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"I am greatly obliged to you for your advice, but some time I should like to have a talk with you to benefit by your large experience of a subject with which I have hitherto had but small acquaintance. Could you fix any date towards the latter end of next month?

"I am, yours truly,

"GEO. J. ROMANES."

After receiving my reply I had another short letter, as follows:

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"I am exceedingly pleased to hear that you are so disposed to assist me with your advice. Time, money, tolerance, and patience I have in abundance, but I lack experience in a subject which, till recently, I rejected as beneath consideration. Therefore, under various circumstances that may arise, I doubt not that your advice may be of much service to me. Thus already you have presented a point of no small importance to me, viz. that I must not count too confidently on being always able to repeat results, even supposing them to be genuine. But, after all, my principal object is to satisfy my own mind upon the subject. If I could obtain any definite evidence of mind unassociated with any observable organization, the fact would be to me nothing less than a revelation-life and immortality brought to light'—and although I might say to others, 'Come and see,' my chief end would have been attained if I could say, 'I have found that of which the prophets (to wit, Crookes, Wallace, Varley, and the rest) have spoken.'

"I will therefore be most happy to accept your invitation to go to Croydon some day to gain some preliminary ideas on the subject. I shall write again to fix a day."

These two letters express very clearly the writer's position and general ideas, with which I myself was completely in accord. They also are very characteristic of his somewhat wordy and involved style of writing, and of some peculiarities of character. But the first was specially interesting to myself by showing me that my book, which had been published six years before, had really produced some effect among men

of science as well as among the general public, many of whom, I knew, it had induced to investigate and, as a consequence of their investigation, to become complete converts. I will here mention a little incident that shows how people were accustomed to speak on the subject in the popular tone of contemptuous incredulity, even when they had reason to accept some of the facts. One evening, while having tea after a Royal Institution lecture, I heard the late Professor Ansted and a friend (not knowing I was just behind them) mention spiritualism, and the professor remarked, "What a strange thing it is such men as Crookes and Wallace should both believe in it!" To which the other replied, with a laugh, “Oh, they are mad on that one subject." As soon as the friend had turned away I addressed Ansted, telling him I had heard what he and his friend had been saying, and asked him if he had any knowledge whatever of the subject. To which he replied, "Well, not much; but a neighbour and friend of mine at Great Bealings has had the most wonderful things happen in his house, which no one has ever been able to find a cause for. He has often told me about the bells ringing when no one was in the house. He was a very clever man, and I am sure what he says is true, and many people in the neighbourhood were witnesses of it." This case I had referred to in my book, and it brought it home to me more vividly to speak with a scientific man who was a friend of the owner of the house where it occurred, and had heard it from his own lips. This was shortly before Professor Ansted's death from an accident, or he might have become one of the band of "persecuted lunatics"-the term by which my friend Mr. Guppy used to describe the despised spiritualists.

To return now to Romanes. He called upon me at Croydon, and I think I paid him a visit in town, and he then told me how he had come to take so deep an interest in spiritualism. Some time previously a member of his own family-I think either a sister or a cousin-had been found to have considerable mediumistic power. Through her he had witnessed a good many of the usual phenomena-movements

and raps by which messages had been spelt out-together with the usual perplexities which beset the beginner; the messages being sometimes true and sometimes false, sometimes totally unexpected by any one present, at other times seeming to be the reflex of their own thoughts. Yet he was already absolutely convinced that the sounds and motions -the physical part of the phenomena-were not caused in any normal way by any of the persons present, and almost equally convinced that the intelligence manifested was not that of any of the circle. In some cases even his mental questions were replied to. I gave him the best advice I could, and for some years, being fully occupied with my own domestic affairs and literary work, I saw or heard nothing more of the subject he had been so intent upon. At this I was not surprised, as he himself was writing a series of works which gave him his scientific reputation, and I thought it probable that, not getting the evidence he wanted, he had given up the inquiry.

