Note on cases of representative shells that are not clearly either varieties or species.

CD (and Emma) had a good laugh over JDH’s mortified response to a misinterpretation (in print) concerning his position on multiple creation.

SPW and Waterhouse agree on island faunas; gives Australia and Tasmania as examples. The "stream of migration" from Asia to Tasmania.

Looks forward eagerly to the publication of CD’s "specific" researches.

Invites CD to send his memoranda [on Manual of Mollusca].

Queries from CD on the distribution of molluscan genera referring to SPW’s Manual of the Mollusca [pt 3 (1856)], with SPW’s answers.

Answers CD’s questions about plants common to U. S. and Britain and their distribution in Europe.

Variability of agrarian weeds.

Wishes to borrow fly pincers for his son George.

Discusses T. V. Wollaston’s book on insect variation [On the variation of species (1856)].

Evidence relevant to E. Forbes’s land-bridge theory.

Do the plants that are common to Europe and North America nearly all live north of the Arctic Circle? CD bases his question on HCW’s "capital" comparison between relations of Europe to North America and Europe to E. Asia if the intervening land had been submerged. CD has been led to speculate that in the mid-Pliocene the organisms now living in middle Europe and northern U. S. lived within the Arctic Circle. Subsequent movements of this flora with advance and retreat of glaciers would explain present distribution better than Forbes’s vast submergences.

Smallpox in the village. Death of Joseph Parslow’s son.

Sends a cultivated specimen of Myosotis (first generation) grown from seed sent by JSH. Asks for a tuft of flower.

Hopes JSH will publish a book on teaching botany, because he has no idea how to begin with his children.

Comments on Huxley–Falconer dispute [see "On the method of palaeontology", Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 18 (1856): 43–54].

Wollaston’s On the variation of species [1856].

Has exploded to Lyell against the extension of continents.

Plants common to Europe and NW. America as result of temperate climate.

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?

Conveys [? J. T. I. Boswell-]Syme’s opinion of variability of agrarian weeds and ranges of species common to U. S. and W. Europe. The Hispano-Hibernian connection.

CD sends reference for "Laburnum case", with comment on his own credulity.

Wants to quote JDH on plants endemic to NW. America.

Can no longer make out story of NW. American plants; consulting Asa Gray.

Questionable validity of seed-salting experiments.

Aristolochia and Viscum seem to shed pollen before flower opens.

Ray Society should only do translations.

Thomas Thomson in India has rediscovered Aldrovanda, a rare relative of Drosera.

Madeiran insects. Regards the "Atlantic province" as a centre of the Coleoptera.

On the relationship of the loss of the powers of flight [in Coleoptera] to increase of bulk.

Criticises at length the concept of submerged continents attaching islands to the mainland in the recent period. Notes drastic alteration of geography required, the dissimilar species on opposite shores of continents, and differences between volcanic islands and mountains of mainland areas. Admits sea-bed subsidence, but not enough to engulf continents. Denies that theory can explain island flora and fauna.

Considers Edward Forbes’s idea a check on study of dissemination of species.