The Wallace-Darwin Correspondence 



9 St. Mark's Crescent August 30, [1868 ?]. 



Dear Darwin, — I was very sorry to hear you had been 

 so unwell again, and hope you will not exert yourself to 

 write me such long letters. Darwinianism was in the 

 ascendant at Norwich (I hope you do not dislike the word, 

 for we really muse use it), and I think it rather disgusted 

 some of the parsons, joined with the amount of advice they 

 received from Hooker and Huxley. The worst of it is that 

 there are no opponents left who know anything of natural 

 history, so that there are none of the good discussions we 

 used to have.^ G. H. Lewes seems to me to be making a 

 great mistake in the Fortnightly , advocating many distinct 

 origins for different groups, and even, if I understand him, 

 distinct origins for some allied groups, just as the anthro- 

 pologists do who make the red man descend from the orang, 

 the black man from the chimpanzee — or rather the Malay 

 and orang one ancestor, the negro and chimpanzee another. 

 Vogt told me that the Germans are all becoming converted 

 by your last book. 



I am certainly surprised that you should find so much 

 evidence against protection having checked the acquire- 

 ment of bright colour in females; but I console myself 

 by presumptuously hoping that I can explain your facts, 

 unless they are derived from the very groups on which I 

 chiefly rest — birds and insects. There is nothing neces- 

 sarily requiring protection in females; it is a matter of 

 habits. There are groups in which both sexes require pro- 

 tection in an exactly equal degree, and others (I think) in 

 which the male requires most protection, and I feel the 

 greatest confidence that these will ultimately support my 

 view, although I do not yet know the facts they may afford. 



Hoping you are in better health, believe me, dear 

 Darwin, yours faithfully, Alfred R. Wallace. 



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