My dear M^r. Darwin,

Thanks for your kind note which I received yesterday.¹

I hope to do some work yet but I was very ill in the early part of this year & am warned against work for a time.

I might have reached your views & a discussion of the questions as to the primitive state in which I could have defined my own views some what fully had it not been for ill-health. As it is I have been able to do little more than negative Morgans & Lubbocks speculations leaving my own views undefined. I am sorry for this but in the circumstances it was unavoidable.²

The time I wasted on the Irish family would have sufficed for the discussion I aimed at.³ But this subject was barely out of hand when I was prostrated & had one attack of bleeding after the other. So the chance was lost. I need not say that I was misled into the Irish Enquiry by what seemed fair promises of a case of classification. Had it been such I should not have grudged my labour.

If you read what I have written of Morgan & think I have been unduly severe please remember that Morgan is not only a block head but an impudent imposter. Sir Henry Maine⁴ wrote to me some months ago saying Morgan had plundered his books—even to the very words—right & left without acknowledgement. I know he so plundered from my own scattered writings & that for years Morgan knew all that had been done by Bachofen⁵ & myself & yet he never mentions us & issues his work as if it were an original speculation—the issues of which had been in his mind when he sent out his schedules to settle “the great problem of the origin of the Red-men”.⁶ No scientifically minded man could act so. For myself I deplore the qualities of brain I see in recent publications on Early Society. I wish y^r. son would turn to this field for which his paper on consanguineous marriages shows such aptitude that at once he must lead in it if he entered it.⁷ As it is no one is at work—except Tylor—with a brain above that of a “wooden spoon”.⁸

Kindest regards to you all | Y^rs. sincerely | J. F M’Lennan