WCP5307

Letter (WCP5307.5851)

[1]

Royal Gardens Kew

Dec 18/79

Dear Darwin

I have well considered the pros & cons of the proposal to enlist sympathy in the matter of a pension to Wallace, & I greatly doubt its advisability.1

Wallace has lost cast terribly, not only by his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately & against the whole voice of the Committee of his section of the British Association, brought about a discussion on Spiritualism at one of it’s sectional meetings, when he was President of that section.This he is said to have done in an underhand manner, & I well remember the indignation it gave rise to in the B.A. Council, & amongst the members at large. In fact it led to our at once framing rules requiring the consideration in Committee of all papers before they should be read.2

Then there is the matter of his taking up the Lunatic’s bet about the Sphericity of the Earth, & pocketing the money.3 There may be two opinions about this, but at any rate there is a prevalent & very strong one to the effect that it was not honorable, to a Scientific man, who was certain of his ground.

I think that under these circumstances it would be very difficult to ask one’s friends to sign an application to Govt. for a pension. Added to which Govt. should in fairness be informed that the candidate is a public & leading Spiritualist!It would never do if an M.P. were to stand up & challenge the pension, to have it said that the Scientific world had put him forward & left the Govt. in ignorance of what might have swayed their decisions as to the distribution of pensions.

Lastly a man not in absolute poverty has little chance; & after all Wallace’s claim is not that he is in need, so much as that he can’t find employment.4 I need not add that I have no animus against Wallace & that I cordially reciprocate your sentiment as to the value of his early work. & the claim it has on his country’s gratitude

I hear such good accounts of your health

Ever affy yrs | J D Hooker

We think of going to the Hodgson’s5 in Glostershire for Xmas. week.

1
See letter to J. D. Hooker, 17 December 1879.
2
In 1876, Alfred Russel Wallace had been president of the biology section at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. William Fletcher Barrett read his paper ‘On some phenomena associated with abnormal conditions of mind’ in the anthropology subsection; the paper discussed hypnotism, mind-reading, and other spiritualistic phenomena, and was followed by a discussion (Report of the 46th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1876): xi, xii; The Times, 13 September 1876, p. 5; Barrett 1883). In a letter in The Times, 21 September 1876, p. 3, Edwin Ray Lankester wrote that the committee for the biology section had refused to report on Barrett’s paper, and that Wallace should therefore have rejected or postponed it. In his autobiography, Wallace wrote, ‘The reading of [Barrett’s paper] was opposed by Dr. W. B. Carpenter and others, but as it had been accepted by the section, it was read’ (Wallace 1905, 2: 49). A new rule was added in 1877: ‘Papers which have been reported on unfavourably by the Organizing Committees shall not be brought before the Sectional Committees’ (Report of the 47th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1877): xx). As a former president, Hooker was an ex officio member of the council (ibid., xlviii).
3
In 1870, Wallace, a qualified surveyor, had accepted John Hampden’s challenge to scientific men to prove the convexity of a stretch of inland water, offering £500 if the proof was accepted by an intelligent referee. Wallace’s proof was accepted by the referee, who gave him the £500, but Hampden refused to accept the result and subjected Wallace to a twenty-year campaign of abuse. (See Raby 2001, pp. 206-7.)
4
Wallace had recently failed in his application to be appointed superintendent of Epping Forest (see letter from A. B. Buckley, 16 December 1879).
5
Brian Houghton Hodgson and Susan Hodgson.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP5307.5851)]

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

Revision history

Transcribed by Darwin Correspondence Project [2020-06-12]

Please cite as “WCP5307,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP5307