Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1, page 69 by James Marchant
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onvert and is about to declare or already has declared his conversion--a noble and almost unique example of a man yielding to conviction on a subject which he has taught as a master all his life, and confessing that he has all his life been wrong.
It is clear that you have not yet sufficiently read the book to enable you to criticise it. It is a book in which every page and almost every line has a bearing on the main argument, and it is very difficult to bear in mind such a variety of facts, arguments and indications as are brought forward. It was only on the fifth perusal that I fully appreciated the whole strength of the work, and as I had been long before familiar with the same subjects I cannot but think that persons less familiar with them cannot have any clear idea of the accumulated argument by a single perusal.
Your objections, so far as I can see anything definite in them, are so fully and clearly anticipated and answered in the book itself that it is perfectly useless my saying anything about them. It seems to me, however, as clear as daylight that the principle of Natural Selection must act in nature. It is almost as necessary a truth as any of mathematics. Next, the effects produced by this action _cannot be limited._ It cannot be shown that there is any limit to them in nature. Again, the millions of facts in the numerical relations of organic beings, their geographical distribution, their relations of affinity, the modification of their parts and organs, the phenomena of intercrossing, embryology and morphology--all are in accordance with his theory, and almost all are necessary results from it; while on the other theory they are all isolated facts having no connection with each other and as utterly inexplicable and confusing as fossils are on the theory that they are special creations and are not the remains of animals that have once lived. It is the vast chaos of facts, which are explicable and fall into beautiful order on the one theory, which a