Greenhill, Edinburgh - It does not look at as if Chalmers [Thomas Chalmers] will be attending the BAAS meeting in Edinburgh due to illness: 'He lamented particularly his having to forego the pleasure of your company'. JDF hopes WW will come up a few days prior to the meeting 'when we shall have a little more peace than during it'.
Edinburgh - Much interested in WW's paper on the form of motion, especially 'the separation you give most of the empirical form'. But has difficulty with the third law; 'as I cannot get quite of the apprehension that it is wholly empirical'. He would like to spend more time on WW's argument on the relationship of external nature to man's 'independent intellectual constitution'. Greatly pleased with the late oration of [Mr Birk]. Thank [Adam] Sedgwick for his recent publication. Surprised at the Edinburgh Review's comments on WW's book [Bridgewater treatise?]. The Quarterly [Review] 'treated me very shabbily'.
Penwick, near Edinburgh - Regrets that he won't make the scientific meeting next month at Edinburgh, or have 'the pleasure of your company under my roof'. He needs 'retirement' for the re-establishment of his health.
Penwick, near Edinburgh - WW to return the enclosed letter from [Thomas] Malthus. Very disappointed not to be well enough to attend the [BAAS] Edinburgh meeting, especially since he wanted to 'introduce a plan for statistics'. Hopes this department is well attended. Gives his regards to WW.
Edinburgh - A Scottish clergyman, Dr Forbes of Glasgow, is in the press with a work aimed at resting the Integral and Differential Calculus on a new principle. TC has told him to send a copy to WW. He will also receive a volume by TC on the nature of 'Literary and Ecclesiastical' subjects.
'Let me talk about your book first ['The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time', 3 vols, 1837] - I cannot promise allegiance to all your metaphysical views but it gave me much comfort to perceive that you do not mean to write the book in the synthetical form in which you put the substance of it in your first letter. If you analyse and unravel the different stages knowledge has gone through and the mind must go through in reaching it then up to the last points your book must be full of useful and interesting truth and those last points, the hyperphysical hooks and glue, are (forgive me) happily by no means of first rate importance and I am sure that if you attempted to synthesize and begin with them you would be thought as wild as Goethe himself when he wrote about light mind you may be perfectly right after all but there is film in my eye as yet when I get to these points a film which I seriously hope you will help to remove'. RJ has been in the valleys for three weeks and off to Ditching tomorrow. Since he did not know where to send WW this letter in Edinburgh, he has sent it to Thomas Chalmers - 'pray make my excuses to him for the liberty I have taken I hope he is well and an active statistician'.