" He
might as well reject gravitation, electrical repulsion, etc. etc., as
explaining the motions of cosmical bodies....--Yours very truly, ALFRED
R. WALLACE.
* * * * *
TO MR. BEN R. MILLER
_Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset, January 18, 1913._
Dear Sir,--Thanks for your kind congratulations, and for the small
pamphlet[40] you have sent me. I have read it with much interest, as the
writer was evidently a man of thought and talent. The first lecture
certainly gives an approach to Darwin's theory, perhaps nearer than any
other, as he almost implies the "survival of the fittest" as the cause
of progressive modification. But his language is imaginative and
obscure. He uses "education" apparently in the sense of what we should
term "effect of the environment."
The second lecture is even a more exact anticipation of the modern views
as to microbes, including their transmission by flies and other insects
and the probability that the blood of healthy persons contains a
sufficiency of destroyers of the pathogenic germs--such as the white
blood-corpuscles--to preserve us in health.
But he is so anti-clerical and anti-Biblical that it is no wonder he
could not get a hearing in Boston in 1847.--Yours very truly,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
* * * * *
TO PROF. POULTON
_Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset. April 2, 1913.
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