WCP6162

The page is numbered WP16/1/104 in pencil in the top LH corner.

Wallace, William Greenell (1871-1951) Electrical engineer, second son and third child of ARW.

Civil List pensions are traditionally granted by the Sovereign upon the recommendation of the First Lord of the Treasury (Prime Minister) to "such persons only as have just claims on the royal beneficence or who by their personal services to the Crown, or by the performance of duties to the public, or by their useful discoveries in science and attainments in literature and the arts, have merited the gracious consideration of their sovereign and the gratitude of their country." It appears that William Greenell Wallace was still receiving the pension paid to his father.

Fleeming Jenkin, Henry Charles (1833-1885) Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, best known as inventor of the cable car, he was also an economist, lecturer, linguist, critic, actor, dramatist and artist.

Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882). English naturalist and writer. Originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection and author (1859) of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

In June 1867, Fleeming Jenkin reviewed On the Origin of Species (1859), in The North British Review. He suggested that Darwin's interpretation of natural selection was incompatible with the prevalent hypothesis of blending inheritance, in which the traits from each parent are averaged together. Neither Fleeming Jenkin nor Darwin was aware of Mendel’s work (see Endnote 7) and the blending inheritance model persisted for several decades. In this interim, Fleeming Jenkin provided his mathematical swamping argument, that under the blending inheritance model any advantageous mutations which might arise would be quickly diluted out after just a few generations. By contrast, Darwin's interpretation of natural selection required hundreds or thousands of generations of passing down such mutations in order to work. Fleeming Jenkin's criticisms led Darwin to largely abandon blending inheritance as the potential mechanism for his own inheritance model, pangenesis, in favour of a competing model of inheritance that derived from Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics).

Mendel, Gregor Johann (1822-1884) German-speaking Moravian scientist and Augustinian friar. Mendel’s theory of particulate inheritance had been already published two years before On the Origin of Species and rejected by the scientific community. It was not widely accepted until after he died, encapsulated in Mendel’s Laws which explained inheritance through the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects.

Poulton, Edward Bagnall (1856-1943) British evolutionary biologist, friend of ARW and lifelong advocate of natural selection. He did pioneering work on warning or protective colouration in animals and became Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford in 1893.