December 5, 1A5O 
Dr. I ic'h   , Bn 
Eegi onal Biologist 
Soil Conserv tion Service 
a', ifor.na 
Dear Dr. Bond: 
?rofesor 140I01d hams sent me yo-r letter to hian of 
Noeter 17 and a copyj of his reply of N.ovember 23, 
Althou-h I have never encoutored in nate a situation thmt 
could be       y c   Aed with the hypothetical one you have outlined 
in yaur second paragraph, it by no means follows that such do not 
exist, If you evr succeed in getting a sufticlently complete se- 
quence of data to trace sethlia like this throh, you should 
certainl publish, but I K      advie aanxt plition of the 
St              adequa   roundwork of data. Not only have I found 
in my own studies of pedation and population that pencil and paper 
calculations that involve assumptions usually -o 'badly astray but 
I am also pretty sure that Chapan (w!o was nown as one of the fore- 
most of population studen4s) shared most of my views on this point, 
indeed, only afew days b4fore his death, I had a long talk with 
h Izin which~ he deployed the tendwac,  of mathematicians to advance 
"principles" merely or aLrost entirely on the basis of their figu-

ing.0 
?Actee's thesis of proportional prvdation was intended only 
as a 'eneralizat ion ne"Ing, n effect that the more abuMnant a pey 
an     is the more heavily it tends to' be preyed upon,    , as a 
generalization, this see   as close to the truth as we are capable 
of coling. He has often stated, however - at least in quite volum- 
inous correspondence with me - that he did not expect specific 
instances to conlorm so much to the thesis. I    it add further 
that M1 own researches have brought cut mny modications a.d I 
would particularly expect greater or less departures in higher ver- 
tebrates, which show varying degrees of territorialism  or other 
kinds of intolerant behavior that :y significantly affect their 
relative vulnerab lity to predation at different population levels 
and under different envirormiental cireumstances.