CD long anxious for new American edition of Origin to incorporate corrections since 2d ed. [of 1860]; believes such updating has kept English and continental sales high. If Appleton unable to comply, he will ask Asa Gray to find another publisher.

Mentions possible arrangements for U. S. edition of new book [Descent].

CD finds GB’s address interesting; assures him that he has never said GB was wrong on any point, but that there were differences between them, which he now thinks are not great.

Comments on specific parts of the address [see 6793]: colonisation, variability of large and small genera, descent from a single parent or pair of parents, rapid multiplication and change in species, isolation.

The 5th edition of Origin was printed some months previously and stereotypes cannot be supplied.

If Appletons will reprint the 5th edition of Origin in America, he pledges to supply stereotypes, if possible, or the sheets as printed if not, of his new book (Descent).

Encloses extract from a letter from Fritz Müller about humming-birds visiting Passiflora, "as a caution about Passiflora in contrast with Tacsonia".

[Signed with CD’s name by Emma Darwin.]

Not willing to sit for photographer again.

ABM’s translation of Wallace’s Malay Archipelago has not yet arrived.