... You are a good man to confess that you expected the cress would be killed in a week, for this gives me a nice little triumph. The children at first were tremendously eager, and asked me often, "whether I should beat Dr. Hooker!" The cress and lettuce have just vegetated well after twenty-one days' immersion. But I will write no more, which is a great virtue in me; for it is to me a very great pleasure telling you everything I do.
... If you knew some of the experiments (if they may be so called) which I am trying, you would have a good right to sneer, for they are so absurd even in my opinion that I dare not tell you.
Have not some men a nice notion of experimentising? I have had a letter telling me that seeds must have great power of resisting salt water, for otherwise how could they get to islands'? This is the true way to solve a problem?
Experiments on the transportal of seeds through the agency of animals, also gave him much labour. He wrote to Fox (1855):—
"All nature is perverse and will not do as I wish it; and just at present I wish I had my old barnacles to work at, and nothing new."
And to Hooker:—
"Everything has been going wrong with me lately: the fish at the Zoolog. Soc. ate up lots of soaked seeds, and in imagination they had in my mind been swallowed, fish and all, by a heron, had been carried a hundred miles, been voided on the banks of some other lake and germinated splendidly, when lo and behold, the fish ejected vehemently, and with disgust equal to my own, all the seeds from their mouths."
THE UNFINISHED BOOK.
In his Autobiographical sketch (p. 41) my father wrote:—"Early in 1856 Lyell advised me to write out my views pretty fully, and I began at once to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which was afterwards followed in my Origin of Species; yet it was only an abstract of the materials which I had collected." The remainder of the present chapter is chiefly concerned with the preparation of this unfinished book.
The work was begun on May 14th, and steadily continued up to June 1858, when it was interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Wallace's MS. During the two years which we are now considering, he wrote ten chapters (that is about one-half) of the projected book.