I am now just reading a charming and ideal bit of autobiography--Robert Dale Owen's "Threading my Way." If you have not read it, do get it (published by Truebner and Co. in 1874). It is delightful. So simple and natural throughout. But his father was one of the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century--Robert Owen of New Lanark--and this book gives the true history of his great success. Then R.D. Owen met Clarkson and heard from his own lips how he worked to abolish the slave trade. 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_ _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. * * * * *