Dear Ian
Thanks for the photocopy. I had seen the huge spread in the Sunday Times and immediately ordered the book. It is another American intellectual mugging of PM and Lamarck. I have added a paragraph to the book. Dennett states that Darwin ‘graciously conceded’ to Matthew’s claim of priority! He does not quote the letter Darwin sent to the Gardener’s Chronicle and so another inaccurate statement will enter the press. Matthew is disposed of in one sentence! The book is supposed to be about natural selection!
… The production [of my book] is now a little behind schedule but that is just as well. It has allowed me to deal with Dennett – what a pretentious man! His bibliography has left out – Buffon, Cuvier, Lamarck, Edward Blyth, St Hilaire etc and Charles Lyell! …
Kind regards to all
Jim
Notes and Commentary by Mike Sutton
In this fourth letter to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust), Jim Dempster refers to a book written by Daniel Dennett (1995): "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life" . Here we see Dempster's indignation at Dennett's biased Darwinist pseudo-scholarly "cherry-stepping" away from the known facts on the topic of Patrick Matthew's shabby, dishonest treatment at the hands of Darwin and his Darwinists in 1860 and thereafter. Dempster covered much of this in his three books on Matthew. Since then, it has been further proven that Darwin lied about the absence of prior-readership of the original ideas in Matthew's (1831) book, that Darwin's friend David Anstead trashed Matthew in the Dublin University Magazine and that clearly identified routes of "knowledge contamination", from the work of Matthew (1831) to the pre-1858 brains of Darwin and Wallace, are newly discovered (Sutton 2014; and Sutton 2016).