JS’s facts on Primula are new to CD.

In Linum CD has also found dimorphic and non-dimorphic species.

Plans to publish next autumn on successive homomorphic generations in Primula.

"Fluctuating forms" due to culture.

Urges JS to publish.

Lobelia functionally monoecious.

Where did JS publish on Clivia hybrids? Did he count parent and cross seeds, as Gärtner shows is necessary?

CD has done large experiments on artificially fertilised cowslips. They never resemble oxlips.

Would welcome detailed criticism of natural selection by a careful observer like JS. Most criticism worthless. Expects a great deal from Lyell’s reaction.

Suggests JS do orchid experiment to see if rostellum can be penetrated by pollen.

Cannot aid TWW with respect to bees from East Indies. Suggests he write to Edward Blyth.

Thanks him for getting query on variation in bees circulated in Germany.

Criticises style of JS’s fern paper [Edinburgh New Philos. J. 2d ser. 16 (1862): 209–27].

JS’s remark on "the two sexes counteracting variability in the product of the one" is new to CD.

Does the female [fern?] plant always produce female by parthenogenesis?

They seem to work on same subjects; CD has much material on Drosera.

Does not understand JS’s objections to natural selection.

Offers to suggest experiments.

Maintains his view on crossing. Thinks practical breeders would agree with him; doubts that variability and domestication are at all necessarily correlative.

Identical plants in different conditions a heavy argument against "direct action" [of physical conditions].

His 1000-pigeon case is altered if long-beaked are in least degree sterile with short-beaked.

His work on dimorphism inclines him to believe that sterility is at first a selected quality to keep incipient species distinct.

Case of easy modification of Lythrum pollen to favour or prevent crossing.

Monsters.

Has just finished chapter on variations of cultivated plants.

Edinburgh doctors have sent him Diploma of Medical Society.

Thanks ACR for Catalogue; pleased some of his volcanic specimens have been included.

Will review T. F. Jamieson’s paper on Glen Roy. Knows the facts and knows too well that he [CD] is everlastingly smashed.

H. W. Bates’s paper; CD will review it. ["Mimetic butterflies" (1863), Collected papers 2: 87–92.]

JS should be proud of his paper ["Nature of the fern-spore", Edinburgh New. Philos. J. 2d ser. 16 (1862): 209–27].

CD has just found that JS’s observations on the confluence of two sexes causing variability were independently confirmed by Huxley.

CD has always suspected a fundamental difference between buds and ovules.

Asks for examples of "bud-variation" or "sports".

Asks JS to test germination of pollen on rostellum of Laelia.

Offers JS money for experimental supplies, e.g., netting, to keep insects out of flowers.

Encloses an outline of crossing experiments with Lythraceae, Primula, Pelargonium, and others, which he feels would be valuable.

Note on melastomids.

Thanks for Begonia and Oxalis.

Keeps obstinate about crossing and could argue till doomsday, but will not bother JDH.

Sees that JDH has finished Welwitschia.

Thinks Huxley’s Working Men’s Lectures excellent.

Has finished Linum paper [Collected papers 2: 93–105],

and abstract of Bates’s paper for Natural History Review,

and has begun to arrange concluding chapters [for Variation]. Is paralysed on how to begin.

Thanks for Dawson’s letter. Doubts his evidence that climate of land was not glacial when upheaved after submergence.

Encloses memorandum of questions for C. V. Naudin.

Expression of the emotions.

Is building a hothouse for plant experimenting.

JDH’s ideas on America are more atrocious than his. What a new idea that struggle for existence is necessary to try to purge a government! Probably true. Slavery draws him one way one day, another the next. Yankees are "detestable toward us". Tocqueville.

Genera plantarum reviewed in Parthenon by a man who says JDH is disgraced by being "obviously tinged with Darwinism".

CD by chance has found that Saturday Review article [14 (1862): 589] on Duke of Argyll was written by his [CD’s] nephew, Henry Parker.

Asa Gray sends American newspapers which CD never reads.

Has HF met with any cases of what gardeners call "sports" and what CD will call "bud-variations"?

On THH’s Lectures to working men.

Work by Ferdinand J. Cohn on the contractile tissue of plants ["Über contractile Gewebe im Pflanzenreich" Abh. Schlesischen Ges. Vaterl. Cult. 1 (1861)] seems important. CD has come to the conclusion that there must be some substance in plants analogous to the supposed diffused nervous matter in lower animals.

[Part of P.S. missing from original.]