Sir Charles Lyell was good enough to write to Lord Ripon and Mr. Cole[93] about me and the Bethnal Green Museum, and the answer he got was that at present no appointment of a director is contemplated. I suppose they see no way of making it a Natural History Museum, and it will have to be kept going by Loan Collections of miscellaneous works of art, in which case, of course, the South Kensington people will manage it. It is a considerable disappointment to me, as I had almost calculated on getting something there. With best wishes for your good health and happiness, believe me, dear Darwin, yours very faithfully, ALFRED R. WALLACE. P.S.--I have just been reading Howorth's paper in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_. How perverse it is. He throughout confounds "fertility" with "increase of population," which seems to me to be the main cause of his errors. His elaborate accumulation of facts in other papers in _Nature_, on "Subsidence and Elevation of Land," I believe to be equally full of error, and utterly untrustworthy as a whole.--A.R.W. * * * * * _Down, Beckenham, Kent. September 2, 1872._ My dear Wallace,--I write a line to say that I understood--but I may of course have been mistaken--from Huxley that Bastian distinctly stated that he had watched the development of the scale of Sphagnum: I was astonished, as I knew the appearance of Sphagnum under a high power, and asked a second time; but I repeat that I may have been mistaken. Busk told me that Sharpey had noticed the appearance of numerous Infusoria in one of the solutions not containing any nitrogen; and I do not suppose that any physiologist would admit the possibility of Infusoria absorbing nitrogen gas. Possibly I ought not to have mentioned statements made in private conversation, so please do not repeat them. I quite agree about the extreme importance of such men as Cohn [illegible] and Carter having observed apparent cases of heterogenesis. At present I should prefer any mad hypothesis, such as that every disintegrated molecule of the lowest forms can reproduce the parent-form, and that the molecules are universally distributed, and that they do not lose their vital power until heated to such a temperature that they decompose like dead organic particles. I am extremely grieved to hear about the Museum: it is a great misfortune.--Yours most sincerely, C. DARWIN. I have taken up old botanical work and have given up all theories. I quite agree about Howorth's paper: he wrote to me and I told him that we differed so widely it was of no use our discussing any point. As for Galton's paper, I have never yet been able to fully digest it: as far as I have, it has not cleared my ideas, and has only aided in bringing more prominently forward the large proportion of the latent characters. * * * * * _Down, Beckenham, Kent. October 20, 1872._