Part 3

Wallace was the son of Thomas Vere Wallace, of Hanworth, Middlesex, England, and Mary Anne Grennell, of Hertford. His ancestry is obscure. On the paternal side he is probably descended from one of the branches of Sir William Wallace, the popular national hero of Scotland, but nothing is known back of his grandfather, who was probably keeper of the inn on the estates of the Duke of St. Albans, of Hanworth. The burial records of Hanworth mention an Admiral James Wallace. In his mother’s family on the paternal side is the name Greenell, of Hertford, probably the “Greenaile” in 1579, French Huguenot refugees after the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Her grandfather was for many years alderman and twice mayor of Hertford. One of the Greenells was an architect.

Wallace’s father took up the profession of the law, but did not continue, and up to his marriage lived the life of a fairly well-to-do middle-class gentleman. After his marriage he essayed the publishing of two magazines apparently devoted to art, antiquities and general literature, which were failures. He then moved from Marylebone to more rural districts where living was less expensive, first to St. Georges, Southwark, and then to Usk, Monmouthshire. In this village Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823.

When Wallace was about six years of age the family moved to Hertford, where his education was begun in the old grammar school that dated back to 1617. He left school too young to begin Greek, but he studied Latin, and next to Latin grammar the most painful subject he learned was geography, principally because of the meaningless way in which it was taught. During the last year of study at the grammar school, as the family were then in very straitened circumstances, he assisted in the teaching of the younger boys in reading, arithmetic, and writing.

Wallace considered that his home life in Hertford was in many ways more educational than the time spent at school. His father was a man who enjoyed the pleasure of literature and belonged to a book club through which a constant stream of interesting books came to the house, from which he read aloud to the family in the evenings. The father earned a small income tutoring and as librarian of a small library, and the son Alfred spent hours reading there, also.

At the age of thirteen young Wallace left school, with a view to learning land surveying. He stayed in London a short time with his brother John, who was apprenticed to a master builder, and their evenings were most frequently spent in the “Hall of Science,” a kind of mechanics institute for advanced thinkers among workmen. Here he heard many lectures by Robert Owen, the founder of the socialist movement in England, and took up philosophical reading, beginning with Paine’s “Age of Reason,” among other books. In the summer of 1837 he went with his brother William into Bedfordshire to begin his education as a land surveyor, and practised for seven years in various parts of England and Wales.

After a time it was decided that he should try to pursue the clock-making business as well as surveying and general engineering, and Wallace considered that this was the first of several turning-points in his life, because changes in the business of the clock-making concern with which he was connected at Leighton prevented his continuing this work for more than a short period. He was delighted to take up again in 1839 the employment of land surveying because of the opportunities it afforded for out-of-door life.

While at Neath, in Wales, there was not much demand for surveying, and Wallace occupied himself in constructing a rude telescope with which he was able to observe the moon and Jupiter’s satellites, and he developed much interest in studying astronomy and in the development of astronomical instruments. But he says that he was chiefly occupied with what became more and more the solace and delight of his lonely rambles among the moors and mountains, namely, his first introduction to the variety, the beauty and the mystery of nature as manifested in the vegetable kingdom.

His earnings were very meagre and he had little money for the purchase of books. During the seven years he worked with his brother he says he “hardly ever had more than a few shillings for personal expenses.” It was during this period, while most occupied out of doors with the observation and collection of plants, that he began to write down more or less systematically his ideas on various subjects that interested him. His first literary efforts all bear dates of the autumn and winter of 1843, when he was between twenty and twenty-one years of age. One of his first productions was the rough sketch of a popular lecture on botany addressed to an audience supposed to be as ignorant as he was when he began his observation of the native flowers. A second of these early lectures was on the subject “The Advantages of Varied Knowledge,” which he considered of interest chiefly as showing the bent of his mind at the time and indicating a disposition for discursive reading and study. He also wrote at this time on the manners and customs of the Welsh peasantry in Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, and put the matter in form for one of the London magazines, but it was declined.

These early and serious studies in botany, continuing for four years, prepared him for the plant wonders of the tropics. At the age of twenty-one he went to London. He afterward regarded his difficulty in obtaining employment as a great turning-point in his career, “for otherwise,” he writes, “it seems very unlikely that I should ever have undertaken what at that time seemed rather a wild scheme, a journey to the almost unknown forests of the Amazon in order to observe nature and make a living by collecting.”

