I will try and see Agassiz’s paper and 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 of your book, though I am sure no one would have enjoyed or appreciated it more.