" "Health," he said to the present writer, "is the
best resistant to disease, and not the artificial giving of a mild form
of a disease in order to render the body immune to it for a season.
Vaccination is not only condemned upon the statistics which are used to
uphold it, but it is a false principle--unscientific, and therefore
doomed to fail in the end." Besides which, he believed in mental
healing, and had recorded definite and certain benefit from spiritual
"healers." And he reminded himself that amongst doctors (witness the
blind opposition encountered by Lister's discoveries) were found from
time to time not a few enemies of the true healing art, and obstinate
defenders of many forms of quackery. Wallace made no claim to be an
original investigator. He knew his limitations, and said again and again
that he could not have conducted the slow and minute researches or have
accumulated the vast amount of detailed evidence to which Darwin, with
infinite patience, devoted his life. He was genuinely glad that it had
not fallen to his lot to write "The Origin of Species." He felt that his
chief faculty was to reason from facts which others discovered. Yet he
had that original insight and creative faculty which enabled him to see,
often as by flashlight, the explanation which had remained hidden from
the eyes of the man who was most familiar with the particular facts, and
he elaborated it with quickening pulse, anxious to put down the whole
conception which filled his mind lest some portion of it should escape
him.
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