Sir James Marchant

“ It is the undoubted benefit to all the members of a society of the greatest possible diversity of character, as a means both towards the greatest enjoyment and interest of association, and to the highest ultimate development of the race. If we are to suppose that man might have been created or developed with none of those extremes of character which now often result in what we call wickedness, vice, or crime, there would certainly have been a greater monotony in human nature, which would, perhaps, have led to less beneficial results than the variety which actually exists may lead to. ”

“ No one can overlook the fact that Spiritualism has many scientific exponents—Myers, Crookes, Lodge, Barrett and others. Prejudices against Spiritualism are as unscientific as the credulity which swallows the mutterings of every medium. Podmore's two ponderous volumes on the History of Spritualism are marred by an obvious anxiety to make the very least, if not the very worst, of every phenomenon alleged to be spiritualistic. That kind of deliberate and obstinate blindness which prided itself on being the clear cold light of science Wallace scorned and denounced. ”

“ His mind was great enough and his heart large enough to encompass all that lies between the visible horizons of human thought and activity, and even in his old age he lived upon the topmost peaks, eagerly looking for the horizon beyond. In the words of the late Mr. Gladstone, he "was inspired with the belief that life was a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny." ”

“ I am much pleased to hear that Huxley has taken to gardening. I have no doubt he will do some good work with his saxifrages. For myself the personal attention to my plants occupies all my spare time, and I derive constant enjoyment from the mere contemplation of the infinite variety of forms of leaf and flower, and modes of growth, and strange peculiarities of structure which are the source of fresh puzzles and fresh delights year by year. ”

“ My dear Mr. Spencer,—After leaving you yesterday I thought a little over your objections to the Duke of Argyll's theory of flight on the ground that it does not apply to insects, and it seems to me that exactly the same general principles do apply to insects as to birds. I read over the Duke's book without paying special attention to that part of it, but as far as I remember, the case of insects offers no difficulty in the way of applying his principles. If any wing were a rigid plane surface, it appears to me that there are only two ways in which it could be made to produce flight. ”

“ I told him that I had had the audacity to approach you on the subject of the Royal Society. He heartily approved, and expressed the strongest opinion that unless you had some insuperable objection you ought to yield. All of us who belong to the R.S. have but one wish, which is that it should stand before the public as containing all that is best and worthiest in British Science. As long as men like you stand aloof, that cannot be said. Lately we have been exposed to some very ill-natured attacks: we have been told that we are professional, and not discoverers. ”

“ WALLACE AND DARWIN MEDALLIONS IN THE NORTH AISLE OF THE CHOIR OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY
[pg 001] Letters and Reminiscences
PART III
I.—Wallace's Works on Biology and Geographical Distribution
"I have long recognised how much clearer and deeper your insight into matters is than mine."
"I sometimes marvel how truth progresses, so difficult is it for one man to convince another, unless his mind is vacant."
"I grieve to differ from you, and it actually terrifies me, and makes me constantly distrust myself. I fear we shall never quite understand each other." ”

“ Our position in the solar system appeared to him to be peculiar and unique because, he thought, we may be almost sure that these conditions do not coexist on any other planet, and that we have no good reason to believe that other planets could have maintained over a period of millions of years the complex and equable conditions absolutely necessary to the existence of the higher forms of terrestrial life. Therefore it appeared to him to be proved that our earth does really stand alone in the solar system by reason of its special adaptation for the development of human life. ”

“ It is not too much to say that our whole system of Society is rotten from top to bottom, and that the social environment as a whole in relation to our possibilities and our claims is the worst that the world has ever seen. ”

“ Dear Mr. Wallace,— ... I have just got F. Darwin's "Foundations." He tries to make out that his father could have dispensed with Malthus. But the selection death-rate in a slightly varying large population is the pith of the whole business. The Darwin-Wallace theory is, as you say, "the continuous adjustment of the organic to the inorganic world." It is what mathematicians call "a moving equilibrium." In fact, I have always maintained that it is a mathematical conception. ”

“ The immediate exciting cause of this discovery of the inadequacy of evolution from the material side alone to account for the world of life may seem to many to have been trivial and unworthy of the serious attention of a great scientist. How, it might be asked, could the crude and doubtful phenomena of Spiritualism afford reasonably adequate grounds for challenging its supremacy and for setting a limit to its range? But spiritualistic phenomena were only the accidental modes in which the other side of evolution struck in upon his vision. ”

“ Dear Mr. Wallace,—I cannot at all agree with you respecting the relative importance of the work you are doing and that which I wanted you to do. Various articles in the papers show that Lord Salisbury's argument is received with triumph, and, unless it is disposed of, it will lead to a public reaction against the doctrine of evolution at large, a far more serious evil than any error which you propose to rectify among biologists. Everybody will look to you for a reply, and if you make no reply it will be understood that Lord Salisbury's objection is valid. ”

“ An uphill fight in an unpopular cause, for preference a thoroughly unpopular one, or any argument in favour of a generally despised thesis, had charms for him that he could not resist. In his later years, especially, the prospect of writing a new book, great or small, upon any one of his favourite subjects always acted upon him like a tonic, as much so as did the project of building a new house and laying out a new garden. ”

