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. If you are able to bear reading, will you allow me to take the liberty of recommending you a book? The fact is I have been so astonished and delighted with the perusal of Spencer's works that I think it a duty to society to recommend them to all my friends who I think can appreciate them. The one I particularly refer to now is "Social Statics," a book which is by no means hard to read; it is even amusing, and owing to the wonderful clearness of its style may be read and understood by anyone. I think, therefore, as it is quite distinct from your special studies at present, you might consider it as "light literature," and I am pretty sure it would interest you more than a great deal of what is now considered very good. I am utterly astonished that so few people seem to read Spencer, and the utter ignorance there seems to be among politicians and political economists of the grand views and logical stability of his works. He appears to me as far ahead of John Stuart Mill as J.S.M. is of the rest of the world, and, I may add, as Darwin is of Agassiz. The range of his knowledge is no less than its accuracy. His nebular hypothesis in the last volume of his essays is the most masterly astronomical paper I have ever read, and in his forthcoming volume on Biology he is I understand going to show that there is something else besides Natural Selection at work in nature. So you must look out for a "foeman worthy of your steel"! But perhaps all this time you have read his books.