To William Preyer   8 July 1877

My dear Sir

I am very glad to hear of the subject which you are investigating, as the results will be very interesting. I fear that you will find very little in my paper, which I dispatch by this morning’s post.¹ Have you ever heard of Douglas Spalding’s experiments of blinding chickens by placing a little bandage over their heads, as soon as they were removed from the egg. The results were extremely interesting and showed how much was done through inheritance. If you have the volumes of “Nature” for the last five years, you would easily find the article by the index.²

My dear Sir | Yours sincerely | Ch. Darwin

P.S.— If you cannot find Spalding’s paper, perhaps I may succeed, but am not at all sure that I can.— There is a curious paper in Nature 1876 by Romanes on a hen bringing up young ferrets.³