Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 5]

Wavertree 8.11.95

 Dear Ian …

I have finished correcting the final proofs. The indexing is a tedious job. One has to be so accurate otherwise the critics spot is deficiencies. The book is 360 pages long.

There is a crisis in Darwinism caused by the fact that he would have nothing to do with catastrophes and mass extinction. Since there has been great interest in the catastrophe of 70 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs catastrophes are back. They never went away so far as PM was concerned. It was, however, scientifically incorrect at the time and Darwin delivered the coup de grâce, “he seems to consider the world was nearly depopulated on successive occasions and then restocked”. That is what it is all about today. The Americans who have resurrected the catastrophe business are ignorant of the fact that PM has it down in black and white!

…

All the best and regards to Min Hunter

Sincerely,

Jim

Notes and Commentary by Mike Sutton

In this fifth letter from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie (one of the three trustees for the Patrick Matthew Trust) Ian is informed that the final drafts are completed of Jim's second book on the story of Matthew and Darwin and the discovery of natural selection  Dempster (1996)" Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century: Natural selection and Patrick Matthew". The production of the book was substantially funded by the Patrick Mathew Trust. This book was vanity published because Dempster was unable to find a professional publishing house willing to publish a book on Matthew (I experienced the exact same difficulty when I tried. Fortunately, the new American publishing house ThinkerMedia published my book on Matthew and Darwin as an e-book, but they were not around in Dempster's time). All of the funds for the Patrick Matthew trust came from the estate of John Matthew, the last living direct Scottish descendant of Patrick Matthew to bear the surname.

John Matthew was the last surviving direct descendant of Patrick Matthew
in Scotland to bear the surname Matthew

Notes supplied by Ian Hardie on the Patrick Matthew Trust

• Ian Hardie together with Min Hunter were the two principal trustees of the Patrick Matthew Trust backed by a third being a solicitor from the Edinburgh law firm Robson McLean.
• The second Jim Dempster book was “substantially funded” by the Patrick Matthew Trust
• All of the funds for the PM Trust came from the Estate of John Matthew.
• Ian Hardie and Min Hunter were jointly appointed as co-executors of the John Matthew estate
• Ian Hardie approached Dempster.  Ian does not  recall Jim Dempster ever writing to Min Hunter.
• The PM Trust was formed sometime after first contact / discussion with Jim Dempster – once it was determined that with financial help Jim Dempster was possibly persuadable to write the second book.

Dempster's first book
on Matthew

Ian Hardie was appointed to assist in the execution of John's estate. Ian has informed me in writing recently that among John's papers they found Dempster's first book (Dempster 1983) on Matthew - "Patrick Matthew and Natural Selection". With it were original letters from Darwin to Matthew, the contents of which were not then in the public domain. Dempster's first publisher went bankrupt shortly after publication of this, his first book on this topic, (details here). Realising what they had stumbled upon,  Ian Hardie approached Jim Dempster to see if the executors of John's will, might commission him to re-visit the topic of the discovery of natural selection in a second book. Once Dempster appeared possibly willing, they set up The Patrick Matthew Trust. At one point - as chapter drafts were presented to them to show progress -  Ian Hardie and Min Hunter sought to advise Jim against being too critically confrontational, because they wanted the facts to be fully embraced by "The Darwin Lobby"  (see my notes on an earlier letter - here), but Jim was having none of that - so they backed-off and gave him free academic rein.

John Matthew and Min Hunter

In this fifth letter to Ian Hardie, Jim Dempster again makes it clear that he has identified that Matthew got extinction events right in his original conception of macroevolution by natural selection and that Darwin (being a Lyell loyal uniformitarian) got it completely wrong and mocked Matthew in his "Historical Sketch" in the Origin of Species (from the third edition of 1861 onwards), implying Matthew was some kind of biblical flood believing crank, because at the time Matthew's view was not "the majority view" held by scientists. Dempster notes that the Americans are aware that meteorological events appear to explain species extinctions, but that they are unaware of Matthew's earlier work on the topic. See my notes on Letter No. 2 regarding Dempster being way ahead of the American Professor Rampino on this issue (here).

