About share transfers, involving JW as a trustee of CD/Emma marriage trust.

CD expresses his inability to accept the view that the Hippuritidae are in any way a connecting link between the oysters and the barnacles.

Discusses how Fuegians and other primitive peoples light fires.

CD "lectures" JDH on taking care of his health.

CD’s pleasure in London trip.

CD and Emma have taken season tickets to Crystal Palace.

Edward Forbes’s "Introductory Lecture" is the best CD ever read.

CD gives his definition of "highness" and "lowness" as "morphological differentiation" from a common embryo or archetype. JDH’s view, with which CD agrees when it can be applied, is the same as Milne-Edwards’, i.e., the physiological division of labour. There is little agreement among zoologists and CD admits his own lack of clarity.

Is unequal to taking chair as President of Natural History Section of BAAS meeting in Liverpool. Very little fatigue or excitement brings on swimming of head, nausea, and other symptoms.

CD’s view requires only that ancient organisms resemble embryological stages of existing ones. Thus "highness" in plants is difficult to evaluate because they have no larval stages. Would compare highest members of two groups, rather than archetype, to determine which group was higher. Against Forbes’s polarity and parallelism.

Thanks for money paid into his account. Has not received interest payment from Lord Powis.

Thanks JAHdeB for his present of two volumes [Description des Entomostracés fossiles des terrains tertiaires de la France et de la Belgique (1852) and "Les Crustacés fossiles du Limbourg" (1854)]. CD was interested in the remarks on geographical distribution of the Entomostraca.

CD’s second volume for the Ray Society [Living Cirripedia] is finished but not yet published.

Should like to examine the correspondent’s Madeira cirripedes but is too much occupied with other subjects of natural history.

Thanks for writing about E. A. Darwin’s illness. Will never forget the comfort she was [when Anne Darwin died, 1851].

Has found a half dozen [cirripede] specimens belonging to William Thompson and a few MS notes. Asks for instructions for sending them to RP.

Arranges to return a collection of cirripedes which belongs to her husband [Samuel Stutchbury].

Can AH spare Alcippe specimens for British Museum?

C. S. Bate has found Alcippe off Plymouth.

Discusses returning specimens to AH.

Owes to AH the discussion of powers of excavation of Verruca in Living Cirripedia [vol. 2 (1854)].

Discusses specimen of Balanus crenatus.

Sorry JP’s children are ill.

Will come to Liverpool if well [for meeting of BAAS].

Sends fossil cirripedes for the museum’s collection.

Will return all but two volumes; requests four titles, including Pepys’s Diaries, but not the first volume.

Sends beetle he cannot identify.

Reading J. O. Westwood [Introduction to the modern classification of insects (1839–40)] has reawakened his passion for entomology.

Sends his comments on JSH’s MS on cirripedes ["On typical objects in natural history", Rep. BAAS (1855): 108–26].

Second Living Cirripedia volume published. Asks THH’s advice on presentation copies for continental naturalists.

THH’s review of Vestiges of creation in [Br. & Foreign Med.-Chir. Rev. 13 (1854)]. CD is almost as unorthodox on species as the author of Vestiges, but hopes not quite so unphilosophical.

Hopes L. Agassiz was sounder on embryological stages than THH thinks.