My dear Mr. Darwin,

In making up a collection of ethnical scriptures which I am about to bring out I came across the curious debate between the Sages & animals, which I thought might amuse and interest you, and had copied.²

Today I send you some rough reports of the Science Congress of America, which will show that though my countrymen may not be very thorough students of the phenomena of evolution they are actively studying and discussing them.³

I reading Prof. Swallow’s repudiation of the idea of the moral nature of man being evolved,⁴ I recalled an anecdote told me two days ago by a Mrs. Chase of Valley Falls, Rhode Island, an intelligent Quaker lady who owns a large farm⁵   She said that finding an old horse quite broken down she ordered that he should be placed in a good pasture there to remain for the rest of his life without work. In the same pasture there was a young horse that her daughters rode and were fond of. A week after the old horse had been so pensioned, her son walked over to the pasture to see after him. The weather was excessively hot—the sun burning. There was a clump of trees in the pasture under whose shade the horses were accustomed to shelter themselves from the sun. The young man wondered at not seeing the horses in this shade; and he presently discovered at a little distance the old horse lying down dying, and the young horse standing beside him on the side of the sun, so that his shadow protected the dying horse. The youth approached, the young horse went off, but going off a little way and watching he saw the horse return and plant himself in the same position. This experiment was repeatedly tried, and invariably the young horse went back and stood in the burning sun beside the other. One morning the youth found the young horse again in the shade of the trees. The old horse was dead. Even supposing the position on the sunny side to have been accidental, there was certainly a touching display of feeling and sympathy.

—We have had in London until today, when she has gone to Oxford, a Miss Holmes of New England,—a remarkably pretty and intelligent young lady,—who moves her ears with great freedom. The ears differ from each other in general outline; one being a general curve, the other of somewhat irregular outline, and more distinctly pointed, in fawn-like fashion, than I have ever before seen.⁶

—In preparing the work to which I have already alluded—“The Sacred Anthology”⁷—in which I hope to have every fine passage in every oriental scripture, comparatively classified—I have at every step seemed to be hearing the echoes of your great generalizations. From man’s first utterance as he cowered under the elements or gazed on them with wonder, up to the Sermon on the Mount, up to Plato’s “Laws”, up to Emerson’s Essays or Tennyson’s poetry,⁸ there is no ‘missing link’. The ethnical religions correspond with genera and species at every point, and they have perished and survived in exact accordance with natural selection. In the various conversations which I have had with Max Müller (who has for some years aided me in this collection), I have observed in him a continual, possibly unconscious, acceptance of and reference to the fact of this religious evolution, in the recollection of which his last lectures (‘The Philology of Darwin’) sounded oddly.⁹ However, on coming out of the lecture-room on one of those occasions, Prof. Clifford¹⁰ remarked to me that he considered the lecture as part of a deep and dark plot to infuse Darwinian ideas into the fashionable world!

I trust you, and Mrs Darwin and your family are well, and beg that you will not take any time in writing, as no reply is needed. | Very faithfully yours | M D Conway