WCP4228

[1]

Parkstone, Dorset

Dec[embe]r 6th. 1891

My dear Mr Cockerell

Thanks for the "Journal of the Institute of Jamaica". How great the Title! How dignified the Setting up!! How miscellaneous the Contents!!! But that will no doubt improve with time, when your new butterflies and big new slugs & land shells can be figured in all their glory! I suppose that both Mrs. Cockerell & yourself are now feeling quite at home in your warm quarters and thoroughly enjoy your soursop, custard-apple, alligator-pear, and water-melon, as well as the native pepper-pot and other delicacies of Creole cookery. I send a copy of Mr. [2] Steads’ Ghost Supplements of Review of Reviews for Mrs. Cockerell’s private Xmas reading. Perhaps you will go an excursion to the mountains, to get cool at Xmas time, if so please remember me if you should see any bulbous plants or terrestrial orchids in a fairly dormant state. The latter, if you get any, should be enclosed tightly in packets of dry moss to prevent evaporation, & will then I think travel well by parcel post. Liliaceous or other bulbs will do anyhow — in a bag or parcel with a little dry paper. If you find the Nelurubium laterna is grown in Jamaica please send me a few (2 or 3) seeds when ripe. There are fine Amaryllids & Ter. orchids in the Mountains.¹

[3] I have now just finished correcting proofs of "Island Life" and am wading through the corrections of Index.

As soon as [it is] out I will send you a copy. If you get the "Fortnightly Review" at your Institute you will find in the Dec. number my second article on "English & American Flowers", and in the January number there will be a very Radical article by me — half socialistic. All the winter I shall have to do rather drudgery work in enlarging "Australasia" for a new edition for Stanford. The wet the gloom the fogs & the storms here for the last 2 months have been almost unprecedented, and you may thank [4] you are in Jamaica and only subject to sunstroke or to be blown to pieces by a hurricane in return for perpetual warmth and sunshine.

Mr. Steads’ Ghost number is really very well done & contains a marvellous body of new information. If you see the English papers you will have seen the accounts of Mrs. Annie Abbott the "Magnetic Lady" or "Little Georgia Magnet" — a very curious and novel kind of medium — as I think — though some wise people say only a clever performer — though how any "performer" can do what she does or seems to do is beyond my comprehension.

With best wishes for Xmas or New Year (according to circumstances)

Believe me | Yours faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]