I am doing nothing just now but writing articles and putting down anti-Darwinians, being dreadfully ridden upon by a horrid old-man-of-the-sea, who has agreed to let me have the piece of land I have set my heart on, and which I have been trying to get of him since last February, but who will not answer letters, will not sign an agreement, and keeps me week after week in anxiety, though I have accepted his own terms unconditionally, one of which is that I pay rent from last Michaelmas! And now the finest weather for planting is going by. It is a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid imitation of a Welsh valley in little, and will enable me to gather round me all the beauties of the temperate flora which I so much admire, or I would not put up with the little fellow's ways. The fixing on a residence for the rest of your life is an important event, and I am not likely to be in a very settled frame of mind for some time. I am answering A. Murray's Geographical Distribution of Coleoptera for my Entomological Society Presidential Address, and am printing a second edition of my "Essays," with a few notes and additions. Very glad to see (by your writing yourself) that you are better, and with kind regards to all your family, believe me, dear Darwin, yours very faithfully, ALFRED R. WALLACE. * * * * * _Holly House, Barking, E. January 27, 1871._ Dear Darwin,--Many thanks for your first volume,[82] which I have just finished reading through with the greatest pleasure and interest, and I have also to thank you for the great tenderness with which you have treated me and my heresies. On the subject of sexual selection and protection you do not yet convince me that I am wrong, but I expect your heaviest artillery will be brought up in your second volume, and I may have to capitulate. You seem, however, to have somewhat misunderstood my exact meaning, and I do not think the difference between us is quite so great as you seem to think it. There are a number of passages in which you argue against the view that the female has, in any large number of cases, been "specially modified" for protection, or that _colour_ has _generally_ been obtained by either sex for purposes of protection. But my view is, and I thought I had made it clear, that the female has (in most cases) been simply prevented from acquiring the gay tints of the male (even when there was a tendency for her to inherit it) because it was hurtful; and, that when protection is not needed, gay colours are so generally acquired by both sexes as to show that inheritance by both sexes of colour variations is the most usual, when _not prevented from acting_ by Natural Selection.