RS has been church hunting and gives his verdict on various churches and cathedrals in south England. RS reflects upon his experience of the architecture he encountered on his continental tour of Europe a few years back [WW is currently doing a similar tour of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland]. RS has read most of Basil Hall's 'clever but heavy book about America. he is not sufficiently a citizen of the world even in imagination to form a fair estimate of brother Jonathan but he has done his best'. RS thinks that nothing 'can be more clear than that America is a hateful country for an Englishman all whose feelings and habits and associations must be perpetually shocked'. RS boils down much of the evil in America 'from the facility with which any man may obtain a livelihood, but still a good deal is left behind which I think with Hall must be laid upon the shoulder of the Democracy. The balance between the necessary evils of a constitution like theirs or like ours so far as we can consider evils as arising to the letter of a constitution, is a different thing and a more difficult subject than Hall would make it. I would not swop but that is still a different thing. I wish his views had been a little wider, because he has evidently had great advantages and because they will be able to criticise very successfully all his merely English notions, so that his good parts and doubts will be lost upon them and he will be set down for author of those John Bulls who travel to see evil in everything not English'.RS is getting a 'twenty inch convertible pendulum, of cylindrical rod and having the planes attached to the pendulum'.
Letters have been assigned numbers 1-20. Item 1 is a note entitled "Hints for Dr. Cumming's Apocalyptic Researches"; item 2 is an anti-evangelical letter; item 3 discusses the corruption of the word "Paulician"; item 6 is a fragment of a letter concerns the "mutual relations" between political economy and morality: 'It is the separate province of Morality to make us good, & of Economic Science to make us wise'; item 11 is an incomplete letter with the author's name missing: knows of no English translation of Cuvier's "Lessons on comparative anatomy", and only knows of Blumenbach's work on that subject; item 12 refers to the "correcting principle" used on the voyages to the North Pole obtained very complete corrections: "the equator of my imaginary sphere came nearly onto the position of the horizon", Basil Hall used the old principle in his voyage across the equator; item 13 is dated 6 Aug. 1840 and questions Whewell's assertion in his Bridgewater treatise, that the sun diffuses in all directions inexhaustible supplies of heat as well as light; item 19 is possibly addressed to Mrs Stair Douglas in March 1866 and originally enclosed a poem in memory of 'that wonderful Philosopher Dr Whewell'.
Letter of 10 Mar. [1833] attached to letter from Basil Hall to Whewell dated 16 Mar. [1833].