38 
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
If one knew anything about natural history one might do a gi'eat service to these people. 
The whole place is covered with the tracks of a little black ant, introduced with some South 
American sugar canes five or six years ago. The ant cultivates a number of aphides, which 
produce serious diseases on all the fruit trees ; also it attacks the newly hatched birds and 
all beasts which shelter under stones. Under a big stone, where some dozen snails have 
sheltered, about half the shells (which look quite fresh) are eaten empty by ants ; so it is with 
the beetles, grasshoppers, and other things. The only good thing they have done is to eat the 
cockroaches. Every kitchen is now full of ants, and contains no cockroaches at all. 
How snails make their shells here is hard to understand ; there is not a scrap of limestone 
in the place : all basalt and beds of gorgeously coloured volcanic sands. Yet when one finds the 
right place, one finds that snails swarm and their shells are rather harder than usual ! 
I should very much like to know whether the habit of hiding under stones is as general in 
all seasons as it is now. You know Wallace points out that most of the beetles here have lost 
their wings ; and he regards it as probable that flying beetles would be blown out to sea in 
storms. Now first of all there are practically no storms, and secondly, if there were, the valleys 
are so dee^j and their sides so precipitous, that there is abundant shelter against winds. But the 
loss of wings might well be correlated with the habit of walking under stones to get out of the 
sun. You find a patch of bare hot sand, so steep that you can hardly stand on it, with a stone 
here and there, and no sign of any living thing. If you turn over a stone you find a number of 
snails, a lizard, twenty or thirty beetles, a grasshopper or two, and armies of millipedes 
The man we see most of in this inn is a sjilendid creature. A captain in the Canadian frontier 
police, who volunteered for service in South Africa, and is recovering from a bullet through his 
right lung. Because he has a colonial accent, cannot see any merit in him It is only 
another sample of the difficulty I feel every day at Oxford. The boys there are so occupied with 
silly superficial things that one can never bring them to think of fundamental matters." 
[Funchal, 29/12/00.] 
"I am glad you are disgusted with the Life. I was afraid you were not. — You cannot judge 
the man from the bits of his letters. I do not think one ought to try to have an opinion about 
a man's conduct towards his wife, or indeed about his ethical value at all. One cannot possibly 
get hold of evidence enough, and the little bits of bad journalism which people give one are only 
sufficient to disturb one's mind. Take the old man as one knows him by his work, without 
troubling to guess at his motives, and there is not much the matter with him. I quite agree 
with you in loving Darwin and more ; but a man may be a great deal lower than these two, 
and yet be high enough for reverence." [Oxford, 2/12/00.] 
The earlier part of 1901 was chiefly occupied by snails, but a new factor had 
come into Weldon's many-sided occupations. It was settled that Biometrika 
should have in au early number a critical bibliography of papers dealing with 
statistical biology. Weldon undertook this task as his study of Mendel had led 
him to a very great number of such papers dealing with inheritance, and the 
section on Heredity was to be published first. Like all Weldon's projects, it was 
to be done in so thorough and comprehensive a manner that years were required 
for its completion. A very full list of titles was formed, especially in the Inherit- 
ance section, and many of the papers therein were thoroughly studied and abstracted 
(26). But such study meant with Weldon not only grasping the writer's conclusions, 
but testing his arithmetic and weighing his logic. Thus Weldon's Note on "Change 
in Organic Correlation of Ficaria ranunculoides during the Flowering Season" (27) 
arose from this bibliographical work and the erroneous manner in which he found 
Verschaffelt and MacLeod dealing with correlation. A further result of this work 
