From H. W. Bates   14 June 1862

King St Leicester

14 June 1862

My Dear Mr Darwin

Adjoined is a sort of answer to Mr Wedgwood’s query & I shall be glad if it prove of any use.1 I am truly sorry to hear of your being again more unwell than usual: but this under the circumstances of the interruption to your work which it causes, is a national concern.

My book “progresses” it is true, but slowly.2 How thoroughly ashamed I am to have bragged to you how quickly I could write it.3 I am at it every day as many hours as I can stand; but what takes me one day to write, takes 5 to alter.

Please do not make use of the facts about generative organs in beetles which I gave you.4 Conversing in London again with those gentlemen I find such a chaos of statements that the facts are not to be depended upon—

Yours sincerely | H W Bates

1
See letter to H. W. Bates, 11 June [1862] and n. 2. The enclosure has not been found.
2
Bates 1863.
3
No letter from Bates containing such a claim has been found. However, when CD wrote to John Murray asking whether he would be interested in publishing Bates’s travel narrative, he emphasised that Bates wished ‘to publish soon’ (see letter to John Murray, 28 January [1862]).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-3604,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-3604