sionally to their discomfiture.

* * * * *

Dr. Littledale has contributed some reminiscences which may be
introduced here.

"When I first met Dr. Wallace the conversation turned on the types of
visitors that came to see him, and he gave us an amusing account of two
young women who called on him to read through a most ponderous treatise
relating to the Universe (I think it was). At all events the treatise
proved, amongst other things, that Kepler's laws were all wrong. Dr.
Wallace was very busy at the time, and politely declined to undertake
the task. I remember him well describing with his hands the size of this
enormous manuscript and laughing heartily as he detailed how the writer
of the manuscript, the elder of the two sisters, persistently tried to
persuade him that her theories were all absolutely proved in the work,
while the younger sister acted as a sort of echo to her sister. The
climax came in a fit of weeping, and, as Dr. Wallace described it, the
whole fabric of the universe was washed away in a flood of tears.

"On one occasion, when I was asked by Mrs. Wallace to see Dr. Wallace
professionally, he was lying on the sofa in his study by the fire
wrapped up in rugs, having just got over a bad shivering attack or
rigor. His temperature was 104 deg. Fahr., and all the other usual signs of
acute fever were present, but nothing to enable one to form a positive
opinion as to the cause. It must have been forty years since he had been
in the tropics, but I think he felt that it was an attack of malarial
fever. Knowing my patient, my treatment consisted in asking what he was
going to do for himself. 'Well,' he said, 'I am going to have a hot bath
and then go to bed, and to-morrow I shall get up and go into the garden
as usual.' And he was out in the garden next day when I went to see him.
This was an instance, doubtless one of many, of the 'will to live,'
which carried him through a long life.

"Once, when he was talking about the gaps in the evolution of life, viz.
between the inorganic and organic, between vegetable and animal, and
between animal and man, I asked, 'Why postulate a beginning at all? We
are satisfied with illimitability at one end, why not at the other?'
'For the simple reason,' he said, 'that the mind cannot comprehend
anything that has never had a beginning.'

"What attracted me to him most, I think, was his remarkable simplicity
of language, whatever the topic