es being a "fake." The writer was too earnest, and too
clear a thinker, to descend to any such trick. And for what? "Agnostic"
is not in Shakespeare, but it may well have been used by someone before
Huxley. The parts of your Address of which you send me slips are
excellent, and I am sure will be of great interest to your audience. I
quite agree with your proposal that the "Lectures" shall be given to the
Linnean Society.--Yours very truly,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

TO MR. E. SMEDLEY

_Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset. August 26, 1913._

Dear Mr. Smedley,--I am glad to see you looking so jolly. I return the
photo to give to some other friend. Mr. Marchant, the lecturer you
heard, is a great friend of mine, but is now less dogmatic. The
Piltdown skull does not prove much, if anything!

The papers are wrong about me. I am not writing anything now; perhaps
shall write no more. Too many letters and home business. Too much
bothered with many slight ailments, which altogether keep me busy
attending to them. I am like Job, who said "the grasshopper was a
burthen" to him! I suppose its creaking song.--Yours very truly,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

TO MR. W.J. FARMER

_Old Orchard, Broadstone, Wimborne. 1913._

Dear Sir,-- ... I presume your question "Why?" as to the varying colour
of individual hairs and feathers, and the regular varying of adjacent
hairs, etc., to form the surface pattern, applies to the ultimate cause
which enables those patterns to be hereditary, and, in the case of
birds, to be reproduced after moulting yearly.

The purpose, or end they serve, I have, I think, sufficiently dealt with
in my "Darwinism"; the method by which such useful tints and markings
are produced, because useful, is, I think, clearly explained by the law
of Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest, acting through the
universal facts of heredity and variation.

But the "why"--which goes further back, to the directing agency which
not only brings each special cell of the highly complex structure of a
feather into its exactly right position, but, further, carries pigments
or produces surface striae (in the case of the metallic or interference
colours) also to their exactly right place, and nowhere else--is the
mystery, which, if we knew, we should (as Tennyson said of the flower in
the wall) "know what God and Man is."

The idea that "cells" are a