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 striæ (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 all conscious beings and go to their right places has been put forward by Butler in his [pg 102] wonderful book "Life and Habit," and now even Haeckel seems to adopt it. All theories of heredity, including Darwin's pangenesis, do not touch it, and it seems to me as fundamental as life and consciousness, and to be absolutely inconceivable by us till we know what life is, what spirit is, and what matter is; and it is probable that we must develop in the spirit world some few thousand million years before we get to this knowledge—if then!
My book, "Man's Place in the Universe," shows, I think, indications of the vast importance of that Universe as the producer of Man which so many scientific men to-day try to belittle, because of what may be, in the infinite!—Yours very truly,