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The Charles Darwin Collection
The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Thanks for sending his article in the Westminster Review [n.s. 41 (1872): 28–49] and the notice of CD’s work.
Natural selection is under a cloud at present, but CD expects that it will be resuscitated.
Questions AG on earthworm activity in North America and would welcome information from northern Canada if AG has a correspondent there.
Obliged for QdeB’s efforts [to have CD elected member of Académie Française].
With regard to stress that QdeB lays on man’s walking on two legs, no one attributes much significance to difference in mode of locomotion between seals and terrestrial Carnivora or kangaroos and other marsupials.
Is resuming the study of worm-casts as he believes they will bear on the denudation of land. Requests specific information on the relative number, size, and manner of deterioration of worm-casts in India.
A friend of JJA’s wants CD’s opinion on whether the disease porigo decalvans (hair falling out in clumps) demonstrates the link between man and dogs and has continued to evolve with man after he passed out of his "hairy-animal state".
Capt. [Richard?] Burton disagrees with CD’s notion of beauty in the abstract, and would like to meet him.
Has no objection to CD’s alluding to FM’s idea that sexual selection has come into play in mimetic butterflies.
Reports observations on other butterflies and on termites.
His father has gone to Egypt.
Tells of visit to circus.
Has some birds which are allegedly the result of a cross between a common fowl and a guinea-fowl; describes their appearance, and will provide CD with likenesses.
Sends a pamphlet [not identified] in which he applies the principle of natural selection to the working of legislative institutions.
Requests a prescribed physic [not specified].
Thanks recipient for memoir on fossil plants of the Devonian and Upper Silurian.
Thanks LHM for his work on consanguinity. [See 7299].
Discusses his paper on mimicry and natural selection [Land and Water 9 (1871): 321]. Believes natural selection tends to fix mimetic characters rigidly.
Discusses the problems of mimicry as related to natural selection; the general variability of colour as a character; and the conditions necessary for natural selection to fix firmly a character.
Encloses a Fritz Müller letter speculating that organisms respond to certain colours because of the prevalence of those colours in their environment.
His rabbits have lost their patches and are grey.
Has FG seen William Crookes [spiritualist]?
Discusses earthworm activity observed in old ploughed fields.
Louis Agassiz is going on a voyage to the Falklands, and BJS wonders whether it is worth while telling him of the Gallegos fossil bed so that he can investigate.
William [Hooker] is in first division of matriculation list of London University.
Other family news.
No news on Ayrton affair. Ayrton has taken staff appointments out of JDH’s hands.
Asks whether CD knows about Zizania aquatica – can hardly believe it is an annual.
Wants references to the work of Julius von Haast and James Hector on New Zealand glaciers, which CD mentions in the Origin [6th ed., p. 335].
Suggests BJS write to Louis Agassiz about his [fossil mammal?] specimens but doubts that he will have time to do the work. Regrets they were ignored at the Royal College of Surgeons; thinks Owen neglected many things because he was overworked.