Letter to Frederick Orpen Bower from John Christopher Willis

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Letter to Frederick Orpen Bower from John Christopher Willis in which he thanks Bower for sending a photograph of himself and asks Bower to remind him to send one of himself if Bower has not already got one. He mentions that they have had a disagreeable year with an "autocratic, ignorant brute of a minister" but that they have an excellent man now. He also informs Bower that his contract is due for renewal but that he does not know if they will renew it or not, he feels this is a shame as they have now got a full complement of staff and a department that could now do things. He remarks that the asiatic places cannot touch Rio de Janeiro for civilisation, flora and climate. He states that he is curious to have Bower's views on the last paper he had published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, The endemic flora of Ceylon : with reference to geographical distribution and evolution in general, (1915) which shows that commonness depends on age and has nothing to do with natural selection. He intends to follow this with another paper discussing evolution more generally but states that as he also has a lot of morphological work to do and his new dictionary to write, he is very busy.

• Academic Papers
• Botany
• Darwin, Backlash to
• Employment
• Evolution (Biology)
• Natural Selection
• Photographs
• Plants
• Labour Contract
• Morphology
• Scholarly Publishing
• Social Interaction

• Bower | Frederick Orpen | 1855-1948 | regius professor of botany, University of Glasgow
• Willis | John Christopher | 1868-1958 | director of the botanic gardens, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

• Royal Society | c1645-: | scientific society | London (England)

• Sri Lanka