Dempster's second book on Matthew,

This book that was substantially funded by the Patrick Mathew Trust. 

The funds of the Trust, coming from the estate of 

John Matthew, establishes a neat line of enabling descent from 

Patrick Matthew to Jim Dempster's book about him. 

John Matthew's House in Scotland

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ian Hardie and Min Hunter for having the imagination, ethical wherewithal, intellectual curiosity and forward-thinking gumption to approach Jim Dempster to write a second book on Matthew and Darwin.  Dempster's  first book was very good, but it wasn't detailed enough to enable me to grasp the field adequately to understand and appreciate the significance and nuanced context of my own discoveries about the pre-1859 -readership of Matthew's book.  I absolutely needed that second Dempster book in order to know how and what I needed to know in order to write my own (Sutton 2104) to build upon existing knowledge.


Further Photographs of Robert Matthew, who was John Matthew's father

Robert Matthew the lower left picture is dated 1925

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 4]

Wavertree 7.10.95

 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).

Darwin Industry Wealth Warning! New 100 per cent proven facts are on the shelves

THE THREE WISE MONKEY'S OF DARWIN'S PLAGIARISM 

100 per cent proven

Postscript

In the public interest, I have been compelled to write a professionally reviewed essay in response to online obscene abuse and written claims, which have been submitted to the Scottish press, about my expert and independently peer-reviewed scholarly science journal publication of my original research findings. You can read it here (Sutton 2016).


It is very, very silly for anyone to claim that it is not the language of science to claim that something can be 100 per cent proven. Because I have just 100 per cent proven to you that  you have just read the word proven.

The lesson here is: Do not confuse the language a rational person uses to describe what published words  they just read on a page or screen with that used by a scientist to describe confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence for a hypothesis.

For example, contrary to 156 years of Darwinist propagandising mythmongery by the world's leading Darwin scholars, my original research (Sutton 2016) reveals that it is newly 100 per cent proven that Patrick Matthew's prior-published hypothesis of natural selection in fact was read by other naturalists (indeed influential naturalists known to both Darwin and Wallace) before Darwin and Wallace replicated Matthew's original ideas, claimed they did so independently and and then fallaciously claimed no one read those ideas before they replicated them. It is so 100 per cent proven, because newly discovered 19th century published books and articles reveal that seven naturalists, four known to Darwin and Wallace - three of whom actually influenced them and their influencer's influencers on the topic, or else facilitated their published work on the topic as editors - cited Matthew's book and the original ideas in it in the published literature.  In fact, it is also 100 per cent proven that Darwin lied in that regard, because Matthew had prior-informed him that his ideas were read and fully understood by two naturalists pre-1859, that he knew of.

Amusingly, a Mr Julian (J. F). Derry - a dealer in statures of Darwin and author of a book about him, which he gives away for free with every Darwin Monkey statue purchased on his commercial website is based in Edinburgh, and using an Edinburgh University email address, - sent an email to the Scottish press and several of my friends and associates criticising me and my work. Just one among a myriad of Mr Julian Derry's unfounded and totally unevidenced claims made about me goes exactly as follows :

 "I have never heard a scientist in any discipline use the kind of language that he does to criticise others and qualify his findings, for example, “100% certainty”. Every scientist I know worth their salt doesn't even have the phrase in their vocabulary.”

