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

Thanks for Journal of researches and Origin.

Thanks CD for comments on his fern paper [see 3847 and 3853]; has great difficulty in expressing his ideas.

Discusses inheritance and variation.

Asks CD for an account of the experiments he would like JS to perform.

Thanks CD for agreeing to review Bates’s paper for Natural History Review.

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.

Has had news from Asa Gray about Civil War.

Belatedly thanks CD for Orchids, which shows CD to be the successor to Gilbert White.

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.

On his particular spiritual faith; worships great naturalists and authors.

Does not wish to see American newspapers that Asa Gray offers to send, or hear about Civil War.

Comments on items in the Saturday Review and the Edinburgh Review.

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"?

JDH’s impression on meeting [J. A.] Froud[e].

CD’s projected three volume work.

Complains at poor state of some [unspecified] plant collection.

Hostile to Spencer’s application of natural selection to society.

JDH on J. E. Gray’s views on collecting.

JDH collecting Wedgwood ware.

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.]