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.
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 [pg 226] 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.
He always thought that he was deficient in the gift of humour: "I am," he wrote to Mr. J.W. Marshall (May 6, 1905), "still grinding away at my autobiography. Have got to my American lecture tour, and hope to finish by about Sept. but have such lots of interruptions. I am just reading Huxley's Life. Some of his letters are inimitable, but the whole is rather monotonous. I find there is a good deal of variety in my life if I had but the gift of humour! Alas! I could not make a joke to save my life. But I find it very interesting." "Unless somebody," he wrote to Miss Evans, "can make me laugh just before the critical moment I always have a horrid expression in photographs." Yet another observant friend remarked that "he had a keen sense of humour. It was always his boyish joyous exuberance which touched me. He never grew old. When I had sat with him an hour he was a young man, he became transfigured to me." ... "The last time I saw Dr. Wallace," writes Prof. T.D.A. Cockerell of Colorado, "was immediately after the Darwin Celebration at Cambridge in 1909. I was the first to give him the details concerning it, and vividly remember how interested he was, and how heartily he laughed over some of the funny incidents, which may not as yet be told in print. One of his most prominent characteristics was his keen sense of humour, and his enjoyment of a good story." In the summer of 1885 he spent a holiday with Prof. Meldola at Lyme Regis. "After our ramble," said the Professor, "we used to spend the evenings indoors, I reading aloud the 'Ingoldsby Legends,' which Wallace richly enjoyed. His humour was [pg 227] a delightful characteristic. 'The inimitable puns of T. Hood were,' he said, 'the delight of my youth, as is the more recondite and fantastic humour of Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll in my old age.'"
Wallace loved to give time and trouble in aiding young men to start in life, especially if they were endeavouring to become naturalists. He sent them letters of advice, helped them in the choice of the right country to visit, and gave them minute practical instructions how to live healthily and to maintain themselves. He put their needs before other and more fortunate scientific workers and besought assistance for them.