Cannot supply a case of atavism in canaries.
Will lend CD back issues of Cottage Gardener.
Cites case of bird (tumbler hen) laying egg in another’s nest.
It is small comfort to be told you will be succeeded in lineal descent by angels when Lamarck and Darwin have made your ancestors without souls. However, can the progressive system not be seen as most consonant with a higher destiny if all spiritual natures advance? The link of common descent to inferior beings like idiots should be obvious. Infants die before they become responsible. Pope’s An essay on Man [1733] shows how man was "In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast", without speculation on his genealogy.
Has read Origin with pleasure.
Has performed many experiments which confirm his opinion that primrose, oxlip, and cowslip are three distinct species.
Responds to CD’s comments on his review of the Origin. Regrets lack of space often causes him to do injustice to CD and to himself. Agrees to alter some of his statements
and offers some evidence for his opinions on plant hybridising.
Sends references to papers mentioning cave insects. Paussi are not blind, as CD thinks, though some other insects that live in ants’ nests are. Each country over the world has its peculiar species of Paussi, though they all live in ants’ nests. "Physical condition I say – Natural Selection you say".
Reports to CD on what he has found out about Elodea growing near Cambridge.
Sedgwick is speaking at [Cambridge] Philosophical Society on CD’s "supposed errors" [Camb. Herald & Huntingdonshire Gaz. 19 May 1860, pp. 3–4].
JSH wonders how Owen can be so savage toward CD’s views when his own are "to a certain extent of the same character".
Future orders will be highly esteemed.
Saw Salter’s Spirifer specimens; a very good proof of indefinite modifiability.
Beginning to think gap between Cambrian and Lower Silurian enormous.
Édouard Lartet to give paper before Geological Society ["On coexistence of man with certain extinct quadrupeds", Q. J. Geol. Soc. Lond. 16 (1859–60): 471–5].
Observations on hybrids from crossed cabbage varieties.
Returns reviews of Origin.
F. J. Pictet [Arch. Sci. Phys. & Nat. n.s. 7 (1860): 231–55] goes further than he himself realises.
Naturalists will resist CD’s views until faith in certain "impassable" barriers between existent species is shaken.
Gives CD an instance of convergence.
CD’s divergent series explains those anomalous plants that hover between what would otherwise be two species in a genus.
Inclined to see conifers as a sub-series of dicotyledons that developed in parallel to monocotyledons, but retained cryptogamic characters.
Mentions H. C. Watson’s view of variations.
Man has destroyed more species than he has created varieties.
Variations are centrifugal because the chances are a million to one that identity of form once lost will return.
In the human race, we find no reversion "that would lead us to confound a man with his ancestors".
Cannot provide plants CD requested.
Has sowed several kinds of lettuce seed near each other and has never observed them to cross naturally [see Cross and self-fertilisation, p. 173 n.].
Answers CD’s questions about his experiments with primroses, cowslips, and oxlips. HD is aware experiments must often be repeated many times. Has never met with the oxlip except where primrose and cowslip grow together.