I do not think that it is quite fair to say that biologists shirk the problem.  In my opinion they are not called upon to face it.  Bastian, I suppose, believed that he had bridged the gulf between lifeless and living matter.  And here is a man, of whom I know nothing, who has apparently got the whole thing cut and dried.—­Yours sincerely,

W.T.  THISELTON-DYER.

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TO PROF.  POULTON

Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset.  May 28, 1912.

My dear Poulton,—­Thanks for your paper on Darwin and Bergson.[39] 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; and I do not think I could read a book which rejects this method in favour of a vague “law of sympathy.”  He might as well reject gravitation, electrical repulsion, etc. etc., as explaining the motions of cosmical bodies....—­Yours very truly, ALFRED R. WALLACE.

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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.

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TO PROF.  POULTON

Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset.  April 2, 1913.

My dear Poulton,—­About two months ago an American ... sent me the enclosed booklet,[41] which he had been told was very rare, and contained an anticipation of Darwinism.