In his autobiographic volumes of 1905, “My Life, a Record of Events and Opinions,” there is also an interesting sketch of his state of mind at this time.

I do not think that at this formative period I could be said to have shown special superiority in any of the higher mental faculties, but I possessed a strong desire to know the causes of things, a great love of beauty in form and color, and a considerable, but not excessive desire for order and arrangement in whatever I had to do. If I had one distinct mental faculty more prominent than another it was the power of correct reasoning from a review of the known facts in any case to the causes or laws which produced them, and also in detecting fallacies in the reasoning of other persons.

Elsewhere in his autobiography he observes that whatever reputation in science, literature and thought he may possess is the result of the organs of comparison, causality and order, with firmness, acquisitiveness, concentrativeness, constructiveness and wonder, all above the average, but none of them excessively developed, combined with a moderate faculty of language which

enables me to express my ideas and conclusions in writing though but imperfectly in speech. I feel, myself, how curiously and persistently these faculties have acted in various combinations to determine my tastes, disposition and actions.

Wallace shared Darwin’s strong sentiment for justice as between man and man, and abhorrence of tyranny and unnecessary interference with the liberty of others. His retiring disposition enabled him to enjoy long periods of reflection, receptiveness and solitude, both at home and in the tropics, out of which have come the sudden illuminations or flashes of light leading to the solution of the problems before him. As to this wonderful mechanism of induction, Wallace observes:

I have long since come to see that no one deserves either praise or blame for the ideas that come to him, but only for the actions resulting therefrom. Ideas and beliefs are certainly not voluntary acts. They come to us—we hardly know how or whence, and once they have got possession of us we can not reject or change them at will.

Apart from Darwin’s education in Christ’s College, Cambridge, as compared with Wallace’s self-education, the parallel between his intellectual tendencies and environment and those of Charles Darwin is extraordinary. They enjoyed a similar current of influence from men, from books and from nature. Thus the next turning-point in his life was his meeting with Henry Walter Bates, through whom he acquired his zest for the wonders of insect life, which opened for the first time for him the zoological windows of nature. In a measure Bates was to Wallace what the Reverend John S. Henslow had been to Darwin. It is noteworthy that the greater and most original part of his direct observations of nature was upon the adaptations of insects.

Darwin and Wallace fell under the spell of the same books, first and foremost those of Lyell, as noted above, then of Humboldt in his “Personal Narrative” (1814–18), of Robert Chambers in his “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (1844), of Malthus in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798).

It was, however, Darwin’s own “Journal of Researches,” published in 1845, and read by Wallace at the age of twenty-three, which determined him to invite Bates to accompany him on his journey to the Amazon and Rio Negro, which filled the four years 1848–52. In this wondrous equatorial expanse, like Darwin he was profoundly impressed with the forests, the butterflies and birds, and with his first meeting with man in an absolute state of nature. Bates, himself a naturalist of high order, was closely observing the mimetic resemblances among insects to animate and inanimate objects and introducing Wallace to a field which he subsequently made his own. Bates remained several years after Wallace’s departure and published his classical memoir on mimicry in 1860–61. Wallace’s own description of his South American experiences, entitled “Narrative of Travels on the Amazon,” published in 1853 when he was thirty years of age, does not display the ability of his later writings and shows that his powers were slowly developing.

His eight years of travel between 1854 and 1862 in the Indo-Malay Islands, the Timor Group, Celebes, the Moluccas and the Papuan Group brought his powers to full maturity. It is apparent that his prolonged observations on the natives, the forests, the birds and mammals, and especially on the butterflies and beetles, were gradually storing his mind for one of those discharges of generalization which come so unexpectedly out of the vast accumulation of facts. “The Malay Archipelago” of 1869, published seven years after the return, is Wallace’s “journal of researches,” that is, it is to be compared with Darwin’s great work of this title. Its fine breadth of treatment in anthropology, zoology, botany and physiography gives it a rank second only to Darwin’s “Journal” in a class of works repeatedly enriched by British naturalists from the time of Burchell’s journey in Africa.

Wallace’s first trial at the evolution problem was his essay sent to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in 1855, entitled “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” This paper suggested the when and where of the occurrence of new forms, but not the how. He concludes:

It has now been shown, though most briefly and imperfectly, how the law that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a preexisting closely allied species,” connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts.

