abilities, such as they are. Lots of things
have given me opportunities, and those I can state. Also other things
have directed me into certain lines, but I can't dilate on these; and
really, with the exception of Darwin and Sir Charles Lyell, I have come
into close relations with hardly any eminent men. All my doings and
surroundings have been commonplace!

I am now just reading a charming and ideal bit of autobiography--Robert
Dale Owen's "Threading my Way." If you have not read it, do get it
(published by Truebner and Co. in 1874). It is delightful. So simple and
natural throughout. But his father was one of the most wonderful men of
the nineteenth century--Robert Owen of New Lanark--and this book gives
the true history of his great success. Then R.D. Owen met Clarkson and
heard from his own lips how he worked to abolish the slave trade.

Then he had part of his education at Hofwyl under Fellenberg, an
experiment in education and self-government wonderfully original and
successful. He afterwards worked at "New Harmony" with his father, and
met during his life almost all the most remarkable people in England and
America.

This book only contains the first twenty-seven years of his life and I
am afraid he never completed it. Such a book makes me despair!--Yours
very sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

When "My Life" was published, he wrote to the same old and valued
friend:

_Broadstone, Wimborne. November 7, 1905._

My dear Mrs. Fisher,--The reviewers are generally very fair about the
fads except a few. The _Review_ invents a new word for me--I am an
"anti-body"; but the _Outlook_ is the richest: I am the one man who
believes in Spiritualism, phrenology, anti-vaccination, and the
centrality of the earth in the universe, whose life is worth writing.
Then it points out a few things I am capable of believing, but which
everybody else knows to be fallacies, and compares me to Sir I. Newton
writing on the prophets! Yet of course he praises my biology up to the
skies--there I am wise--everywhere else I am a kind of weak, babyish
idiot! It is really delightful!

Only one is absolutely savage about it all--the _Liverpool_ _Daily Post
and Mercury_. The reviewer devotes over three columns almost wholly to
the fads--as to all of which he evidently knows absolutely nothing, but
he is cocksure that I am always wrong!...--Yours very sincerely,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

*