September 15 Sunday – Sam wrote from London to Livy. Sam was being pressured to lecture in London but he resisted.

“On Tuesday I mean to hang a card to my key-box, inscribed ‘Gone out of the City for a week’—& then I shall go to work & work hard. One can’t be caught in a hive of 4,000,000 people, like this” [MTL 5: 160].

Sam also wrote a short note to James R. Osgood, enclosing a photograph of himself [MTP, drop-in letters].

Sam continued to see the sights. From his notebook:

Regent’s Park is a huge tract in the midst of London, adorned with great trees & luxuriantly carpeted with grass. …We entered the great Zoological Gardens with Mr. Henry Lee…I wanted to find Mr. Darwin’s baboon that plays mother to a cat, but did not succeed. So Darwin invented that.

In the House of Monkeys there was one long, lean, active fellow that made me a convert to the theory of Natural Selection. He made a natural selection of monkeys smaller than himself to sling around by the tail. …Without reflection one might jump to the conclusion that Noah would consider the Zoo Gardens not much of a show, & look twice at his shilling before he bought a ticket; but it appears different to me. Noah could not get these animals into two arks like his. Though of course I do not wish to disparage Noah’s collection. Far from it. Noah’s collection was very well for his day [MTL 5: 586-7].