In February, 1858, during a period of intermittent fever at Ternate, the how arose in his mind with the recollection of the “Essay” of Malthus, and there flashed upon him all the possible effects of the struggle for existence. Twenty years before the same idea, under similar circumstances, had come into the mind of Darwin. The parallel is extraordinary as shown in the following citations:

DARWIN WALLACE In October, 1838, that is, fifteen In February, 1858, I was suffering months after I had begun my from a rather severe attack of systematic inquiry, I happened to intermittent fever at Ternate, in read for amusement, “Malthus on the Moluccas; and one day, while Population,” and being well lying on my bed during the cold prepared to appreciate the struggle fit, wrapped in blankets, though for existence which everywhere goes the thermometer was at 88° Fahr., on from long-continued observations the problem again presented itself of the habits of animals and to me, and something led me to plants, it at once struck me that think of the “positive checks” under these circumstances favorable described by Malthus in his “Essay variations would tend to be on Population,” a work I had read preserved, and unfavorable ones to several years before, and which had be destroyed. The result of this made a deep and permanent would be the formation of new impression on my mind. These species. Here, then, I had at last checks—war, disease, famine and the got a theory by which to work; but like—must, it occurred to me, act I was so anxious to avoid prejudice on animals as well as man. Then I that I determined not for some time thought of the enormously rapid to write even the briefest sketch multiplication of animals, causing of it. In June, 1842, I first these checks to be much more allowed myself the satisfaction of effective in them than in the case writing a very brief abstract of my of man; and while pondering vaguely theory in pencil, in thirty-five on this fact there suddenly flashed pages, and this was enlarged during upon me the idea of the survival the summer of 1844 into one of 230 of the fittest—that the individuals pages.—Darwin’s “Autobiography,” removed by these checks must be on Chap. II. the whole inferior to those that survived. In the two hours that elapsed before my ague fit was over, I had thought out almost the whole of the theory; and the same evening I sketched the draft of my paper, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full, and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin.—Wallace’s “My Life,” p. 212.

Darwin had been working upon the verification of the same idea for twenty years. We owe to Sir Joseph Hooker and to Lyell the bringing together of these independent but strikingly similar manuscripts. The noble episode which followed of the joint publication of the discovery was prophetic of the continued care for truth and carelessness of self, of the friendship, mutual admiration and co-operation between these two high-minded men, which affords a golden example for our own and future ages. Each loved his own creations, yet undervalued his own work; each accorded enthusiastic praise to the work of the other.

It is a striking circumstance in the history of biology that Wallace’s rapidly produced sketch of 1858 “On the Tendencies of Varieties to Part Indefinitely from the Original Type” not only pursues a line of thought parallel to that of Darwin, except in excluding the analogy of natural with human selection, but embodies the permanent substance of the selection theory as it is today after fifty-four years of world-wide research. It may be regarded as his masterpiece. The attempt has been made by De Vries and others to show that Wallace in his “Darwinism” of 1889 differed from Darwin on important points, but whatever may be true of this final modification of the theory, a very careful comparison of the Darwin-Wallace sketches of 1858 shows that they both involve the principle of discontinuity; in fact, fluctuation in the sense of plus and minus variation was not recognized at the time; the notion of variation was that derived directly from field rather than from laboratory notes. This is repeatedly implied in Wallace’s language and especially in his sketch of 1858:

... there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from the original type, and which also produces, in domesticated animals, the tendency of varieties to return to the parent form....

Most or perhaps all the variations from the typical form of a species must have some definite effect, however slight, on the habits or capacities of the individuals. Even a change of color might, by rendering them more or less distinguishable, affect their safety; a greater or less development of hair might modify their habits.... The superior variety would then alone remain, and on a return to favorable circumstances would rapidly increase in numbers and occupy the place of the extinct species and variety.

The variety would now have replaced the species, of which it would be a more perfectly developed and more highly organized form.... Here, then, we have progression and continued divergence deduced from the general laws which regulate the existence of animals in a state of nature, and from the undisputed fact that varieties do frequently occur.... Variations in unimportant parts might also occur, having no perceptible effect on the life-preserving powers; and the varieties so furnished might run a course parallel with the parent species, either giving rise to further variations or returning to the former type.... In the wild animal, on the contrary, all its faculties and powers being brought into full action for the necessities of existence, any increase becomes immediately available, is strengthened by exercise, and must even slightly modify the food, the habits and the whole economy of the race. It creates, as it were, a new animal, one of superior powers, and which will necessarily increase in numbers and outlive those inferior to it....