Newton's claim that Wallis's death, by removing from the scene the last of the older mathematicians, permitted Leibniz to paint an exaggerated picture of his priority in the development of the calculus does not seem plausible. However Newton might view Wallis, it is perfectly evident to us that in his correspondence with Leibniz, Wallis was far from displaying skepticism of Leibniz's rights to the calculus. Moreover, it would be evident to anyone having no more intimate source of information than Wallis's own Mathematical Works that Wallis had known nothing of Newton's mathematical development before 1676, nor of the Newton-Leibniz letters of that year, until long afterward. Wallis might indeed have proved, as an Anglophile, an ardent defender of Newton, but not on the basis of independent personal knowledge or (one might add without disrespect to one who had been a considerable mathematician in his own day) an independent personal capacity to judge the mathematical subtleties involved in the methods of differential calculus and fluxions. In actuality Wallis's own role in the slow warming up of the calculus dispute had been to act as an uncritical mouthpiece for Newton.