From William Spence   26 February 1855

My dear Sir,

By todays Eastern Counties Railway you will [illeg.] Miller's "Schools & Schoolmasters" & Karr’s "Tour round my Garden" which we were talking about at the Linnean Club & of which I beg your acceptance. The idea of Karr’s book is not amiss if it had been better worked out, but it has too much sentiment (how truly to note the beginning if written the loves of spiders!) & has many mistakes showing the writers Natural History is second-hand, as indeed is proved by the silly tirade, (borrowed apparently partly from Bonnet (?),), against scientific names.

I also beg your acceptance of “B [illeg.]’s Life” which as the Revision may have deterred you from enquiring for, I hope you will glance over on my recommendation or at least the first 100 pages. These are valuable tho' the history of a [illeg.], as a genuine picture of Middleclass life in the Northern States, showing how truly “the Child is father of the Man” nationally as well as individually, & that the low moral sense of a large proportion of Americans, their eagerness to seize on Cuba, their sympathy with Register(?) are the natural fruits of the System of Trickery & dishonesty generally prevailing in spite of strict religious professions with which they can very nobly reconcile them, as a Bar [illeg.] does his daily study of the Bible with his lies & swindling. His book, too, shows (& this is my main reason for forwarding it) how sadly they have wanted teachers like yourself to offer them substitutes for these [illeg.] “practical jokers” always including falsehood & the love of giving pain, - their only [illeg.] (except “Religious Revivals”!) for the [illeg.] excitement then will have in some shape or other.

Pray when writing to your Secretary, direct him to send me an account of what I owe for my annual subscription to the Ipswich Museum which seems to be some years in arrears.

If you want funds for your proposed Natural History Society, I shall be happy to subscribe a pound a year

I am

My dear sir

Yours very truly

W. Spence

[JSH: W. Spence, Entomologist | the Kirby & Spence]