Letter to Lord Avebury, by Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace : Alfred Wallace : A. R. Wallace :
Russel Wallace : Alfred Russell Wallace (sic)

Letter to Lord Avebury (S707ab: 1914)

Editor Charles H. Smith's Note: A letter to Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, printed on page 258 of Volume 2 of Horace G. Hutchinson's Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury in 1914. Lubbock had invited Wallace to attend a breakfast at the time of the awarding of the Darwin-Wallace medals in 1908. To link directly to this page, connect with: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S707AB.htm

Broadstone, Wimborne,
June 23rd, 1908.

Dear Lord Avebury--Thank you very much for your kind invitation. I regret that I have for years been obliged to renounce such delights as breakfasts with my friends. I have been obliged to adopt the plan of 'no breakfast,' and 'no dinner' either--only eating once, in the middle of the day, which I find the only means of keeping off attacks of asthma, and keeping me in such health that I can still do a little work.

I shall probably come up to the "celebration" on the 1st, for the day only, as there are convenient trains, and that will involve less fatigue and risk than a more prolonged stay away from my household gods.

Allow me to wish every success to your Bill for preserving beautiful birds from destruction.

To stop the import is the only way--short of the still more drastic method of heavily fining every one who wears feathers in public, with imprisonment for a second offence. But we are not yet ripe for that.--Yours very truly,

Alfred R. Wallace.

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