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.
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