My dear Sir,

I sent you by mail last week a short paper of mine exposing some misquotations of Prof. Dana’s, which I hope you have received.¹

I received in due course your welcome letter of April 20, & was rejoiced to find that you were preparing a new Edition of the Origin.² As you are kind enough to promise me a copy, please forward it to me through Baillière 219 Regent S^t. to Baillière Bros. of New York, with whom I deal, to be sent thence to me by Express.³ The Smithsonian Institution is so awfully slow in their operations, that they quite put me out of patience.⁴ Curiously enough, the same mail that brought me your last letter brought me also one from Wilson Armistead, saying that he had only just received my box of galls, though I had sent it to the Smithsonian the preceding autumn.⁵ He was delighted with what I sent, & like Oliver Twist calls out for more.⁶ I am gathering together another lot for him. I had sent him two bottles of galls packed in common salt brine, by way of experiment, & he says it is a complete success & far superior to alcohol—the chief disadvantage being that it is so vulgarly cheap.

I had a copy sent me the other day of an “Analysis of Darwin Huxley & Lyell, by Henry A. Dubois of New York” being a reprint in pamphlet form from the “American Quarterly Church Review”, which by the way I never heard of before.⁷ The writer is a beautiful compound of fool & knave & makes some most ludicrous blunders in Natural History; besides accusing you of setting up a new God—yes, a real, personal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God—called “Natural Selection”.⁸ Hence, one would infer that you must be a Deist. But when he comes to attack Huxley, he talks of “the atheistical views embraced in Darwin’s hypothesis”; so that you must be Deist & Atheist both at the same time.⁹ “Throw plenty of mud, & some of it is sure to stick”. My correspondent (W^m. Edwards of N.Y.)¹⁰ wanted me to review the review; but I thought it answered itself sufficiently, & that anyhow “the game would not pay for the candle”.¹¹

I believe I have done some little good, at all events among N.A. entomologists, in the way of converting them to the true philosophical faith on the origin of species.¹² For I find a great many of them now who take much the same ground as Rev. Herbert,¹³ but cannot as yet “go the whole hog”, as we say out West.

Have you read Clark’s book on “Mind in Nature”? He strikes me as having almost as illogical a mind as Prof. Agassiz. From one end to the other of the Book I don’t see a single new fact or new argument to carry out his thesis, namely that “Mind” exists in Nature. But, so far as I am a judge, his original investigations seem very valuable.¹⁴ I never knew before the history of Agassiz’s treatment of him. It always puzzled me why there was no titlepage to the two first parts of the “Contributions”, but now I fully understand the why & the wherefore.¹⁵

You mentioned some time ago the case of a foreign gall-fly having suddenly spread over England.¹⁶ Was it not a species that made its gall on the leaf, so that leaf & gall together might be blown great distances by the wind? I have often remarked that our “Oak-apples” are carried by the wind hundreds of yards with the living insect in them; but the species that make their galls in the twig, so that they are part & parcel of the twig itself, infest the same tree year after year, without spreading, except very slowly indeed sometimes, to adjoining trees.

I find that my Paper on Dimorphism in Cynips was reviewed by D^r. Reinhard in the Berlin Entom. Periodical;¹⁷ & that he proposes two hypotheses to account for my facts, 1^st. that spongifica & aciculata are distinct species, making undistinguishable galls on the same oak, 2^nd. that spongifica is an inquiline.¹⁸ But my this year’s experiments confirm the fact that aciculata generates spongifica & aciculata indiscriminately; & by next fall I shall in all human probability have facts to show that aciculata (A) generates aciculata (B), & that in the following season aciculata (B) generates aciculata (C), all of them being ♀ ♀ & agamous. I have little doubt now that this process goes on for a considerable number of years in certain species—commonly called agamous—say for 10 or 15 years, until at last a brood of ♂ ♂ appears. This would be altogether analagous to the case of Aphis ♀ producing 8 or 9 broods of ♀ ♀ through the summer by parthenogenesis & finally in the autumn ♂ ♂.¹⁹ I am aware that the Germans maintain that the agamous Aphis has no true ovary or “egg-stock” but only a “bud-stock”; but this seems to me a mere verbal distinction. Is it not essential to gemmative reproduction that it should be on the surface of the plant or animal & not in its interior?²⁰

I have the concluding part of my Willow Gall Paper now ready for the press. There are some facts in it respecting Galls that I think will please you, showing that Gall-making insects must have originated according to your theory.²¹ In the autumn I shall probably throw together the facts respecting Dimorphism in Cynips, which I have been accumulating now for two years.

I discovered this morning that a pale green fleshy gall on the leaf of the Grape-vine, which had been described by D^r. Fitch as Aphidian & referred to the genus Pemphigus, though he was unacquainted with the winged insect, is in reality the work of a Coccus!!! I believe this is the first recorded instance of any species of that family producing galls; at least my books mention none such.²² The gall is about like this & globular, & occurs very abundantly, some leaves being almost covered with them. Inside there is a true wingless Coccus with a parcel of eggs—say 100—many of which are already hatched out—& no powdery or cottony matter among the young lice, as is always the case with the young plant-lice in galls. Besides, eggs are never found in Aphidian galls, the mother-louse generating viviparously. I wonder if you have any such galls in England.

Yours very truly | Benj. D. Walsh