book. What I have hitherto seen
of his on Glacial subjects seems very good, but in all his Natural
History _theories_, he seems so utterly wrong and so totally blind to
the plainest deduction from facts, and at the same time so vague and
obscure in his language, that it would be a very long and wearisome task
to answer him.

With regard to work, I am doing but little--I am afraid I have no good
habit of systematic work. I have been gradually getting parts of my
collections in order, but the obscurities of synonymy and descriptions,
the difficulty of examining specimens, and my very limited library, make
it wearisome work.

I have been lately getting the first groups of my butterflies in order,
and they offer some most interesting facts in variation and
distribution--in variation some very puzzling ones. Though I have very
fine series of specimens, I find in many cases I want more; in fact if I
could have afforded to have all my collections kept till my return I
should, I think, have found it necessary to retain twice as many as I
now have.

I am at last making a beginning of a small book on my Eastern journey,
which, if I can persevere, I hope to have ready by next Christmas. I am
a very bad hand at writing anything like narrative. I want something to
argue on, and then I find it much easier to go ahead. I rather despair,
therefore, of making so good a book as Bates's, though I think my
subject is better. Like every other traveller, I suppose, I feel
dreadfully the want of copious notes on common everyday objects, sights
and sounds and incidents, which I imagined I could never forget but
which I now find it impossible to recall with any accuracy.

I have just had a long and most interesting letter from my old companion
Spruce. He says he has had a letter from you about Melastoma, but has
not, he says, for three years seen a single melastomaceous plant! They
are totally absent from the Pacific plains of tropical America, though
so abundant on the Eastern plains. Poor fellow, he seems to be in a
worse state than you are. Life has been a burden to him for three years
owing to lung and heart disease, and rheumatism, brought on by exposure
in high, hot, and cold damp valleys of the Andes. He went down to the
dry climate of the Pacific coast to die more at ease, but the change
improved him, and he thinks to come home, though he is sure he will not
survive the first winter in England. He had never been able to get a
copy