Summary

Cancelled: same as 1672.

Summary

CL would like to put Joachim Barrande on the Royal Society’s foreign list. Of French geologists and palaeontologists, he is the man who has made the greatest sacrifices and produced the greatest results.

Summary

Delighted to hear that CD was awarded Copley Medal. Important because award by chartered institution acts on outsiders and helps increase stock of moral courage.

Summary

His view of Origin.

Belief of Duke of Argyll that substituting "variation" and "selection" for creation deifies them.

Thinks Argyll would accept evolution except for man.

A’s view of humming-birds.

Describes discussion with [Victoria,] Princess Royal of Prussia, about evolution.

New edition of Elements consistent with Origin.

Summary

Feels sure that at times the globe must have been superficially cooler. Believes CD will turn out right with regard to migration across the equator via mountain chains, while the tropical heat of certain lowlands was retained.

Summary

Surprised at Hooker’s introducing "so organic a change as a deviation in the axis of the planet" to explain the cold of the Glacial Period.

Summary

Comments on cool-period MS. Still believes geographical changes principal cause of former changes of climate.

Summary

Urges CD to publish his theory with small part of data.

Corrects names of land shells on list of shells picked up at Down.

Discusses transport of Ancylus from one river-bed to another by water-beetle.

"I hear that when you & Hooker & Huxley & Wollaston got together you made light of all Species & grew more & more unorthodox."

Mentions discussion of old Atlantis by Oswald Heer.

Comments on Helix and Nanina.

Mentions beetle discovered with small bag of eggs of water-spider under wing.

Madeira evidence favours single species birth-place theory.

Summary

CD forgets an author [CD himself in Coral reefs] "who, by means of atolls, contrived to submerge archipelagoes (or continents?), the mountains of which must originally have differed from each other in height 8,000 (or 10,000?) feet".

CL begins to think that all continents and oceans are chiefly post-Eocene, but he admits that it is questionable how far one is at liberty to call up continents "to convey a Helix from the United States to Europe in Miocene or Pliocene periods".

Will CD explain why the land and marine shells of Porto Santo and Madeira differ while the plants so nearly agree?

Summary

To cast doubt on CD’s view that volcanic action is associated with elevation of land, CL suggests that local oscillations in strata underlying volcanoes could also explain how active volcanoes have uplifted fossil deposits of marine shells. Overall he is more inclined to believe that recent volcanoes belong to areas of subsidence rather than of elevation.

Summary

Enumerates fossil mammals known in Secondary strata.

Lack of angiosperm plants in rocks older than Chalk is no reason to anticipate rarity of warm-blooded quadrupeds.

Summary

Praises the Origin: a "splendid case of close reasoning".

Objects to CD’s having ignored Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Thinks CD should omit mentioning problem of explaining the eye at the beginning of chapter 14. Suggests rewording several passages.

Thinks want of peculiar birds in Madeira a difficulty, considering presence of them in Galapagos.

Has always felt that the case of man and his races is one and the same with animals and plants.

Summary

Cancelled: Known only from reference in letter to Charles Lyell, 11 October [1859]

Summary

Wishes CD would enlarge on the doctrines of [Pyotr Simon] Pallas about the various races of dogs having come from several distinct wild species or sub-species.

Suggests organisms have a latent principle of improvement which is brought out by selection or breeding.

Summary

Since dogs have same gestation period as the wolf it is likely that the wolf is the ancestral wild species, if it is just one species.

CD’s belief that domestic dogs are descended from several distinct aboriginal species seems to contradict views on sterility of hybrids and variation in Origin. If domestic varieties came from hybrids of wild species it will be impossible to trace ancestry. Opponents will exploit these problems.

Summary

Questions CD’s view in Origin that domestic dogs are not descended from a single stock. Occasional crossings of domestic stock with wild species could explain cases of reversion towards wild specific forms. CD’s views on hybridity do not then have to be contradicted in constructing an ancestral stock.

Summary

Comments on pp. 201, 211, and 218 [of Origin].

Summary

Discusses phases of climate.

Describes fossil mammals discovered by Auguste Bravard in South America.

Has had argument with Bishop of Oxford [Samuel Wilberforce] about CD’s book [Origin].

Discusses review in Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Guesses that T. V. Wollaston is the author.

Discusses evidence of shells on Madeira.

Comments on paper by Wallace ["On the zoological geography of the Malay Archipelago", J. Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond. (Zool.) 4 (1860): 172–84].

Summary

It is small comfort to be told you will be succeeded in lineal descent by angels when Lamarck and Darwin have made your ancestors without souls. However, can the progressive system not be seen as most consonant with a higher destiny if all spiritual natures advance? The link of common descent to inferior beings like idiots should be obvious. Infants die before they become responsible. Pope’s An essay on Man [1733] shows how man was "In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast", without speculation on his genealogy.

Summary

Saw Salter’s Spirifer specimens; a very good proof of indefinite modifiability.

Beginning to think gap between Cambrian and Lower Silurian enormous.

Édouard Lartet to give paper before Geological Society ["On coexistence of man with certain extinct quadrupeds", Q. J. Geol. Soc. Lond. 16 (1859–60): 471–5].