WCP6716

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Alfred Russel Wallace

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.

He always thought that he was deficient in the gift of humour: "I am," he wrote to Mr. J. W. Marshall (May 6, 1905), "still grinding away at my autobiography. Have got to my American lecture tour, and hope to finish by about Sept. but have such lots of interruptions. I am just reading Huxley's¹ Life. Some of his letters are inimitable, but the whole is rather monotonous. I find there is a good deal of variety in my life if I had but the gift of humour! Alas! I could not make a joke to save my life. But I find it very interesting." "Unless somebody," he wrote to Miss Evans, "can make me laugh just before the critical moment I always have a horrid expression in photographs." Yet another observant friend remarked that "he had a keen sense of humour. It was always his boyish joyous exuberance which touched me. He never grew old. When I had sat with him an hour he was a young man, he became transfigured to me."... "The last time I saw Dr. Wallace," writes Prof. T. D. A. Cockerell² of Colorado, "was immediately after the Darwin Celebration at Cambridge in 1909. I was the first to give him the details concerning it, and vividly remember how interested he was, and how heartily he laughed over some of the funny incidents, which may not as yet be told in print. One of his most prominent characteristics was his keen sense of humour, and his enjoyment of a good story." In the summer of 1885 he spent a holiday with Prof. Meldola³ at Lyme Regis. "After our ramble," said the Professor, "we used to spend the evenings indoors, I reading aloud the ‘Ingoldsby Legends,' which Wallace richly enjoyed. His humour was