WCP3751

Letter (WCP3751.3662)

[1]1

5 Westbourne Grove Terrace. W.

Feb. 26th. 1864

My dear Mr. Huxley,

I am sorry your objections to the Anthropological people will not allow you to attend.2 In your opinion of Hunt3 I pretty well agree with you. I do not think he is fit to be President, but the few meetings I have attended I have found quite equal to those of the rival Society.4

I can not agree with you that "there was not the slightest reason for its existence". It seems [2] to me that its establishment is a good protest against the absurdity of making the Ethnological a ladies' Society.5 Consequently many important & interesting subjects cannot possibly be discussed there, — & as the Geographical is also a ladies Society the Anthropol. is the only place where they can be discussed.

I am only a visitor there & have nothing to do with them; but I attend more frequently than I should because the [3] Ethnological meet on the same evenings as the Zoological which I like always to attend; & this was another reason why, having just given the paper to the Ethn.,6 I give the next to the Anthrop.

I am sorry to hear that poor Darwin7 gets no better.

With best wishes | I remain | My dear Mr Huxley | Yours very faithfully ׀ Alfred R. Wallace [signature]

T. H. Huxley Esq.

1
Page 1 is numbered 91 by the repository. Every second subsequent page has a consecutive handwritten number written in the upper right-hand corner of the page
2
Presumably a meeting of the Anthropological Society. No related letter from Huxley to ARW has been found.
3
Hunt, James (1833-1869) British speech therapist; a founder in 1863 of the Anthropological Society of London, a breakaway group from the older Ethnological Society.
4
The Ethnological Society of London, a learned society founded in 1843 to study human diversity.
5
i.e. allowing women to attend meetings.
6
Wallace, A. R. 1865. On the Varieties of Man in the Malay Archipelago. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 3: 196-215. (Read January 26th, 1864).
7
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882), British naturalist, geologist and author, notably of On the Origin of Species (1859).

Editorial information

Status: Edited (but not proofed) transcription [Letter (WCP3751.3662)]

For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon

Revision history

Transcribed by Lister, Iona [2013-01-10] Transcription checked by Lucas, Paula [2019-12-20]

Please cite as “WCP3751,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3751