WCP5238

[1]

Old Orchard,

Broadstone,

Wimborne

August 5th, 1908

Dewitt Miller Esq.

Dear Sir

Thanks for your "cutting" from the N.Y. Evening Post — it is much the same as several in English papers. The writer misses the point altogether when he compares with Darwin with modern scientists who publish their "facts" instantly & benefit by the mass of workers who discover fresh facts. Darwin's work was , essentially, not the finding of any new facts, but of a great new "theory" that coordinated & explained all the facts then known, & all [2] those constantly being discovered. Moreover, it was a wholly unpopular theory, & if it had been ^made known when he discovered it (in 1838) it would have been overwhelmed under a flood of opposition, prejudice, and ridicule, even from his fellow naturalists. He therefore judged rightly, in keeping back his "theory" from the public, till he had shown how it agreed with so vast a body of known facts.

Darwin is truly comparable with Newton, who did not publish his theory for many years till a new measurement of Moon's distance served almost to demonstrate it.¹

With regard to the new theories at which the writer hints, but which many others claim to have "superseaded" [sic] Darwin, you will be interested to read my reply in [3] this month's "Contemporary Review", (written at the Editor's request) on "The Present Position of Darwinism".

As to the poem — "Leonainie" — I am quite satisfied myself that that Riley was not the "Author", in the true sense, & that Poe almost certainly was. Riley has never distinctly denied that he got it from some source unexplained. He has never answered my challenge, as to where he got the name, "Leonainie", nor how it is that he has published the poem after, many years silence, with such alterations from my copy as to prove he did not understand it, & could not possibly [4] have been its composer — though no doubt he wrote it with his hand. And then, instead of taking the credit due to a man who could write so truly in Poe's style as to deceive all the critics, he goes on maundering about his being ashamed of himself — that he is a liar, that he did write it and did not write &c and such nonsense. My second article in the "Fortnightly" is an accusation & a challenge that no author of a poem thus challenged would have declined to answer.

Yours very truly | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]