ir own gait, uninfluenced by anything that we can find or reasonably
believe in, of a _naturally selective influence_, in the plain meaning
of the phrase.--Very sincerely yours,

FRANCIS GALTON.

* * * * *

TO THEO. D.A. COCKERELL

_Parkstone, Dorset. March 10, 1891._

Dear Mr. Cockerell,-- ... Your theory to account for the influence of a
first male on progeny by a second seems very probable--and in fact if,
as I suppose, spermatozoa often enter ova without producing complete
fertilisation, it must be so. _That_ would be easily experimented on,
with fowls, dogs, etc., but I do not remember the fact having been
observed except with horses. It ought to be common, when females have
young by successive males.--Yours faithfully,

A.R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

The next letter relates to a controversy with Romanes concerning Herbert
Spencer's argument about Co-adaptation which Romanes had urged in
support of Neo-Lamarckism as opposed to Natural Selection. Prof. Meldola
endeavoured to show that the difficulties raised by Spencer and
supported by Romanes had no real weight because the possibility of
so-called "co-adaptations" being developed _successively_ in the order
of evolution had not been reckoned with. There was no real divergence
between Wallace and Prof. Meldola on this matter when they subsequently
discussed it. The correspondence is in _Nature_, xliii. 557, and
subsequently. _See also_ "Darwin and After Darwin," by Romanes, 1895,
ii. 68.

TO PROF. MELDOLA

_Parkstone, Dorset, April 25, 1891._

My dear Meldola,--You have now put your foot in it! Romanes _agrees_
with you! Henceforth he will claim you as a disciple, converted by his
arguments!

There was one admission in your letter I was very sorry to see, because
it cannot be strictly true, and is besides open to much
misrepresentation. I mean the admission that Romanes pounces upon in his
second paragraph. Of course, the number of individuals in a species
being finite, the chance of four coincident variations occurring in any
one individual--each such variation being separately very common--cannot
be anything like "infinity to one." Why, then, do you concede it most
fully?--the result being that Romanes takes you to concede that it is
infinity to one against the coincident variations occurring in "_any
individuals_." Surely, with the facts of coincident independent
variation we now pos