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WDC's is pleased that the BAAS is coming to Plymouth and thrilled by the prospect of 'sitting under you [WW will be President] - whom I regard as the great roman candle of science and literature'. He does not think John will get a fellowship. Hopes WW will visit him on his trip to Plymouth next autumn.

After his son's [William John Conybeare's?] illness during the holiday, WDC is uneasy about his health standing up to the rigours of a new term at Trinity College.

Uxminster - WDC is thrilled that his son [William John Conybeare] is to be made a Fellow of Trinity College.

WDC is 'delighted' with WW's letter, and would like to quote WW as an authority in an article he wants to write for the West of England Journal. He is pleased that WW may consider sending the said journal a paper 'on the action of tides - your name would be very serviceable to us', and hopes he has seen the second number which has two articles by him in. Like everywhere else they are all 'agitated by Politics just now - I look on the Stanley folk as the only true Whigs - and can hardly find words to express the disgust and contempt with which the coalition of that poor tool and fool Johnny Russell with the Radicals and Repealers gives me'.

WDC's son [William John Conybeare] has been 'detained by serious indisposition in town'. Therefore he has not yet returned home and thus he can say nothing certain about his plans. WDC's son has 'read nothing but Classics' and neglected the mathematics. Last week he had a bad 'fever and strong pulsation and displacement of the heart' but thanks to a prompt bleeding seems much better. WDC would like to 'keep him quiet ten days or a fortnight before he returns' homeward, and does not want him to overwork.

WDC is sorry that he wasted any of WW's time. He had thought both WW and Sedgwick had attributed to him an unfounded degree of ignorance which made him annoyed. WDC is now flattered with the attention WW has paid him over his query, which accept for 'some differences rather metaphysical than physical between us' has been settled. When he first made it he only had Faraday's papers before him and had forgot to look at 'earlier writers and see if they had not determined the law of the tangential electro magnetic force, which of course would give me the result I sought as to the Time of revolution by the simplest process'. Barlow [Peter Barlow?] has found the tangential force of galvanic particles on magnetic to be inversely as the squares of the distances and therefore the Times will be directly as the squares of the distances. WW corrects him on his notion of force; 'its strict definition as the cause of change of motion'. WDC accepts this as long as one agrees that motion exists in the first place: 'but here physics seems to me to pass into metaphysics and I cannot conceive but that, recurring to the origin of things a state of rest is more natural than a state of motion - Hence I have a lurking fancy to understand by force not only the cause of a change of existing motion but the original cause of the motion whatsoever...if a tangential force had not been impressed in them at their creation, they would all have huddled together in an heap'.

2 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn - CL was surprised and complimented that WW had already read the 300 pages he had sent him ['Principles of Geology', volume 2, 1832]: 'Recollect that all I have hitherto said against catastrophe is little else than dogmatizing to one who has not seen or read of the evidences which forced me against all my prepossessions to adopt my present creed...I hope you will be an umpire on this question, and therefore restrict yourself for a time to the ample subject of the evidence of organic changes already left you and reject as not yet proved, or attempted to be proved whatever advance respecting the slowness and uniformity of geological changes'. WW may be convinced by the next three chapters. CL has found that 'Hoffman [Friedrich Hofmann?] sent from Sicily an account of the country to which I owe my conversion just when von Dechen [Heinrich von Dechen], Miterlisch [Eilhard Mitscherlich?], and Von Hoff [Karl E A von Hoff?] were reading my book and to this I attribute the now favourable reception of my doctrine at Berlin'. Hoff has reviewed CL at length - an expose of his views as opposed to a critique. 'Dechen writes to Murchison [Roderick Murchison] 'Conybeare's [William Conybeare] reply in the annals is the work of a learned and able divine in support of a lost cause''.