From James Paget   16 March 1863

My dear Darwin

I send you, by this same post, a pamphlet with an account of an interesting case of malformations associated & inherited—¹ I ought not to have forgotten it when you asked me about such cases—²

And I enclose a paper which I turned-up a few days ago,³ and which may serve as an illustration of a class of facts which one meets with in practice among diseases, and which probably have their parallels among ‘malformations’ and other varieties of form:—namely, that the members of one family are not so likely to have, all, the same disease as to have different diseases more or less nearly related to one another— In one family, as in this, are various diseases of the nervous system: in another, of the skin; in another, of the stomach & so on.— Since one might expect, as a general rule, that a progenitor having any well marked variety of form would have offspring in some of whom the same form would appear, but none of whom would present a variety of forms related to, yet different from, that which was peculiar in the progenitor— I do not know if this can suggest to you anything about related groups of forms; but I shall not have wasted much of your time even if all this is not worth consideration.

Of course, the sentence you forwarded to me was all right.⁴

Always truly your’s | James Paget

Cha^s. Darwin Esq^re.