WCP5763

[1] [p. 225]

Broadstone, Wimbome. November 7, 1905.

My dear Mrs. Fisher,¹ — The reviewers are generally very fair about the fads except a few. The Review invents a new word for me — I am an "anti-body"; but the Outlook is the richest: I am the one man who believes in Spiritualism, phrenology, anti-vaccination, and the centrality of the earth in the universe, whose life is worth writing. Then it points out a few things I am capable of believing, but which everybody else knows to be fallacies, and compares me to Sir I. Newton writing on the prophets! Yet of course he praises my biology up to the skies — there I am wise — everywhere else I am a kind of weak, babyish idiot! It is really delightful!

Only one is absolutely savage about it all — the Liverpool [2] Daily Post and Mercury. The reviewer devotes over three columns almost wholly to the fads — as to all of which he evidently knows absolutely nothing, but he is cocksure that I am always wrong!... — Yours very sincerely, ALFRED R. WALLACE.