My Dear M^r Darwin

I was as pleased as a child this morning to have a letter from you again.¹ Mr Wallace two months ago told me of the illness in your house & knowing the distress you would be in I did not like to trouble you with letters. You do not say whether M^rs Darwin & Leonard are quite recovered.²

Regarding my book. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself after so much bragging at the beginning not to have finished the work after 12 months employed on it.³ I think I told you that it would be only external stimulus that would impel me on with it I felt so disinclined to write. I hoped, however, having once commenced, a liking for the task would set in but it has not been so. I have been working & bodging against inclination ever since April last. You will be glad to hear that now, 620 pages are finished out of the 700 of which the work is to consist. Two thirds of the M.S. have been delivered to Murray:⁴ after the last receipt M. writes “it keeps up to the mark”. With the autumnal weather a better activity has arisen & I am writing rapidly.

I must plead as a little excuse for slowness, an interruption caused by re-writing & passing through the press of my memoir in Linnæan Transactions.⁵ This took me 3 hours a day for six weeks in June to August. It fills 72 pages quarto. I took great pleasure in this. I shall get sharply scolded, I expect, for expense caused to the society in altering proofs; but I wanted to make the treatise worthy of the high honour of its place in the Transactions.⁶ It was written only as a review of species with ordinary introductory remarks for the “Proceedings”. I feel now that the memoir does not express my thoughts with the force & clearness that I think I could impart were I allowed to rewrite again the whole. I shall be most anxious to have your deliberate criticism on it   I should think it is now about ready for distribution. I have matter for another better treatise on the origin of species out of local varieties.

Mr Edwin Brown is manager in a large bank at Burton.⁷ I have known him 21 years: he was my earliest Naturalist friend. I have always looked on him as a man of extraordinary intellectual ability. I have given him my notions on Carabi. He is amassing material (specimens) at a very great expense.⁸ He has never travelled: this is a great deficiency for the relations of species to closely allied species & varieties cannot, I think, be thoroughly understood without personal observation in different countries. He has very little leisure & perhaps will not be able to devote the enormous time & anxious thought to the subject which are required to work it out.⁹

It was a damper not to see my book advertised in Murray’s lists for November, December.¹⁰ Should you advise me to recommend him to begin printing? The correction of proof would sooner help me to finish than hinder me. There are 3 or 4 more engravings required, which he will put in hand doubtless when he has the additional M.S. which I shall send him in 5 or 6 days.

Please give my kind regards to Mrs Darwin & family

Yours sincerely | H W Bates