s
observations. Again, as to the saline solution without nitrogen, would
not the air supply what was required?

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 argument 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 and suggestive paper that is by Galton on "Blood
Relationship." It helps to render intelligible many of the
eccentricities of heredity, atavism, etc.

Sir Charles Lyell was good enough to write to Lord Ripon and Mr. Cole[93]
about me and the Bethnal Green Museum, and the answer he got was that at
present no appointment of a director is contemplated. I suppose they see
no way of making it a Natural History Museum, and it will have to be
kept going by Loan Collections of miscellaneous works of art, in which
case, of course, the South Kensington people will manage it. It is a
considerable disappointment to me, as I had almost calculated on getting
something there.

With best wishes for your good health and happiness, believe me, dear
Darwin, yours very faithfully,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

P.S.--I have just been reading Howorth's paper in the _Journal of the
Anthropological Institute_. How perverse it is. He throughout confounds
"fertility" with "increase of population," which seems to me to be the
main cause of his errors. His elaborate accumulation of facts in other
papers in _Nature_, on "Subsidence and Elevation of Land," I believe to
be equally full of error, and utterly untrustworthy as a whole.--A.R.W.

* * * * *

_Down, Beckenham, Kent. September 2, 1872._

My dear Wallace,--I write a line to say that I understood--but I may of
course have been mistaken--from Huxley that Bastian distinctly stated
that he had watched the development of the scale of Sphagnum: I was
astonished, as I knew the appearance of Sphagnum under a high power, and
asked a second time; but I repeat that I may have been mistaken. Busk
told me that Sharpey had noticed the appearance of numerous Infusoria in
one of the solutions not containing any nitrogen; and I do not suppose
that any physiologist would admit the possibility of Infusoria absorbing
nitrogen gas. Possibly I ought not to have mentioned statements made in
private conversat