alternatehistory.com

15 December

Slightly belated launch of HMS Minotaur. This improved Achilles has turned out to take less time to construct than Achilles herself, and is planned to mount both heavy RML guns for punching armour and a large Armstrong battery for general work. Her entire side is protected by armour between 4.5 and 5.5 inches thick, and she is said to be essentially unsinkable by any of the weapons of the American War owing to the combination of her thick armour and her double bottom.

16 December

Charles Darwin is startled and gratified by Mendel's letter, and writes back expressing his great interest in what Mendel has to show him.

19 December

An Austrian diplomat at a meeting of the German Confederation attacks the way that Prussia is - supposedly - warping the whole of Confederation policy around themselves, with both the Polish crisis (attributed by the Austrian in question to the Prussians, something which is a little surprising to some) and the Holstein crisis being cited as examples of this.
Nevertheless, the resolution for action is passed by the Confederation, with a series of escalating get-out clauses amended onto it. It will activate on 12 January.

A patent is issued on Kampticon, later known as Linoleum.

21 December

HMS Achilles is launched. While inferior to Minotaur, she is seen as superior to Warrior and to the current French ships (the most recent and powerful of which is the Provence, which has a thicker belt but slightly thinner battery armour and less effective armour penetration).
The Admiralty's current plans in the event of war with France include the heavy use of Palliser shells on 68-lbers, Somerset guns and heavy RML guns to fight enemy ironclads, and the use of Martin's Shell to disable and destroy the French wooden liners.


25 December

Queen Victoria and her son-in-law Frederick III enjoy a fine Christmas together in Hanover with the blind Hanoverian king George V (a close relative of both other monarchs through different routes). Discussion of politics takes place, in which Victoria states her view that it would be best for Prussia to take a liberal leadership position in German affairs.
George V disagrees, being an autocrat and Austrian partisan by nature, and Queen Victoria of Prussia defuses the situation in deft fashion before an argument can really get going.

26 December

New evidence comes to light in a divorce case, in which it is revealed that Lord Palmerston was not in fact sleeping with the woman in the case as he had originally been accused.
It is perhaps the simplest summary of Palmerston, his energy and his public persona that the suggestion that the seventy-nine year old man had been sleeping around was met with a general sense that the idea was both plausible and a source of amusement and admiration.


1 January 1864

A mass of thanks is held in St John's Archcathedral in Warsaw, expressing the joy and relief of the city for being delivered from the threat of the Russian occupation of the citadel.
The mass also holds a political significance - it is explicitly a New Year Mass, and underlines the separation from Russia and the closer affinity with non-Orthodox Europe by stressing the Gregorian calendar.


4 January

Charles Darwin reads Gregor Mendel's summary paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (a short piece written up in a tearing hurry and read in Brno a few days previously) and also the four-page notes Mendel has sent on about the basic properties of the hybridization experiments.
Darwin is thunderstruck by the elegance of the concept, and immediately comes up with a number of examples from human inheritance of "dominant" or "recessive" characteristics (the traditional blond hair and blue eyes being two of the most obvious, at least at first glance).
He is well aware that in most cases it is clearly more complicated than Mendel's peas, but feels this is probably a matter for further research.

He sends Mendel's paper on to the Royal Society, describing it as a "fine piece of work in the matter of inheritance from a gentleman of Moravia", and writes a long letter back to the friar expressing his admiration. The letter also speculates on how some beneficial heritable property may arise which is recessive, but in which that fraction of the population where the property appears nevertheless will be advantaged and become the majority as they preferentially survive and reproduce.