njoyed my visit to Oxford, and only regretted that I could not
leave more time for personal talk with yourself, for I am so deplorably
ignorant of modern physiology that I am delighted to get intelligible
explanations of its bearings on the subjects that most interest me in
science. I quite see all its importance in investigations of the
mechanism of colours, but there is so much still unknown that it will be
very hard to convince me that there is no other possible explanation of
the peacock's feather than the "continued preference by the females" for
the most beautiful males, in _this one point_, "during a long line of
descent"--as Darwin says! I expect, however, great light from your new
book....--Believe me yours very faithfully,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

SIR FRANCIS GALTON TO A.R. WALLACE

_42 Rutland Gate, S.W. May 24, 1890._

Dear Mr. Wallace,--I send the paper with pleasure, and am glad that you
will read it, and I hope then see more clearly than the abstract could
show the grounds of my argument.

These finger-marks are most remarkable things. Of course I have made out
much more about them since writing that memoir. Indeed I have another
paper on them next Thursday at the Royal Society, but that only refers
to ways of cataloguing them, either for criminal administration, or what
I am more interested in, viz. racial and hereditary inquiry.

What I have done in this way is not ready for publication, but I may
mention (privately, please) that these persistent marks, which seem
fully developed in the sixth month of foetal life, and appear under the
reservations and in the evidence published in the memoir to be
practically _quite_ unchanged during life, are _not_ correlated with
any ordinary characteristic that I can discover. They are the same in
the lowest idiots as in ordinary persons. (I took the impressions of
some 80 of these, so idiotic that they mostly could not speak, or even
stand, at the great Darenth Asylum, Dartford.) They are the same in
clod-hoppers as in the upper classes, and _yet_ they are as hereditary
as other qualities, I think. Their tendency to symmetrical distribution
on the two hands is _marked_, and symmetry _is_ a form of kinship. My
argument is that sexual selection can have had nothing to do with the
patterns, neither can any other form of selection due to vigour, wits,
and so forth, because they are not correlated with them. They just go
the