Dear Mrs. Fisher,—­Thanks for your remarks on what an autobiography ought to be.  But I am afraid I shall fall dreadfully short.  I seem to remember nothing but ordinary facts and incidents of no interest to anyone but my own family.  I do not feel myself that anything has much influenced my character or 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.

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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.

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