My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

—"372 MY LIFEthey are cowering beneath the inquiring gaze of onesingle truth-seeker, John Hampden, the well-knownchampion of the Mosaic cosmogony, as against theinfidel theories and superstitions of the pagan mystics,who is, at the end of fifteen years' conflict, still holdinghis ground against all the professional authorities ofEngland and America ;and the single fact that duringthe whole of that time, no one but a degraded swindlerhas dared to make a fraudulent attempt to supportthe globular theory, is ample and overwhelming proofsof the worthless character of modern elementarygeography." And this man was educated at OxfordUniversity ! Seldom has so much boldness of assertionand force of invective been combined with such grossignorance. And to this day a society exists to upholdthe views of Hampden, Carpenter, and their teacher," Parallax !The two law suits, the four prosecutions for libel,the payments and costs of the settlement, amountedto considerably more than the ;^500 I received fromHampden, besides which I bore all the costs of theweek's experiments, and between fifteen and twentyyears of continued persecution—a tolerably severepunishment for what I did not at the time recognizeas an ethical lapse.There is one other small money matter which Iwish to put on record here, because, though it involvesonly the small sum of sixpence, it affords an exampleof official meanness, and what really amounts to pettylarceny, which can hardly be surpassed.BritishIn 1865 theMuseum purchased from me some specimen(I think a skeleton) for which they agreed to pay£S' Two years later I received the following printedform :