RS cannot give any information as yet about lithography. WW's 'barometer only pretends to be comparative and is adjusted by another which is positioned to give yourself no uneasiness upon that head. The Galvanic plates look ugly enough to be very scientific but you know best what use you intend to extract from them. As the barometer and thermometer both require care they must stay here until I can bring them down which will be also as well for the Plates. What day this will be I am not quite certain but I hope on Thursday morning to mount the telegraph'. RS has sent and addressed his circle to WW and it should arrive at Shepherd's Bridge Street on Friday morning. He will bring his own barometer so that WW can compare it with his. Donkin [Bryan Donkin] has finished the Zenith Sector. RS hopes the observatory [Cambridge Observatory] 'may get so far advanced that to recede or limit the plan may be impossible even for the heads'. RS has been testing his instrument: 'Two lines of observations nearly contemporaneous gave me the same error in the chronometer within a second of time but that only proves that the instrument gives the same results and that the fault was not in the observer making the contacts'. RS gives Troughton's [Edward Troughton] answers to George Peacock's questions concerning the Transit.
Aldeburgh - Has been to Rome with his wife, went to the Mithraic Temple at San Clemente, had many talks with Father Delaney; writes of the state of religion: thinks the church is stagnating; thinks politicians should take a course in the study of anthropology, adding the study of heredity; thinks Dean Inge in his 'Outspoken Essays' understands the times, and admires his 'Idea of Progress'; Bury's book of the same name claims that 'the number of civilizations which have reached a given stage and gone under, is beyond compute'; agrees that Germany should pay for her 'brigandage' but thinks money should be advanced to pay the miners to dig the coal that France needs; Frazer writes of [Oliver] Lodge and [Arthur Conan] Doyle, and Clodd quotes Sir Bryan Donkin that he classes Doyle among the 'mentally defective'; he is publishing a book 'Magic in Names'; wonders if Frazer is going to supplement 'Folk-Lore in the Old Testament' as Frazer has said that it hung on the issue of a book by a French scholar on the early history of Christianity; asks if Frazer has examined the evidence advanced by Prof. Elliot Smith on the origin of Pre-Columbian civilization, backed by [W. H. R.] Rivers in [A. H.] Keane's Man Past and Present' and quotes [A.C.] Haddon; finds as he gets older the more he values an open mind; the servant problem not helped by the promising house maid who hid her pregnancy and gave birth in the middle of the night.