Suffice it to say, I have already just demonstrated why it is rational and perfectly scientific to state that was has been published is 100 per cent proven to have been published. In other words, as my (see Sutton 2016) peer reviewed article originally reveals:

1.  It is 100 per cent proven that the world's leading naturalists Sir Gavin de Beer and Ernst Mayr  both wrote that Matthew's work went unread by anyone at all/by any biologists.
2. . It is 100 per cent proven that Darwin lied in 1860 and 1861 (and every edition of the origin of species thereafter) when he claimed that Matthew's ideas on natural selection  had gone unread until 1860.
3. It is 100 per cent proven that naturalists who played key roles at the epicentre of influence and facilitation of the work of Darwin and Wallace on natural selection did read the orignal ideas in Matthew's (1831), On Naval Timber, book before 1858. 
4. It is most amusingly and ironically 100 per cent proven that Mr Derry has some strange notions of what language a scientist uses to criticise others, because it is 100 per cent proven he used the obscene four letter misogynistic "c" word to abuse me on social media. Hilariously, The 100 per cent proof of that disgraceful behaviour is here: Click 

Mr Derry, who was plainly upset by the New Facts in the history of discovery of natural selection published in an earlier edition of the Scottish Courier newspaper), was given short-shrift in the same paper (click here to read) by way of my published reply to  his weirdly ranting self-destructive attempts to deny the importance of what I have originally discovered in the history of discovery of natural selection. Might I respectfully suggest, in line with his monkey-business interests that he start dealing in statues that cannot be 100 per cent proven to exist. He could make a fortune. You know, rather like  selling "Scotch mist" in a jar.

I have added Mr Derry's bizarre "no such thing as 100 per cent proof" in the language of science claim to my collection of the world's most ironic claims. Here.

Anyone interested in facts, rather than brass-necked monkeys lacking balls, can read the full story of the discovery of the New Facts in my Thinker Media e-book Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret. 

Mental Health and Wealth Warning! 100 per cent proof science hits the shelves

100 per cent proven

It is very, very silly for anyone to claim that it is not the language of science to claim that something can be 100 per cent proven. Because I have just 100 per cent proven to you that just read the word proven.

The lesson of this truism is: Do not confuse the language a rational person uses to describe what published words  they just read on a page or screen with that used by a scientist to describe confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence for a hypothesis.

For example, contrary to 156 years of Darwinist propagandising mythmongery by the world's leading Darwin scholars, my original research (Sutton 2016) reveals that it is newly 100 per cent proven that Patrick Matthew's prior-published hypothesis of natural selection in fact was read by other naturalists (indeed influential naturalists known to both Darwin and Wallace) before Darwin and Wallace replicated Matthew's original ideas, claimed they did so independently and and then fallaciously claimed no one read those ideas before they replicated them. It is so 100 per cent proven, because newly discovered 19th century published books and articles reveal that seven naturalists, four known to Darwin and Wallace, actually influenced them and their influencer's influencers on the topic, or else facilitated their published wok on the topic as editors, cited Matthews's book and the orignal ideas in it,  In fact, it is also 100 per cent proven that Darwin lied in that regard, because Matthew had prior-informed him that his ideas were read and fully understood by two naturalists pre-1859, that he knew of.

Amusingly, a Mr J. F. Derry - a dealer in statures of Darwin and author of a book about him, based in Edinburgh, and using an Edinburgh University email address, - sent an email to the Scottish press and several of my friends and associates criticising me by claiming that :

 "I have never heard a scientist in any discipline use the kind of language that he does to criticise others and qualify his findings, for example, “100% certainty”. Every scientist I know worth their salt doesn’t even have the phrase in their vocabulary.”

Suffice it to say, I have already just demonstrated why it is rational and perfectly scientific to to state that was has been published is 100 per cent proven to have been published. In other words, as my (see Sutton 2016) peer reviewed article originally reveals:

1.  It is 100 per cent proven that the world's leading naturalists Sir Gavin de Beer and Ernst Mayr  both wrote that Matthew's work went unread by anyone at all/by any biologists.
2. . It is 100 per cent proven that Darwin lied in 1860 and 1861 (and every edition of the origin of species thereafter) when he claimed that Matthew's ideas on natural selection  had gone unread until 1860.
3. It is 100 per cent proven that naturalists who played key roles at the epicentre of influence and felicitation of the work of Darwin and Wallace on natural selection did read the orignal ideas in Matthew's (1831), On Naval Timber, book before 1858. 
4. It is most amusingly 100 per cent proven that Mr Derry has some strange notions of what language a scientist uses to criticise others, because it is 100 per cent proven he used the four letter misogynistic "c" word to abuse me on social media. The 100 per cent proof of that is here: Click 

Mr Derry was given short-shrift in the press (click here to read the article)  for his weirdly self-destructive attempts to deny the importance of the New Facts in the history of discovery of natural selection. Might I respectful suggest he start dealing in statues that cannot be 100 per cent proven to exist. He could make a fortune. You know - like selling "Scotch mist" in a jar.