But seven years later, when I was in Canada, I obtained a knowledge of the correspondence between Romanes and Darwin before my interview with the former, as already narrated in Chapter XXX. This was, to me, of extreme interest because it showed how reticent Romanes was, and how little he told me of the evidence he had really obtained some years before, and of the profound impression it had made upon him. The letters then shown me were very long and full of curious details of evidence, the more important of which I took notes of. Darwin's reply was of the usual kind-suggestion of clever trickery; more investigation required; had no time to go into it himself, etc. Of course I had no intention of referring to these letters in any way without Romanes' permission, but I thought I might some day ask him why he had not mentioned having written to Darwin when corresponding with me and discussing this very subject. But a year or two later I was surprised by something he wrote as to one of the thought readers" then exhibiting in London, in a way which implied that all such phenomena were clever trickery

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by means of muscle-reading, although in his letter to Darwin he had declared that his mental questions had been answered.

But a cause of difference on a scientific question had since arisen between Romanes and myself which led to complicacation. In 1886 he read a paper to the Linnean Society, which was printed in their Journal, entitled "Physiological Selection: an additional suggestion on the Origin of Species." This paper put forth what was really a new theory of the origin of infertile races, which was supposed to account for the infertility that so generally occurs between allied species. It was very complex, and led to much discussion, and before leaving for America I had criticized it in the September issue of the Fortnightly Review. Later, I gave what I considered a proof of its entire fallacy in my “Darwinism" (published in 1889), and many other writers had also given reasons for rejecting it. This rejection of a theory which he evidently thought very highly of seems to have been very unexpected and to have somewhat ruffled his temper, as was very natural, or he would not, I think, have written of me as he did, especially if we consider the letters he had sent me four years previously. In an article in the Nineteenth Century, of May, 1890, he repeats a statement which he had made before in other periodicals in the following words :-" He presents an alternative theory to explain the same class of facts. Yet this theory is purely and simply, without any modification whatsoever, a restatement of the first principles of physiological selection, as these were originally stated by myself." To this and to a repetition of it in the American magazine, The Monist, of October, I replied in Nature, and I need only say here that the essential parts of my theory were founded partly on facts established by Darwin, and partly on a mathematical demonstration that sterility could be increased by natural selection. This last argument was stated by me in nearly the same form in letters to Darwin in 1868, eighteen years before Romanes set forth his theory of physiological selection (see "More Letters of Charles Darwin," vol. i. pp. 288-297). Further,

while this last theory has now, I believe, no supporters my own view, so far as I know, has not been shown to be unsound; and I do not think that the accusation of direct and barefaced plagiarism is now aceepted by any naturalist who has taken the trouble to follow the whole discussion.

But much worse than this was the following passage referring to my "Darwinism," where he says it is in the concluding chapter of my book "that we encounter the Wallace of spiritualism and astrology, the Wallace of vaccination and the land question, the Wallace of incapacity and absurdity" (Nineteenth Century, May, 1890, p. 831).

To this I made no public reply, since I was sure that all whose opinion I valued would condemn this mode of discussing the problems of science. But I thought it afforded an excellent opportunity to let my critic know what I thought of his behaviour, and perhaps puzzle and frighten him a little by exhibiting an acquaintance with facts which he evidently wished to conceal. I accordingly wrote him the following letter:

"DEAR MR. ROMANES,

"Parkstone, July 18, 1890.

"Some time back I read your article in the Nineteenth Century for May, but I have been so much occupied that I have, till now, had no time to write about it. Whether or no it was good taste for you to appeal to the political and medical prejudices of your readers in a matter purely scientific-by referring to my advocacy of land nationalization and opposition to vaccination-I leave others to judge. I am quite satisfied myself that, in a not distant future, I shall have ample credit given me on both these points. But as to your appeal to popular scientific prejudice by referring to my belief in spiritualism and astrology (which latter I have never professed my belief in), I have something to say.

"In the year 1876 you wrote two letters to Darwin, detailing your experiences of spiritual phenomena. You told him that you had had mental questions answered with no paid medium present. You told him you had had a message

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