WCP467

[1]¹

Corinda,

Brisbane, Qld. [Queensland]

24. Oct. 1909.

My dear D^r. Wallace,

It was not telepathy: it was only fact. I was comparing your "Australia" with Gregory’s, and had "Island Life",² and the "Geog Dist",³ at my elbow, when the really glorious advent of your letter materialised. I went right off to Brisbane (only 7 miles) to Major Sankey,⁴ (the head of the firm of Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey, the oldest gem people in Australia) and he promptly and joyfully said "Let me send Wallace the opals", and I hope you get them by this mail.⁵ Sankey, I need hardly say is a scientist.

Not a day passes but what you and your work are in my mind or on my lips, and but few days when I am in the house but what I consult you. But I must confess I never ever got a sight of your book⁶ about the Earth being a central Point: one cant [sic] get what one wants from libraries here, and even admiration wont allow a poor man to buy all his friend’s books.

I am delighted to hear that your eyes are better. I am still more delighted to see by your handwriting that time has not imparted a tremor to it. I compared the signature with the one you wrote in "Island Life" for me in 1880, and I dont [sic] think you are a day older!

My wife,⁷ who like myself, is grey now, sends all kinds of good wishes and the kindliest of remembrances to you and yours. I cant [sic] imagine what the "boy and girl"^8,9 are like after all these years! Do they remember tree-climbing with my Eth¹⁰and Dash¹¹ at Godalming? Poor Eth! he "passed over" two years ago— the East held him too long, Sudah pulang ke rahmat Allah!¹² He was a fine oriental scholar & an ardent naturalist. He and Dr Nielville had been working for years on a book upon the Rhopalocera of E and S. Asia: both are gone! Ruby¹³ has been married [2] 2 about a year. Her husband, E. J. Cooper,¹⁴ is a sugar planter & farmer, a very good man, and the family all all [sic] tinged with science. So the wife and I are alone with our poor boy "Bim", who tho’ 28,¹⁵ is still a child. We have a small house with ½ acre ground, and the roses are miracles, and our Caladiums a joy, and some of our wondrous Proteaceae are of course quite at home. Yes I know Doryanthes but strangely they havnt [sic] it in the Bot. Gardens. It doesnt [sic] grow about here or I would try and elicit the reason for its putting points on its spears!

Your new book on Evolution, may it NOT be your last, I shall certainly get, and this leads me to say I am sending you a copy of my article on "The Origin of Australia",¹⁶ and another thing or two. Now it was in this paper I had been trying to make up my mind about writing to you. I shall have to produce a little book on the subject and wanted to dedicate it to you. My paper is truly a bare outline and must be extended. It is curious how my life has come en rapport with yours in lines of thought! Here am I again compelled to work in the same groove, and from personal observation come to somewhat similar conclusions. The weak spot in both of us is that along the southern coast of Aust. from S. A. [South Australia] through Vic. [Victoria] to N. S. W. [New South Wales] no Cretaceous rocks are known, so the barrier would cut off my opal sea from the S. ocean, and leave a bridge from W. to E. Still I think the sea must have had a clear passage. In no other way can one account for the complete difference between the Eucalypts &c of W. A. [Western Australia] and the E. The great Tertiary basin of N. S. W. and Vic. is physically continuous with the Cretaceous basin to the N. You could stroll from the mouth of the Murray to the Gulf of Carpentaria not and hardly have to climb a hill. At any rate our Marsupials are Australian and not the disjecta membra of elsewhere: but we made them in a hurry. However, you’ll perhaps read the paper, and the book when finished.

I am sending to London this week another book, that will get your back up, I am pretty sure. It will be called "A White Australia: Is it a Possibility?". I find that if instead of reading history politically we work it out anthropologically, it appears that no race has permanently established itself on alien soil since neolithic times! This is a big heresy: but is true. I find that what happens when say the white race colonise a new country, even a salubrious and congenial one, is that [3] 3. first there is rapidly enhanced fertility and the pop. rises by leaps and bounds: in a few generations the birth rate slows down till it is betw below normal and finally below the death rate. Second that improved hygiene &c. does not increase the birth-rate, it only [illeg.] ^lowers the death-rate: it lets people live longer, but it does not get them born. I find this true of all European races and of the Chinese. The U.S. are ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon: Australia is worse off than the U.S. even in this short time. I almost expect to be lynched for saying this.

When I have got these two books off I want to work out another big idea: one very like one you have suggested. I believe that the mid-Tertiary saw a total revolution of things, and that practically all the present distribution of animals and plants has arisen since then. It is the result of working out your idea that as now the earth’s safety-valve is screwed down, volcanic and other disturbing forces are greater, not less, than in early times. I doubt if there were ever such high mountain ranges as now.

I have now been wandering nearly 30 years in Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia— always trying to work at these problems — always hating to write, for in the art of writing I find before I am write finis I either know a lot more, or want to get off somewhere to look at something that hasn’t been seen with proper eyes. But now I have given up professional work, and am going to put my life’s work on record. I have a very small income, fewer wants, no hankering after dollars, and an insatiable hunger for truth. I see science getting so specialised, especially in biology and petrology, that it is growing contemptible, and I intend one man at any rate to put on record down some big ideas.

I have been president of the Roy: Soc. here, founded and am President of the Field Nat. Club, Presided over the Anthrop^l. & Section of the Aust. Ass. Adv. Sci,¹⁷ where I gave 16 papers this year & didnt write one!! One was on the Northerly extension of Wallace’s Line¹⁸ (in wh. I still believe, pace the grubbers) & showed how it was perfectly marked between Borneo & Sulu, and faded away at Palawan.

This letter is full of self, but I flattered myself you’d care to know. I am a stronger evolutionist than ever, but not so much a Nat. Selectionist, and I dont [sic] believe in Weismann’s¹⁹ Germ-plasm or any other home-made myth. Your work on the Dist. of Life as illustrated by config. of land & sea is the greatest of all facts: but of course one knows more about it since you first saw the great light in our beloved Malaya.

Believe me, my dear D^r. Wallace | Yours faithfully, gratefully, & may I say it, affectionately | Sydney B. J. Skertchly²⁰[signature]