You can read the full story of the discovery of the New Data in my Thinker Media e-book Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret. 

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 3]

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

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 2]

Note: This is the second of the 10 transcribed Wavertree Letters from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust)


Wavertree 22.9.94

Dear Ian,

Thanks for your letters of 13.9 and 23.9. …

Your letter of the 13.9 brought a cloud over the horizon. A cloud as ancient as patronage itself. You write “We feel that to succeed it should not be too confrontationist re the Darwin lobby…” this is the problem of “He who pays the piper calls the tune”. I don’t know what you and Mrs Hunter mean. Does it mean that the present book is too confrontationist? If so then you must exclude me from funds out of your trust because that is my style. I found in reading the literature that from Darwin onwards there was a gang up on PM and Lamarck. If by countering their unfair, dismissive remarks I was or am going to be confrontationist I can only bow myself out.

I presume you and Mrs Hunter are familiar with the Darwin Lobbyists. They would not give a tinker’s curse for what I say. When I presented the evidence contained in the Appendix to Jay Gould of Harvard he dismissed PM with “He buried his head in his trees and saw no forest.” In actual fact PM as soon as he had finished his book went into the political aspect of the Appendix, joined the Chartist movement… He was elected the candidate for east Fife and Perth for the Great Convention of 1839. So – do we let Gould’s stupid and ignorant remark go by for fear that the sale of the book will suffer?

The “We feel” sentence continues “… and should set Patrick Matthew in the context of his era… etc”

If you turn to page 19 of my book you will see the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph does exactly that. Throughout the book I have taken the approach of the contextual historian and this is what I am continuing to do with the work I have been engaged on. If by this approach I am to confrontationist I can only say – that’s me.

You see “The man who pays the piper calls the tune” has led to tears in the end over the whole history of patronage. If the piper remonstrates he is unfairly accused of being churlish and looking a gift horse in the mouth. I had hoped this situation would not arise.

 I have mentioned several times to you that the cost of another edition would be high. …

 If you turn to my book you will see the name of Edward Blyth. I have a chapter relating him to PM and Darwin. Another chapter deals with Darwin’s Historical Sketch which includes PM. This Sketch is the most dishonest piece ever Darwin wrote. He makes PM look ridiculous but as I present it now Matthew’s approach is completely modern with all those catastrophes and disappearance of the dinosaurs. There is another chapter on Darwin who learned nothing during five years at University. When he was in Edinburgh for two years he came under the care of Robert Grant who taught him about the fauna of the Firth of Forth, encouraged him to collect invertebrate specimens and demonstrate them to the Pliny Society and since Grant was an enthusiastic Lamarckian Darwin got grounded in that too. Darwin’s comment: the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. He then went to Cambridge for three years. There he collected beetles and other specimens, went on geological trips with Sedgwick the professor of Geology. Darwin’s comment : the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. So why did Henslow recommend him as naturalist for the Beagle?

PM comes in for a bit of stick from me over his colonial policy which could not be more brutal and inhuman – but in the “Survival of the fittest” sense exactly what became social Darwinism. If you read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ the same inhuman conclusions are drawn i.e. the savages will be annihilated and in time to come there will be a hoped for, improved Caucasian people and below them the chimp and gorilla. All other humans would be eliminated.

