I have by no means given up the idea of writing my Travels, but I think I shall be able to do it better for the delay, as I can introduce chapters giving popular sketches of the subjects treated of in my various papers.

I hope, if things go as I wish this summer, to begin work at it next winter.  But I feel myself incorrigibly lazy, and have no such system of collecting and arranging facts or of making the most of my materials as you and many of our hard-working naturalists possess in perfection.—­With best wishes, believe me, dear Darwin, yours most sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

Down, Bromley, S.E.  Tuesday, February, 1866.

My dear Wallace,—­After I had dispatched my last note, the simple explanation which you give had occurred to me, and seems satisfactory.  I do not think you understand what I mean by the non-blending of certain varieties.  It does not refer to fertility.  An instance will explain.  I crossed the Painted Lady and Purple sweet peas, which are very differently coloured varieties, and got, even out of the same pod, both varieties perfect, but none intermediate.  Something of this kind, I should think, must occur at first with your butterflies and the three forms of Lythrum; though these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring.

I am heartily glad that you mean to go on preparing your
Journal.—­Believe me yours very sincerely,

CH.  DARWIN.

* * * * *

Hurstpierpoint, Sussex.  July 2, 1866.

My dear Darwin,—­I have been so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly, or at all, the self-acting and necessary effects of Natural Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself, and your mode of illustrating it, however clear and beautiful to many of us, are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public.  The two last cases of this misunderstanding are (1) the article on “Darwin and his Teachings” in the last Quarterly Journal of Science, which, though very well written and on the whole appreciative, yet concludes with a charge of something like blindness, in your not seeing that Natural Selection requires the constant watching of an intelligent “chooser,” like man’s selection to which you so often compare it; and (2) in Janet’s recent work on the “Materialism of the Present Day,” reviewed in last Saturday’s Reader, by an extract from which I see that he considers your weak point to be that you do not see that “thought and direction are essential to the action of Natural Selection.”  The same objection has been made a score of times by your chief opponents, and I have heard it as often stated myself in conversation.  Now, I think this arises