248 EVOLUTION [CHAP. IV 



Letter It would save you trouble to forward this with my kindest 

 remembrances to Falconer. 



The following letter was the beginning of a correspondence with 

 Mr. B. D. Walsh, whom C. V. Riley describes as "one of the ablest 

 and most thorough entomologists of our time." The facts here given 

 are chiefly taken from the American Entomologist (St. Louis, Mo.), 

 Vol. II., p. 65. Benjamin Dann Walsh was born at Frome, in England, 

 in 1808, and died in America in 1869, from the result of a railway 

 accident. He entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and obtained a 

 fellowship there after being fifth classic in 1831. He was therefore 

 a contemporary of Darwin's at the University, though not a " school- 

 mate," as the American Entomologist puts it. He was the author of 

 A Historical Account of the University of Cambridge and its Colleges, 

 London, 2nd edit., 1837 ; also of a translation of part of Aristo- 

 phanes, 1837 : from the dedication of this book it seems that he was 

 at St. Paul's School, London. He settled in America in 1838, but 

 only began serious Entomology about 1858. He never returned to 

 England. 



In a letter to Mr. Darwin, Nov. 7th, 1864, he gives a curious 

 account of the solitary laborious life he led for many years. " When 

 I left England in 1838," he writes, " I was possessed with an absurd 

 notion that I would live a perfectly natural life, independent of the 

 whole world in me ipso totus teres atquc rotiindns. So I bought several 

 hundred acres of wild land in the wilderness, twenty miles from any 

 settlement that you would call even a village, and with only a single 

 neighbor. There I gradually opened a farm, working myself like 



a horse, raising great quantities of hogs and bullocks I did 



all kinds of jobs for myself, from mending a pair of boots to hooping 

 a barrel." After nearly dying of malaria, he sold his land at a great 

 loss, and found that after twelve years' work he was just $1000 

 poorer than when he began. He then went into the lumber business 

 at Rock Island, Illinois. After seven years he invested most of his 

 savings in building "ten two-storey brick houses for rent." He states 

 that the repairs of the houses occupied about one-fourth of his time, 

 and the remainder he was able to devote to entomology. He after- 

 wards edited the Practical Entomologist. In regard to this work he 

 wrote (Feb. 25th, 1867): "Editing the Practical Entomologist does 

 undoubtedly take up a good deal of my time, but I also pick up a 

 good deal of information of real scientific value from its correspondents. 

 Besides, this great American nation has hitherto had a supreme con- 

 tempt for Natural History, because they have hitherto believed that it 

 has nothing to do with the dollars and cents. After hammering 

 away at them for a year or two, I have at last succeeded in touching 

 the ' pocket nerve ' in Uncle Sam's body, and he is gradually being 

 galvanised into the conviction that science has the power to make 

 him richer." It is difficult to realise that even forty years ago the 