So I suppose you will designate this contextual approach as confrontationist. So be it. I have found another letter from PM to Darwin which I knew must be around because the reply is in my book. This letter accompanied a review of the Descent of Man by Matthew in the Scotsman newspaper. The central library dug out the review which could have been more critical. Many people were dismayed at the time because Darwin had now changed his mind and says he now realised he stressed natural selection too much in the Origin!

So that’s it for the moment.

Sincerely,

 Jim Dempster

~~~

Notes and commentary by MIke Sutton

Dempster reveals he personally informed the famous Darwinist Professor Gould (Stephen Jay Gould) of exactly what was in the appendix of Matthew's 1831 work, On Naval Timber, regarding the first full hypothesis of macro evolution by natural selection, and that Gould merely dismissed the evidence with an off-the cuff propagandising unevidenced dismissal.

We see here also the first evidence in writing (it is clearly and prominently included in Dempster's 1996 book) that Dempster was first to note that Matthew had in fact been correct and Darwin wrong regarding catastrophic meteorological and geological extinction events. Note: Jim Dempster was way further ahead in this regard than Michael Rampino (Rampino 2011), who is generally misattributed with this important discovery - and who attributes Dempster by way of a mere cursory footnote in his famous article on the topic.

In this letter, Dempster refers to Min (Mrs) Hunter - who was a friend of John Matthew (who was a descendant of Patrick Matthew) . The book Dempster is writing at the time of the Wavertree Letters  is  his 1996 'Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century'. The Patrick Matthew Trust was financially assisting Dempster's work. Later in 2005 Dempster published his third book on the topic 'The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins'.

It is notable that in the letter Dempster outlines that his approach to the topic is deliberately critically confrontational, because he felt that the so called "Darwin Industry"- so as to foster and maintain their impression of Darwin's original genius - was incredibly biased in its effective propagandising  against Darwin's intellectual forbears Lamarck and Matthew.   I have taken the same strategically objective, honest and open stance in my work (Sutton 2014a; Sutton 2014b and 2016). Indeed, feeling that Dempster's superb groundbreaking work on Matthew and Darwin has been for the most part cannily ignored by Darwin scholars my own approach goes further with zero regard for any undue reverence to Darwin, the Darwin lobby, or their credulous Darwin worshipping misplaced sensitivities, poor and pseudo-scholarship, and irrational thinking.

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 1]

Jim (W. J) Dempster

For the next 10 days a new blog post will be published each day on the Patrick Matthew blog. Each post will be a letter.

Each letter, published in chronological order, is from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie. The letters were written during the period when Hardie co-managed the Patrick Matthew Trust.

Please Note: Some details concerning living people have been omitted in order to protect certain minor issues of possible personal privacy and sensibility.  Wherever this occurs the point of redaction is indicated by three full stops in a row "..."

Much of the correspondence concerns Dempster's second book. Dempster, W. J (1996) Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh. The Pentland Press.

PLEASE NOTE All of these letters, published on the Patrick Matthew Blog are the copyright of the Dempster Family Private Archive - (C) All International Rights Reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission. 

Letter 1 (Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie)

Wavertree 20.08.94

Dear Ian

Many thanks for your letter and enclosures. The article for country life I find rather lifeless but let it go. I have written to Fiona about a minor change. When you return the photograph can you enquire whether they can improve the quality. There are sorts of tricks these days. That photo, I think I told you was turned down by American publishers as being of poor quality. If they can send us some better quality prints it would be helpful.

