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.
Sends specimens of sessile cirripedes for corroboration of their cementing apparatus.
Absence of anus in Brachiopoda and Alcippe cirripedes.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks THH for corroborating his observations. Discusses metamorphosis of ovaria to cement organs. Ovaries, germinal vesicles, and anatomy of cirripedes. Difficulties of classification, and observation.
THH’s article on Mollusca [Charles Knight, ed., English cyclopædia: a new dictionary of universal knowledge (1854–70) 3: 855–74].
Acknowledges a list [of plants?].
Looks forward to new edition [of British plants growing wild in the parish of Hitcham, Suffolk, 2d ed. (1855)].
JSH should not trouble about Anacharis until he is less busy. Will send cirripedes.
Can AH give information about D. A. Godron, "De l’espèce et des races" [Mem. Soc. Sci. Lett. & Arts Nancy (1847): 182, 239–88]? CD unable to locate reference.
CD has been a referee for LH’s Nile geology paper [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 145 (1855): 105–38]. Praises the work but offers criticism not in his report: Joseph Russegger’s statement about the baked Upper Sandstone deposit cannot be believed; LH’s paper is too long.
Asks WDF to observe at what age pigeons have tail-feathers sufficiently developed to be counted.
CD is hard at work on his notes for a book with all the facts "for & versus" the immutability of species.
Asks for a young chicken and a nestling common pigeon.
Recommends publication of Leonard Horner’s account of researches in alluvial deposits of Egypt [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 145 (1855): 105–38]. It contains valuable observations which will probably become of still higher value in future.
CD hopes to have an hour’s talk with CJFB before CD leaves London.
Will forward JD’s paper to the Royal Society ["On the ova of salmon", Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 146 (1856): 21–9].
Discusses JD’s paper ["On ova of salmon"]. His experiments are of particular value regarding power of dispersal and geographical distribution and would make of them a very different subject. Hopes JD can test again the tenacity of life of non-developed ova being less than that of those fully developed – a result which surprised CD.