Wavertree 26.8.95
Dear Ian
Many thanks for your last two letters.
Well! I have just sent back the corrected galley proofs plus the index. An index is so easy to compile with a computer.
The 1861 letter of PM is still a mystery. I appealed to the Dundee Advertiser to ask for suggestions as to what the Farmers Newspaper meant to farmers in 1861. I followed up the suggestions which were sent to the Dundee paper but no letter. There is in London a huge Newspaper library which I used previously to dig out Matthew’s letters. He nearly always wrote to that paper the Dundee Advertiser. I approached the library again with the new suggestions but no result. …
I was pleased to read the paper on Lamarck. It is the only sympathetic attitude to Lamarck that I have come across in the literature since about the 1950s. he has been consistently slandered from Darwin to Richard Dawkins; the latter, I may say, comes in for some stick in the book. He is either ignorant or deceiving the public.
I think Robb has been very kind to me. He has done a lot to bring PM to the notice of people, I asked him some time ago to check in Geology whether PM had ever attended the Pliny Society. No evidence. He will certainly receive a book from me.
I will be sending off my first contribution to old man Burns. I should get the final galleys soon. The printers have done A GOOD JOB. … The book is now 356 pages plus the index which is another 5 or 6 pages. …
Do give Min Hunter my regards. I have brought John Hunter into the book quite a lot.
Regards
Jim
~~~
Notes and Commentary by Mike Sutton
In this third letter to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust), Jim Dempster refers once again to his criticisms of Richard Dawkins scholarship in "The Blind Watchmaker". A correspondent of Dawkins, Dempster (1996) criticises Dawkins for writing the palpable nonsense that Matthew did not understand what he had written.
Perhaps Dawkins wants us to believe he thinks Matthew was a blind monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter that was yet to be invented?
Dempster's (1996) book hammers further home the facts of such shamefully pseudo-scholarly Darwinist propagandising against Matthew by Richard Dawkins in several others areas.
Min Hunter was a friend of the late John Matthew (the last surviving direct descendant in Scotland to bear the name Matthew) .
Dempster's last book "The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwin's" focused on John Hunter as a much neglected forerunner of Darwin.
NOTE - Dempster's next letter to Hardie is published on this site already. It is here: 30.12.94 letter: http://patrickmathew.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Dempster
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