I saw Gribbin’s article in the Sunday Times. I wrote him and complimented him on being hooked on only one reading. Hooker found it the most difficult book he ever read; Huxley has to re-read several times before he was able to point out several mistakes especially Darwin’s opinion that natural selection was always a slow process. It so happens that several months ago I was so appalled at the number of mistakes in the Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins that I wrote him a small essay. It was mainly the usual English diatribe against Lamarck without mentioning that by the 6th edition of the Origin Darwin was won over to Lamarckian ideas. The inheritance of acquired characteristics came from Buffon and not Lamarck. It was Huxley who wrote Darwin to point out that his Pangenesis was what Buffon had written almost a hundred years ago. So – the Darwin Industry (coined by Adrian Desmond) are determined to shield Darwin from Pangenesis and all the other untruths Darwin uttered about his predecessors. I asked Richard Dawkins why he had listed in his bibliography the 1st edition and not the 6th edition. Here is his disingenuous reply.

“I don’t understand why you are ‘surprised’ that I refer to the 1st edition of the Origin. Apart from the fact that the last edition contains the well-known acknowledgement to Matthew, I greatly prefer the first edition. It lacks errors that Darwin introduced, (like Pangenesis) in response to criticisms that we can now see to have been erroneous.”

 Can you spot the similarity?

The piece about Matthew in the 6th edition is in the so-called ‘Historical Sketch’. It makes Matthew out to be an idiot but turns out now to be very modern. I am dealing with this in my current study. I refer in my book to the Huxley – Darwin correspondence about Pangenesis.

Richard Dawkins knew nothing about PM and states that he was taught that PM was ‘an enigma’!

I thank you for pursuing a possible publisher. My big problem is the typing of the manuscript. I had a secretary when I wrote the book but not now. My standard of typing would not be acceptable by publishers. It will be very costly to hire a typist. That is my main problem these days.

I came across in the transactions of the Royal Society another letter from Matthew to Darwin. Matthew had clearly written a review (9.3.71) of the ‘Descent of Man’ (1871) for the Scotsman Newspaper; a copy of the review was enclosed. Darwin wrote back curtly a few words, mainly about his ill-health, as usual, but made no reference to the review and signed off curtly with a ‘yours faithfully’. Even so Darwin did not let up on his rubbishing of Matthew for by February 1872 the 6th edition was published with the Historical Sketch.

So – I wrote to the National Library on George IV Bridge and asked them to track down the review. I have just received a copy. It is a long but very favourable review but Darwin took care not to mention it in his letters.

I have been immersed in a marvellous book – The politics of Evolution by Adrian Desmond. He lives quite near here. He deals with another Edinburgh graduate – Robert Grant – who befriended Darwin when he was at Edinburgh. Told him all about Lamarck, the fauna of the Firth of Forth and encouraged him to present short papers at the Pliny Society. When Darwin returned from the voyage he lived in Gower Street a stone’s throw form the University College where Grant was now the professor of Zoology and preaching or rather lecturing on Lamarckism. Darwin avoided him for the rest of his life and spread untruths about him. Desmond asks why? I think Darwin from the beginning was making sure that his predecessors would be blanked out so that he could claim ‘I owe nothing to my predecessors’. What arrogance! So his predecessors were Herbert Spencer, Lamarck, Robert Grant, Patrick Matthew, Edward Blyth. All these people were subject to Darwin’s malicious untruths which everyone believes. His treatment of Edward Blyth I deal with in my book.

Arthur Keith in his book ‘Darwin re-valued’ asks “why was Darwin so abrupt with Herbert Spencer?”

I have a great deal of typing to do which I find rather boring. I think I now have all the data I need. The local library have been most helpful.

Sincerely,

 Jim

~~~

Notes by Mike Sutton

In fact, Darwin's Historical Sketch was included in every edition of the Origin of Species from the third edition onward (Darwin 1861).  Dempster never got that fact wrong in this letter, it's just that he writes "by the 6h edition" meaning it was definitely in that edition.

It is also important to note that this letter established that Richard Dawkins was well aware of  the completeness of Matthew's (1831) on the topic of natural selection as early as 1994, not least thanks to the correspondence he received from Jim Dempster on the topic.

Re-Branding Darwin IV

"That's a nice book containing the full prior-published theory of macroevolution by natural selection", said Burglar Darwin, "I'll have that." 

When he got home, and without telling anyone, Darwin put the ideas from it into his own book: The Origin of Species.

Read the full story of Burglar Darwin in "Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret"

Re-Branding Darwin III

Get up-to speed with the New Data

Re-Branding Darwin II

Get up to speed with the New Facts: here