Then it points out a few things I am capable of believing, but which
everybody else knows to be fallacies, and compares me to Sir I. Newton
writing on the prophets! Yet of course he praises my biology up to the
skies--there I am wise--everywhere else I am a kind of weak, babyish
idiot! It is really delightful!
Only one is absolutely savage about it all--the _Liverpool_ _Daily Post
and Mercury_. The reviewer devotes over three columns almost wholly to
the fads--as to all of which he evidently knows absolutely nothing, but
he is cocksure that I am always wrong!...--Yours very sincerely,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
* * * * *
He always thought that he was deficient in the gift of humour: "I am,"
he wrote to Mr. J.W. Marshall (May 6, 1905), "still grinding away at my
autobiography. Have got to my American lecture tour, and hope to finish
by about Sept. but have such lots of interruptions. I am just reading
Huxley's Life. Some of his letters are inimitable, but the whole is
rather monotonous. I find there is a good deal of variety in my life if
I had but the gift of humour! Alas! I could not make a joke to save my
life. But I find it very interesting." "Unless somebody," he wrote to
Miss Evans, "can make me laugh just before the critical moment I always
have a horrid expression in photographs." Yet another observant friend
remarked that "he had a keen sense of humour.
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