a German would dig out such a passage if it exists [see 3812].

Has caused Tyndall to modify his pseudo-geology.

Has not seen Duke of Argyll’s review [Edinburgh Rev. 116 (1862): 378–97]. [The Duke] did not understand Orchids the least little bit, nor the Origin, when JDH saw him.

Summary

Returns Asa Gray letter. Gray has made a great blunder in his criticism of Oliver: he mistakes perpetuation of a variety for "propagation of variation". Confusion between "action of physical causes" and "effects of physical causes". Neither crossing nor natural selection has made so many divergent individuals, but simply variation. "If once you hold that natural selection can create a character your whole doctrine tumbles to the ground." CD’s failure to convey this, and the false doctrine that "like produces like" is at bottom of half the scientific infidelity to CD’s doctrine. There is something to the objection that CD has made a deus ex machina of natural selection since he neglects to dwell on the facts of infinite incessant variations.

Summary

On Asa Gray’s letter; has written why he avoids alluding to the war.

Has read Max Müller [see 3752] – last part unphilosophical.

On CD’s pigeon example, long-beaked and short-beaked pigeons must be either sterile or not inter se. There is "no such thing as Equality – hence no such thing as chance and Nat. Sel. is the sword of Damocles hanging over your head if you make a slip in your premisses."

Has read note on Lythrum sent several weeks ago. Its consequences are of most prolific order to CD’s doctrine.

Kew has no wild gooseberries.

JDH praises the Saturday Review reply [14 (1862): 589] to the Duke of Argyll’s bitter review of Orchids ["The supernatural", Edinburgh Rev. 116 (1862): 378–97].

Summary

"Throttled off" Welwitschia paper at Linnean Society [Trans. Linn. Soc. Lond. 24 (1863): 1–48].

Has read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America [1835–40] – disagrees with it. Tocqueville says democracy in America is a success. Democracy has persisted because there has been no cause for its overthrow (i.e., no struggle for existence, too much mobility).

Sends J. W. Dawson’s unsatisfactory letter.

Summary

Comments on items in the Saturday Review and the Edinburgh Review.

Summary

JDH’s impression on meeting [J. A.] Froud[e].

CD’s projected three volume work.

Complains at poor state of some [unspecified] plant collection.

Summary

Hostile to Spencer’s application of natural selection to society.

JDH on J. E. Gray’s views on collecting.

JDH collecting Wedgwood ware.

Summary

Huxley’s lectures [Man’s place in nature (1863)]; he would be a scientific H. T. Buckle, if he were more careful.

Asks CD what the evidence is for inheritance of acquired characteristics.

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

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

JDH delivers CD’s letter to C. V. Naudin.

Neither Naudin nor Decaisne appreciates Origin.

Discusses Naudin on physiological causes of species formation;

Decaisne on plant heredity.

JDH on Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation.

Summary

British attitude towards America: not hate as Asa Gray thinks, but contempt.