ave not worn this
twenty years. Luckily I had a good excuse in having committed the same
offence before. Some ten years back I declined the offer of a degree
from Cambridge, so that settled it.

P.S.--Having already degrees two--LL.D. (Dublin) and D.C.L. (Oxford)--I
might have quoted Shakespeare: "To gild refined gold, to paint the
lily," etc. But I didn't!--A.R.W.

* * * * *

In 1908 he received the Order of Merit, the highest honour conferred
upon him. To his friend Mrs. Fisher he wrote:

Dear Mrs. Fisher,--Is it not awful--two more now! I should think very
few men have had three such honours within six months! I have never felt
myself worthy of the Copley Medal--and as to the Order of Merit--to be
given to a red-hot Radical, Land Nationaliser, Socialist,
Anti-Militarist, etc. etc. etc., is quite astounding and
unintelligible!...

There is another thing you have not heard yet, but it will be announced
soon. Sir W. Crookes, as Secretary of the Royal Institution, wrote to me
two weeks back asking me very strongly to give them a lecture at their
opening meeting (third week in January) appropriate to the Jubilee of
the "Origin of Species." I was very unwell at the time--could eat
nothing, etc.--and was going to decline positively, having nothing more
to say! But while lying down, vaguely thinking about it, an idea flashed
upon me of a new treatment of the whole subject of Darwinism, just
suitable for a lecture to a R.I. audience. I felt at once there was
something that ought to be said, and that I should like to say--so I
actually wrote and accepted, provisionally. My voice has so broken that
unless I can improve it I fear not being heard, but Crookes promised to
read it either wholly, or leaving to me the opening and concluding
paragraphs. I was very weak--almost a skeleton--but I am now getting
much better. But finishing up the "Spruce" book, and now all these
honours and congratulations and letters, etc., are giving me much work,
yet I am getting strong again, and really hope to do this "lecture" as
my last stroke for Darwinism against the Mutationists and Mendelians,
but much more effective, I hope, than my article in the August
_Contemporary Review_, though that was pretty strong.--Yours very
sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

How more than true "Sunlight's"[64] words have come, "You will come out
of the hole! You will be more in the world. You will have satisfaction,
retrospec