“ TO MR. M.J. MURPHY Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset. August 19, 1913.
Dear Sir,—I not only think but firmly believe that Lloyd George is working for the good of the people, in all ways open to him. The wonder is that he can persuade Asquith and the Cabinet to let him go as far as he does. No doubt he is obliged to do things he does not think the best absolutely, but the best that are practicable. He does not profess to be a Socialist, and he is not infallible, but he does the best he can, under the conditions in which he finds himself. ”

“ Wallace gave a large and honoured sphere to women. He considered that it was in the highest degree presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital and most sacred of all human relationships, regardless of the fact that our present phase of social development is not only extremely imperfect, but, as already shown, vicious and rotten to the core. ”

“ I love a man with a theory, for I learn most from such a man, and when I have thought a thing out in my own mind and forgotten the arguments while I have arrived at a firm conviction as to the conclusion, it is refreshing to be reminded of points and facts that have slipped away from me! ”

“ I am rather perplexed by Darwin speculating on the possibility of New Zealand having once been united with Australia (p. 446, 4th Ed.) . The puzzle is greater than I can get over, even looking upon it as an oceanic island. Why should there have been no mammalia, rodents and marsupials, or only one mouse? Even if the Glacial period was such that it was enveloped in a Greenlandic winding-sheet, there would have been some Antarctic animals? It cannot be modern, seeing the height of those alps. It may have been a set of separate smaller islands, an archipelago since united into fewer. ”

“ It is therefore quite possible that all the evil in the world is directly due [pg 149] to man, not to God, and that when we once realise this to its full extent we shall be able, not only to eliminate almost completely what we now term evil, but shall then clearly perceive that all those propensities and passions that under bad conditions of society inevitably led to it, will under good conditions add to the variety and the capacities of human nature, the enjoyment of life by all, and at the same time greatly increase the possibilities of development of the whole race. ”

“ When Henslow died, Huxley wrote to Hooker: "He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown; his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep." Let that also stand as the estimate of Wallace by his contemporaries, an estimate which we believe posterity will confirm. ”

“ Dear Sir,—I look upon you as the one politician left to us, who, by his ability and integrity, his eloquence and love of truth, his high standing as a thinker and writer, and his openness of mind, is able to become the leader of the English people in their struggle for freedom against the monopolists of land, capital, and political power. ”

“ Again and again Wallace drew attention to the fundamental duties of landownership, maintaining that the public, as a whole, had become so blinded by custom that no effectual social reform would ever be established unless some strenuous and unremitting effort was made to recover the land by law from those who had made the land laws and who had niched the common heritage of humanity for their own private aggrandisement. ”

“ My dear Meldola,—As we had no time to "discourse" on Thursday, I will say a few words on the individual adaptability question. We have to deal with facts, and facts certainly show that, in many groups, there is a great amount of adaptable change produced in the individual by external conditions, and that that change is not inherited. I do not see that this places Natural Selection in any subordinate position, because this individual adaptability is evidently advantageous to many species, and may itself have been produced or increased by Natural Selection. ”

“ My reason for troubling you is merely to learn, since you have studied the birds of South America, and I hope collected some humming-birds, whether Gould is right in saying that there are so many hundred very distinct species without instances of marked varieties and transitional forms. If this be the case, would it not present us with an exception to the rule laid down by Darwin and Hooker that when a genus is largely represented in a continuous tract of land the species of that genus tend to vary? ”

“ Of course, the number of individuals in a species being finite, the chance of four coincident variations occurring in any one individual—each such variation being separately very common—cannot be anything like "infinity to one." Why, then, do you concede it most fully?—the result being that Romanes takes you to concede that it is infinity to one against the coincident variations occurring in "any individuals." Surely, with the facts of coincident independent variation we now possess, the occurrence of three, four, or five, coincident variations cannot be otherwise than frequent. ”

“ My dear Poulton,—Thanks for your paper on Darwin and Bergson.40 I have read nothing of Bergson's, and although he evidently has much in common with my own views, yet all vague ideas—like "an internal development force"—seem to me of no real value as an explanation of Nature.
I claim to have shown the necessity of an ever-present Mind as the primal cause both of all physical and biological evolution. This Mind works by and through the primal forces of nature—by means of Natural Selection in the world of life ”

“ Indeed, it may well be that these wonderful forces of the ether are more irregular—and perhaps more violent—in their effect upon matter in what may be termed the outer chambers of that universe, and that they are only so nicely balanced, so uniform in their action, and so concealed from us, as to be fit to aid in the development of organic life in that central portion of the stellar system which our globe occupies. ”

“ I may just mention here that none of the people who still insist on former continents where now are deep oceans have ever dealt with the almost physical impossibility of such a change having occurred without breaking the continuity of terrestrial life, owing to the mean depth of the ocean being at least six times the mean height of the land, and its area nearly three times, so that the whole mass of the land of the existing continents would be required to build up even one small continent in the depths of the Atlantic or Pacific! ”

“ ALFRED R. WALLACE.
TO MRS. FISHER (née BUCKLEY) Frith Hill, Godalming. February 16, 1888.
My dear Mrs. Fisher,—I know nothing of the physiology of ferns and mosses, but as a matter of fact I think they will be found to increase and diminish together all over the world. Both like moist, equable climates and shade, and are therefore both so abundant in oceanic islands, and in the high regions of the tropics.
I am inclined to think that the reason ferns have persisted so long in competition with flowering plants is the fact that they thrive best in shade, flowers best in the light. ”