MS of a paper called "Comments on Mr Darwin’s grand theory", which generally supports CD but proposes that present flightless birds are primitive. Paper supplemented by a diagram showing the phylogeny of birds.

Examples of animals that dwell in dark places, some of which are blind, some not. Asks: where causes are the same, why is not the effect? Does not think disuse is the answer, but arrested development.

Comments also on the absence of a ligament in four mammals and asks how natural selection accounts for this.

Responds to CD’s queries concerning faults; is sending sections of the kind he wants. The Merionethshire fault with a downthrow of 12000ft. [See Origin, p. 285.]

Will secure information on indigenous and naturalised bees as CD requests.

Believes Mexican and Jamaican Melipona are different.

Relieved by Wallace’s letter.

At work on introductory essay to Flora Tasmaniae.

European plants naturalised in Australia are almost all adapted to invading disturbed ground.

JDH supports Asa Gray against Alphonse de Candolle as foreign member of Royal Society.

Hooker is “relieved and pleased” by the letters from ARW that Darwin had forwarded regarding ARW’s reaction to the joint reading of their papers at the Linnean Society in 1858. He discusses his progress on his Australian article. [Hooker, J. D. 1859. On The Flora of Australia: Its Origin, Affinities, and Distribution. In: Botany of the Antarctic Expedition. Part 3: Flora of Tasmania, vol. 1. London: Lovell Reeve.] He discusses potential candidates for the Royal Society’s new Foreign Fellow.