Correspondence on Biology, etc. 



but is now less dogmatic. The Piltdown skull does not 

 prove much, if anything! 



The papers are wrong about me. I am not writing any- 

 thing now ; perhaps shall write no more. Too many letters 

 and home business. Too much bothered with many slight 

 ailments, which altogether keep me busy attending to them. 

 I am like Job, who said " the grasshopper wa« a burthen " 

 to him ! I suppose its creaking song. — Yours very truly, 



Alfred K. Wallace. 



To Mr. W. J. Farmer 



Old Orchard, Broadstone, Wimborne. 1913. 



Dear Sir, — ... I presume your question *' Why ? " 

 as to the varying colour of individual hairs and feathers, 

 and the regular varying of adjacent hairs, etc., to form 

 the surface pattern, applies to the ultimate cause which 

 enables those patterns to be hereditary, and, in the case 

 of birds, to be reproduced after moulting yearly. * 



The purpose, or end they serve, I have, I think, suffi- 

 ciently dealt with in my ^' Darwinism " ; the method by 

 which such useful tints and markings are produced, because 

 useful, is, I think, clearly explained by the law of Natural 

 Selection or Survival of the Fittest, acting through the uni- 

 versal facts of heredity and variation. 



But the " why " — which goes further back, to the direct- 

 ing agency which not only brings each special cell of the 

 highly complex structure of a feather into its exactly right 

 position, but, further, carries pigments or produces surface 

 striae (in the case of the metallic or interference colours) 

 also to their exactly right place, and nowhere else — is the 

 mystery, which, if we knew, we should (as Tennyson said 

 of the flower in the wall) " know what God and Man is." 



The idea that " cells " are all conscious beings and go 

 to their right places has been put forward by Butler in his 



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