18641869] REVIEWS 305 



Agassiz's Book on Brazil how excessively anxious he is to Letter 222 

 destroy me. In regard to this country, every one can judge 

 for himself, but you would not say interest was dying out if you 

 were to look at the last number of the Anthropological Review, 

 in which I am incessantly sneered at. I think Lyell's Prin- 

 ciples will produce a considerable effect. I hope I have given 

 you the sort of information which you want. My head is rather 

 unsteady, which makes my handwriting worse than usual. 



If you argue about the non-acceptance of Natural Selec- 

 tion, it seems to me a very striking fact that the Newtonian 

 theory of gravitation, which seems to every one now so certain 

 and plain, was rejected by a man so extraordinarily able as 

 Leibnitz. The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind. 



Wallace, 1 in the Westminster Review, in an article on 

 Protection has a good passage, contrasting the success of 

 Natural Selection and its growth with the comprehension 

 of new classes of facts, 2 with false theories, such as the 

 Ouinarian Theory, and that of Polarity, by poor Forbes, both 

 of which were promulgated with high advantages and the 

 first temporarily accepted. 



1 Wallace, Westminster Review, July, 1867. The article begins: 

 " There is no more convincing proof of the truth of a comprehensive 

 theory, than its power of absorbing and finding a place for new facts, and 

 its capability of interpreting phenomena, which had been previously 

 looked upon as unaccountable anomalies . . ." Mr. Wallace illustrates 

 his statement that " a false theory will never stand this test," by Edward 

 Forbes' " polarity >; speculations (see p. 84 of the present volume) and 

 Macleay's Circular and Quinarian System published in his Hor<z Ento- 

 molcgica, 1821, and developed by Swainson in the natural history 

 volumes of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia. Mr. Wallace says that a 

 " considerable number of well-known naturalists either spoke approvingly 

 of it, or advocated similar principles, and for a good many years it was 

 decidedly in the ascendant . . . yet it quite died out in a few short years, 

 its very existence is now a matter of history, and so rapid was its fall 

 that . . . Swainson, perhaps, lived to be the last man who believed in 

 it. Such is the course of a false theory. That of a true one is very 

 different, as may be well seen by the progress of opinion on the subject 

 of Natural Selection." 



Here (p. 3) follows a passage on the overwhelming importance of 

 Natural Selection, underlined with apparent approval in Mr. Darwin's 

 copy of the review. 



3 This rather obscure phrase may be rendered : " its power of growth 

 by the absorption of new facts." 



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