Ch. XL] 1858—1859. 189 



story. Hence the few corrections in Mr. Wallace's letter, for 

 instance bed for hammock, 



A. B. Wallace to A. Newton. Frith Hill, Godalming, 

 Dec. 3rd, 1887. 



My dear Newton— I tad hardly heard of Darwin before 

 going to the East, except as connected with the voyage of the 

 Beagle, which I think I had read. I saw him once for a few 

 minutes in the British Museum before I sailed. Through 

 Stevens, my agent, I heard that he wanted curious varieties 

 which he was studying. I think I wrote to him about some 

 varieties of ducks I had sent, and he must have written once to 

 me. I find on looking at his " Lifo " that his first letter to me 

 is given in vol. ii. p. 95, and another at p. 109, both after the 

 publication of my first paper. I must have heard from some 

 notices in the Athenaeum, I think (which I had sent me), 

 that he was studying varieties and species, and as I was con- 

 tinually thinking of the subject, I wrote to him giving some of 

 my notions, and making some suggestions. But at that timo 

 I had not the remotest notion that he had already arrived at a 

 definite theory — still loss that it was the same as occurred to 

 me, suddenly, in Ternato in 1858. The most interesting co- 

 incidence in the matter, I think, is, that I, as well as Darwin, 

 was led to the theory itself through Mai thus — in my case it was 

 his elaborate account of the action of " preventive checks " in 

 keeping down the population of savage races to a tolerably 

 fixed but scanty number. This had strongly impressed me, and 

 it suddenly flashed upon me that all animals are necessarily 

 thus kept down — " the struggle for existence " — while varia- 

 tions, on which I was always thinking, must necessarily often 

 be beneficial, and would then cause those varieties to increaso 

 while the injurious variations diminished.* You are quite at 

 liberty to mention the circumstances, but I think you have 

 coloured them a little highly, and introduced some slight 

 errors. I was lying on my bed (no hammocks in the East) in 

 the hot fit of intermittent fever, when the idea suddenly came 

 to me. I thought it almost all out before the fit was over, and 



* This passage was published as a footnote in a review of the Life and 

 Letters of Charles Darwin which appeared in the Quarterly Review, 

 Jan. 1888. In the new edition (1891) of Natural Selection and Tropical 

 Nature (p. 20), Mr. Wallace has given the facts above narrated. There 

 is a slight and quite unimportant discrepancy between the two accounts, 

 viz. that in the narrative of 1891 Mr. Wallace speaks of the " cold fit " 

 instead of the " hot fit * of his ague attack. 



