There was no real divergence
between Wallace and Prof. Meldola on this matter when they subsequently
discussed it. The correspondence is in _Nature_, xliii. 557, and
subsequently. _See also_ "Darwin and After Darwin," by Romanes, 1895,
ii. 68.
TO PROF. MELDOLA
_Parkstone, Dorset, April 25, 1891._
My dear Meldola,--You have now put your foot in it! Romanes _agrees_
with you! Henceforth he will claim you as a disciple, converted by his
arguments!
There was one admission in your letter I was very sorry to see, because
it cannot be strictly true, and is besides open to much
misrepresentation. I mean the admission that Romanes pounces upon in his
second paragraph. 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. As a fact, more
than half the whole population of most species seems to vary to a
perceptible and measurable, and therefore sufficient, amount in scores
of ways.
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