Dear Wallace,—­I am much obliged for your extract; I never heard of such a case, though such a variation is perhaps the most likely of any to occur in a state of nature and be inherited, inasmuch as all domesticated birds present races with a tuft or with reversed feathers on their heads.  I have sometimes thought that the progenitor of the whole class must have been a crested animal.

Do you make any progress with your Journal of travels?  I am the more anxious that you should do so as I have lately read with much interest some papers by you on the ouran-outang, etc., in the Annals, of which I have lately been reading the latter volumes, I have always thought that Journals of this nature do considerable good by advancing the taste for natural history; I know in my own case that nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative.  I have not yet received the last part of Linnean Transactions, but your paper[47] at present will be rather beyond my strength, for though somewhat better I can as yet do hardly anything but lie on the sofa and be read aloud to.  By the way, have you read Tylor and Lecky?[48] Both these books have interested me much.  I suppose you have read Lubbock?[49] In the last chapter there is a note about you in which I most cordially concur.[50] I see you were at the British Association, but I have heard nothing of it except what I have picked up in the Reader.  I have heard a rumour that the Reader is sold to the Anthropological Society.  If you do not begrudge the trouble of another note (for my sole channel of news through Hooker is closed by his illness), I should much like to hear whether the Reader is thus sold.  I should be very sorry for it, as the paper would thus become sectional in its tendency.  If you write, tell me what you are doing yourself.

The only news which I have about the “Origin” is that Fritz Mueller published a few months ago a remarkable book[51] in its favour, and secondly that a second French edition is just coming out.—­Believe me, dear Wallace, yours very sincerely,

CH.  DARWIN.

* * * * *

9 St. Mark’s Crescent, Regents Park.  October 2, 1865.

Dear Darwin,—­I was just leaving town for a few days when I received your letter, or should have replied at once.

The Reader has no doubt changed hands, and I am inclined to think for the better.  It is purchased, I believe, by a gentleman who is a Fellow of the Anthropological Society, but I see no signs of its being made a special organ of that Society.  The Editor (and, I believe, proprietor) is a Mr. Bendyshe, the most talented man in the Society, and, judging from his speaking, which I have often heard, I should say the articles on “Simeon and Simony,” “Metropolitan Sewage,” and “France and Mexico,” are his, and these are in my opinion superior to anything that has been in the Reader