WCP4891

[1]

9, St Mark’s Crescent, N.W.

Sunday

Dear Sir Charles¹

I am sorry I was out when you called. I send, over leaf, a note of the number of hours I was occupied at your work.

What a clever simile that is of Huxley²’s in the "Academy", of the Death watch in the kitchen clock. I should like to ask him if he thinks there was an intelligence who could and did foresee the state of the British Fauna in 1869 when the Solar system was a "cosmic vapour"; — and if it is not as legitimate to reason from our intelligence to a preexisting³ [2] intelligence, as from the ^existing material universe to a "cosmic vapour".

Believe me | Yours very truly | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]