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TO PROF.  POULTON

Broadstone, Wimborne.  July 27, 1907.

My dear Poulton,—­Thanks for your very interesting letter.  I am glad to hear you have a new book on “Evolution"[33] nearly ready and that in it you will do something to expose the fallacies of the Mutationists and Mendelians, who pose before the world as having got all wisdom, before which we poor Darwinians must hide our diminished heads!

Wishing to know the best that could be said for these latter-day anti-Darwinians, I have just been reading Lock’s book on “Variation, Heredity, and Evolution.”  In the early part of his book he gives a tolerably fair account of Natural Selection, etc.  But he gradually turns to Mendelism as the “one thing needful”—­stating that there can be “no sort of doubt” that Mendel’s paper is the “most important” contribution of its size ever made to biological science!

“Mutation,” as a theory, is absolutely nothing new—­only the assertion that new species originate always in sports, for which the evidence adduced is the most meagre and inconclusive of any ever set forth with such pretentious claims!  I hope you will thoroughly expose this absurd claim.

Mendelism is something new, and within its very limited range, important, as leading to conceptions as to the causes and laws of heredity, but only misleading when adduced as the true origin of species in nature, as to which it seems to me to have no part.—­Yours very truly,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

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TO PROF.  POULTON

Broadstone, Wimborne.  November 26, 1907.

My dear Poulton,—­Many thanks for letting me see the proofs.[34] ...  The whole reads very clearly, and I am delighted with the way you expose the Mendelian and Mutational absurd claims.  That ought to really open the eyes of the newspaper men to the fact that Natural Selection and Darwinism are not only holding their ground but are becoming more firmly established than ever by every fresh research into the ways and workings of living nature.  I shall look forward to great pleasure in reading the whole book.  I was greatly pleased with Archdall Reid’s view of Mendelism in Nature.[35] He is a very clear and original thinker.

I see in Essay X. you use in the title the term “defensive coloration.”  Why this instead of the usual “protective”?  Surely the whole function of such colours and markings is to protect from attack—­not to defend when attacked.  The latter is the function of stings, spines and hard coats.  I only mention this because using different terms may lead to some misconception.

Your illustration of mutation by throwing colours on a screen, and the argument founded on it, I liked much.  That reminds me that H. Spencer’s argument for inheritance of acquired variations—­that co-ordination of many parts at once, required for adaptations, would be impossible by chance variations of those parts—­applies with a hundredfold force to mutations, which are admittedly so much less frequent both in their numbers and the repetitions of them.—­Yours very truly,