WCP5761

[1] [p. 222]

Dear Mrs. Fisher,¹ — Is it not awful — two more now! I should think very few men have had three such honours within six months! I have never felt myself worthy of the Copley MedaI — and as to the Order of Merit — to be given to a red-hot Radical, Land Nationaliser, Socialist, Anti-Militarist, etc. etc. etc., is quite astounding and unintelligible! …

There is another thing you have not heard yet, but it will be announced soon. Sir W. Crookes, as Secretary of the Royal Institution, wrote to me two weeks back asking me very strongly to give them a lecture at their opening meeting (third week in January) appropriate to the Jubilee of the "Origin of Species." I was very unwell at the time [2] — could eat nothing, etc. — and was going to decline positively, having nothing more to say! But while lying down, vaguely thinking about it, an idea flashed upon me of a new treatment of the whole subject of Darwinism, just suitable for a lecture to a R.I. audience. I felt at once there was something that ought to be said, and that I should like to say — so I actually wrote and accepted, provisionally. My voice has so broken that unless I can improve it I fear not being heard, but Crookes promised to read it either wholly, or leaving to me the opening and concluding paragraphs. I was very weak — almost a skeleton — but I am now getting much better. But finishing up the "Spruce" book, and now all these honours and congratulations and letters, etc., are giving me much work, yet I am getting strong again, and really hope to do this "lecture" as my last stroke for Darwinism against the Mutationists and Mendelians, but much more effective, I hope, than my article in the August Contemporary Review, though that was pretty strong. — Yours very sincerely, ALFRED R. WALLACE.

How more than true "Sunlight's" words have come, "You will come out of the hole! You will be more in the world. You will have satisfaction, retrospection, and work"! Literally fulfilled ! — A. R. W.