who knows that he is risking his life,--realising that the personal
satisfaction that may follow is not worth the risk--is surely admirable
from the strength of character that leads him to follow the social instinct
against his purely personal inclination. But the man who blindly obeys the
social instinct is a more useful member of a social community. He will act
with courage where even the strong man will fail.)

Your letter appears to me an interesting and valuable one; but I have now
been working for some years exclusively on the physiology of plants, and
all other subjects have gone out of my head, and it fatigues me much to try
and bring them back again into my head. I am, moreover, at present very
busy, as I leave home for a fortnight's rest at the beginning of next week.
My conviction as yet remains unchanged, that a man who (for instance) jumps
into a river to save a life without a second's reflection (either from an
innate tendency or from one gained by habit) is deservedly more honoured
than a man who acts deliberately and is conscious, for however short a
time, that the risk and sacrifice give him some inward satisfaction.

You are of course familiar with Herbert Spencer's writings on Ethics.


(422/1. The observations to which the following letters refer were
continued by Mr. Wallis, who gave an account of his work in an interesting
paper in the "Proceedings of the Zoological Society," March 2nd, 1897. The
results on the whole confirm the belief that traces of an ancestral pointed
ear exist in man.)


LETTER 422. TO H.M. WALLIS.
Down, March 22nd, 1881.