Collingwood - The superintendent of the Government Free Schools at the Cape, Mr. Jones, is in Scotland seeking school masters. He is then going on a visit to Belgium, Holland and Germany 'with a view to examine personally into the details and principles of the methods of teaching there practiced'. Can WW provide him with any letters of introduction and suggestions. JH will introduce him to Lambert A. J. Quetelet who has relevant statistics. Mr Jones 'is a very superior person' and is superintendent of a brand-new plan of colonial education. WW's 'book is a tough [The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, 2 vols., 1840] - one...You are too a-prori rather for me - as soon as one has worked ones way up to a general law you...come cranking in and tell me it is a fundamental idea innate in everybody's mind - a necessary truth or very likely to prove such in one [or] thousand years hence'.
JWL has received WW's letter plus Quetelet's [Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet] papers. He is sorry that WW cannot attend the Committee and thinks his suggestions excellent - reports on papers and a yearly report. If we had an exact copy of the constitutions of all Foreign Societies, we could graft the best aspect of each onto ours. The Council of the Royal Society have given him permission to employ Mr Walker to draw a map of the world under his direction to chart the progress of the tide, unfortunately 'Capt. Beaufort [Francis Beaufort] will not allow him to consult the Charts at the admiralty for fear he shall trouble them', so he has had to use books of sailing directions. Regarding WW's problem in biometry, JWL does not think 'we possess sufficient information with respect to the ages at which marriages take place and the intervals which lapse after marriage before children are born to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion with respect to the influence a general retardation of marriages would have upon the increase of the population'. Mr Dessiou [Joseph Foss Dessiou] has nearly completed his work on the tides and JWL has seen some of his results. He has begun work on a Physical Astronomy paper.
The draft concerning Paley's Moral Philosophy carries revisions in Whewell's hand. This is accompanied by a broadsheet advertising a course of astronomical lectures by the Plumian Professor [James Challis] dated 20 Mar. 1846; a satirical election broadsheet; a leaflet about the Masons signed in print by Granville Penn at Stoke Park, Bucks. Jan. 1 1840; a facsimile of a printed copy of Friedrich Schiller's letter dated 6 Nov. 1782; a leaflet from the Académie Royale regarding a commemorative medal in honour of M. Quetelet; Dawson Turner's booklet Emblems of Saints (Jan. 1844); three printed Moral Philosophy examination questions; printed material relating to meetings of various learned societies, and other material.