Thanks FG for book [The art of travel (1855)].
Is looking for a house in London for a month.
Reports that his intercession with Folliott Baugh [Rector of Chelsfield, Kent] has had no effect. Baugh still believes Farnborough’s rights have not been attended to if entire fund is applied to the school at Down.
Discusses views of Daniel Sharpe on foliation and cleavage. Recalls his own previous discussion [in South America].
Has found a house on Baker Street to take for a month.
Mentions Daniel Sharpe’s study of the Grampians.
Association of various metamorphic rocks and relationship of their foliation to their dip and strike. Discusses foliation of schists and its origin. Comments on fluidity of gneiss and schists.
CD called on Baugh but found him adamant; he has already laid the case before the [Charity] Commissioners and if necessary will take it to a Court of Equity.
Relationship of schists to alternating beds of slate in western Tierra del Fuego and the Chonos Islands.
Comments on Sharpe’s theory of curved cleavage planes.
Example of metamorphosis in a "clay-slate porphyry region". Importance of previous lines of cleavage and stratification in foliation of metamorphosed rock.
Responds to CD’s letter. The ova of Salmonidae exposed to air, if kept moist, will stay alive up to 72 hours.
The only mainland vegetation he saw on Falkland Island shores were trees. Remembers no strange birds there, but on journey home saw a woodcock more than 500 miles from the nearest land.
Provides another case of apparently pure bred pointers producing litter with one setter puppy. Correspondent was told that this occurred in several litters; gives names of owners and others who can corroborate the information.
Sends specimens of sessile cirripedes for corroboration of their cementing apparatus.
Absence of anus in Brachiopoda and Alcippe cirripedes.
Comments on possibility of transport of seeds of Arctic plants by ice.
Thanks for FG’s note and trouble in searching out pigeons.
Is obliged to FG for obtaining C. J. Andersson’s offer of information about breeds of cattle in South Africa.
Pleased to hear that SC is prospering.
News of FitzRoy, Sulivan and J. L. Stokes.
The Crimean War is badly mismanaged, but Englishmen are behaving nobly.
Wishes he knew what to do with his boys.
CD has suggested an explanation of how pike were introduced to a remote lake in Ireland by cormorants [carrying pike spawn on their feet or in their gullets].
Hybrid insects.
Description of the Salvages.
Variability of "transition groups" of insects; relation of variability to ranges of insects. The variability of wings, even within species. Reduction of flying ability on isolated islands.
Forbes’s "Atlantis" theory and insect fauna of the Atlantic islands, considered with regard to insect migrations.
Gives instances of sexual differences in the number of tarsi within species of Coleoptera and also variation in the number of tarsi between related species.
A page of [unspecified] text is missing from a parcel of material received from GRW.
CD "hopes and expects to live to see Carboniferous, & perhaps even Silurian, mammifers!"
Has several questions to ask whenever they meet.
CD’s tabulation of colonists curious but explicable.
Working on Tasmanian flora; contemplating general essay on Australian distribution: Tasmania and Australia same alpine species; Swan River flora very peculiar and quite distinct from New South Wales.
Trying to establish new journal at Linnean.
Latitude overrules everything in distribution. Alpine distributions are like insular. Tabulating proportions.
T. V. Wollaston’s Madeira insects: many flightless, thus not blown to sea. TVW’s insects do not confirm Forbes’s Atlantis.
Comparison of skulls of Ichthyosaurus and Cetacea.