Dear Darwin

Many thanks for your long & interesting letter about Bastian’s book, though I always regret that my asking for your opinion sh^d. have led you to give yourself so much trouble.¹ I quite understand your frame of mind & think it quite a natural & proper one. You had hard work to hammer your views into peoples’ heads at first,—& if Bastian’s theory is true he will have still harder work, bacause the facts he appeals to are themselves so difficult to establish.

Are not you mistaken about the Sphagnum? As I remember it Huxley detected a fragment of Sphagnum leaf in the same solution in which a fungoid growth had been developed. Bastian mistook the Sphagnum also for a vegetable growth,—& on account of this ignorance of the character of the sphagnum, & its presence in the solution Huxley rejected somewhat contemptuously (& I think very illogically) all Bastian’s observations.² Again, as to the Saline solution without nitrogen, would not the air supply what was required?³

I quite agree that the book would have gained force by rearrangement in the way you suggest,—but perhaps he thought it necessary to begin with a general agreement in order to induce people to examine his new collection of facts. I am impressed most by the agreement of so many observers, some of whom struggle to explain away their own facts.

What a wonderfully ingenious & suggestive paper that is by Galton, on “Blood Relationship”.⁴ It helps to render intelligible many of the excentricities of Heredity, Atavism, &c.

Sir Cha^s. Lyell was good enough to write to Lord Ripon and Mr.  Cole about me & the Bethnal Green Museum, & the answer he got was, that at present, no appointment of a director is Contemplated.⁵ I suppose they see no way of making it a Natural History Museum, & it will have to be kept going by Loan Collections of miscellaneous works of Art,—in which case of course the S. Kensington people will manage it.⁶ It is a considerable disappointment to me, as I had almost calculated on getting something there.

With best wishes for your health & happiness | Believe me D^r Darwin | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R Wallace

P.S. I have just been reading Howorth’s paper in Journ. of Anthrop. Inst. How perverse it is. He throughout confounds “fertility” with “increase of population”—which seems to me to be the main cause of his errors.⁷ His elaborate accumulation of facts in other papers in “Nature” on subsidence & elevation of land, I believe to be equally full of error, & utterly untrustworthy as a whole.⁸ | A.R.W.