Correspondence on Biology, etc. 



Mr. Samuel Waddington to A. K. Wallace 

 7 Whitehall Gardens, London, 8.W. Febrmry 19, 1901. 



Dear Sir, — I trust you will forgive a stranger troubling 

 you with a letter, but a friend has asked me whether, as a 

 matter of fact, Darwin held that all living creatures de- 

 scended from one and the same ancestor, and that the 

 pedigree of a humming-bird and that of a hippopotamus 

 would meet if traced far enough back. Can you tell me 

 whether Darwin did teach this ? 



I should have thought that as life was developed 

 once, it probably could and would be developed many 

 times in different places, as month after month, and year 

 after year went by; and that, from the very jQrst, it 

 probably took many different forms and characters, in the 

 same way as crystals take different forms and shapes, even 

 when composed of the same substance. From these many 

 developments of '' life " would descend as many separate 

 lines of evolution, one ending in the humming-bird, another 

 in the hippopotamus, a third in the kangaroo, etc., and their 

 pedigrees (however far back they might be traced) would not 

 Join until they reached some primitive form of protoplasm. — 

 Yours faithfully, Samuel Waddington. 



To Mr. Samuel Waddington 



Parkstone, Dorset. February 23, 1901. 



Dear Sir, — Darwin believed that all living things origin- 

 ated from " a few forms or from one " — as stated in the last 

 sentence of his " Origin of Species." But privately I am 

 sure he believed in the one origin. Of course there is a 

 possibility that there were several distinct origins from in- 

 organic matter, but that is very improbable, because in that 

 case we should expect to find some difference in the earliest 



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