Alfred
Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist, geographer, explorer,
anthropologist and biologist. He is most famously known for co-
discovering the theory of evolution by means of natural selection
entirely independent of Charles Darwin.
Childhood
Born 8th January 1823, Alfred was born in Welsh village Llanbadok.
He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas
Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. Mary Anne
was English; Thomas Wallace was probably of
Scottish ancestry. When he was 5 years old, he was forced to move
to Hertford, where he attended Hertford Grammar School.
His father, Thomas Wallace, graduated in law, but for some reason,
never practised it. He owned some income-generating property, but
bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady
deterioration of the family's financial position. Mary Anne, Alfed’s
mother, originated from a middle-class family in Hertford.
Later on, he moved to London with his older brother John. Alfred
enjoyed going to lectures and reading books. He left London to work
with his brother William as an apprentice for 6 years.
At the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Hereford, near the
Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Glamorgan in
Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace did land surveying work in
the countryside of the west of England and Wales. By the end of
1843, William's business had declined due to difficult economic
conditions, and Wallace, at the age of 20, left in January.
After a brief period of unemployment, he was hired as a master at
the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach drawing, mapmaking, and
surveying. One evening, he met Henry Bates, an entomologist. He
befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects.
Wallace’s oldest brother, William, passed away in 1845 and Alfred
left his teaching position to handle William’s business, but was
unable to. Wallace persuaded his brother John to
join him in starting another architecture and civil
engineering firm, which carried out a number of
projects, including the design of a building for the
Neath Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1843.
William Jevons, the founder of that institute, was impressed by
Wallace and persuaded him to give lectures there on science and
engineering. In the autumn of 1846, John and he purchased a
cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister
Fanny (his father had died in 1843).
Exploring the natural world
Inspired by the chronicles of earlier travelling naturalists,
including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin and
especially William Henry Edwards, Wallace decided that he too
wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist.
In 1848, Wallace and Henry Bates left for Brazil
aboard the Mischief. Their intention was to collect
insects and other animal specimens in the Amazon
Rainforest for their private collections, selling the
duplicates to museums and collectors back in
Britain in order to fund the trip. Wallace also
hoped to gather evidence of the transmutation of
species.
Wallace and Bates spent most of their first year collecting
near Belém, then explored inland separately, occasionally meeting to
discuss their findings. In 1849, they were briefly joined by another
young explorer, botanist Richard Spruce, along with Wallace's
younger brother Herbert. Herbert left soon thereafter (dying two
years later from yellow fever), but Spruce, like Bates, would spend
over ten years collecting in South America.
Wallace continued charting the Rio Negro for four years, collecting
specimens and making notes on the peoples and languages he
encountered as well as the geography, flora, and fauna. On 12 July
1852, Wallace embarked for the UK on
the brig Helen. After 26 days at sea, the ship's cargo caught fire
and the crew was forced to abandon ship. All of the specimens
Wallace had on the ship, mostly collected during the last, and most
interesting, two years of his trip, were lost. He managed to save a
few notes and pencil sketches and little else.
Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open boat before being
picked up by the brig Jordeson, which was sailing from Cuba to
London. The Jordeson's provisions were strained by the unexpected
passengers, but after a difficult passage on very short rations the
ship finally reached its destination on 1 October 1852.
Upon his arrival in London, Wallace spent 18 months in London living
on the insurance payment for his lost collection and selling a few
specimens that had been shipped back to Britain prior to his starting
his exploration of the Rio Negro. He was deeply awe-stuck by the
variety of butterflies and birds. During this period, despite having
lost almost all of the notes from his South American expedition, he
wrote six academic papers (which included "On the Monkeys of the
Amazon") and two books; Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their
Uses and Travels on the Amazon. He also made connections with a
number of other British naturalists.
An illustration from The Malay Archipelago depicts the flying frog Wallace discovered.
From 1854 to 1862, age 31 to 39, Wallace travelled through the
Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Singapore, Malaysia and
Indonesia), to collect specimens for sale and to study natural
history. A set of 80 bird skeletons he collected in Indonesia and
associated documentation can be found in the Cambridge University
Museum of Zoology. Wallace had as many as a hundred assistants
who collected on his behalf. Wallace's observations of the marked
zoological differences across a narrow strait in the archipelago led
to his proposing the zoogeographical boundary now known as
the Wallace line.
Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay
Archipelago (more than 80,000 beetles alone). Several thousand of
them represented species new to science. One of his better-known
species descriptions during this trip is that of the gliding tree
frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, known as
Wallace's flying frog. While he was
exploring the archipelago, he refined his
thoughts about evolution and had his
famous insight on natural selection. In 1858
he sent an article outlining his theory to
Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's own
theory, in the same year.
Return to England, marriage and children
While recovering from his travels Wallace organised his collections
and gave numerous lectures about his adventures and discoveries to
scientific societies such as the Zoological Society of London. Later
that year, he visited Charles Darwin at Down House, and became
friendly with both Charles Lyell and Herbert Spencer.
During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and gave lectures defending
natural selection. He also corresponded with Darwin about a variety
of topics, including warning colouration and the possible effect of
natural selection. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
In 1866, Wallace married Annie Mitten.
Wallace had been introduced to Mitten
through the botanist Richard Spruce, who had
befriended Wallace in Brazil and who was also
a good friend of Annie Mitten's
father, William Mitten, an expert on mosses.
In 1872, Wallace built the Dell, a house of
concrete, on land he leased in Greys in Essex,
where he lived until 1876. The Wallaces had
three children: Herbert (1867– 1874), Violet
(1869–1945), and William (1871–1951).
Financial Crisis
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was very concerned about the
financial security of his family. While he was in the Malay
Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought in a considerable
amount of money, which had been carefully invested by the agent
who sold the specimens for Wallace. However, on his return to the
UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines
that squandered most of the money, and he found himself badly in
need of the proceeds from the publication of The Malay
Archipelago.[36]
Despite assistance from his friends, he was never able to secure a
permanent salaried position such as a curatorship in a museum. To
remain financially solvent, Wallace worked grading government
examinations, wrote 25 papers for publication between 1872 and
1876 for various modest sums, and was paid by Lyell and Darwin to
help edit some of their own works.[37]
In 1876, Wallace needed a £500 advance from the publisher of The
Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of
his personal property. Darwin was very aware of Wallace's financial
difficulties and lobbied long and hard to get Wallace awarded a
government pension for his lifetime contributions to science. When
the £200 annual pension was awarded in 1881, it helped to stabilise
Wallace's financial position by supplementing the income from his
writings.
Social activism
John Stuart Mill was impressed by remarks criticising English
society that Wallace had included in The Malay
Archipelago. Mill asked him to join the general
committee of his Land Tenure Reform
Association, but the association dissolved after
Mill's death in 1873. Wallace had written only a
handful of articles on political and social issues
between 1873 and 1879 when, at the age of 56,
he entered the debates over trade policy
and land reform in earnest. He believed that
rural land should be owned by the state and
leased to people who would make whatever use
of it that would benefit the largest number of
people, thus breaking the often-abused power of wealthy landowners
in British society.
In 1881, Wallace was elected as the first president of the newly
formed Land Nationalisation Society. In the next year, he published
a book, Land Nationalisation; Its Necessity and Its Aims, on the
subject. He criticised the UK's free trade policies for the negative
impact they had on working-class people. In 1889, Wallace
read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and declared himself a
socialist, despite his earlier foray as a speculative investor.
[41] After reading Progress and Poverty, the bestselling book by the
progressive land reformist Henry George, Wallace described it as
"Undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the
present century."
Wallace opposed eugenics, an idea supported by other prominent
19th-century evolutionary thinkers, on the grounds that
contemporary society was too corrupt and unjust to allow any
reasonable determination of who was fit or unfit. In the 1890 article
"Human Selection" he wrote, "Those who succeed in the race for
wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent ..." In 1898,
Wallace wrote a paper advocating a pure paper money system, not
backed by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving
Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920 book Stabilizing the
Dollar to Wallace.
Wallace wrote on other social and political topics including his
support for women's suffrage, and repeatedly on the dangers and
wastefulness of militarism. In an essay published in 1899 Wallace
called for popular opinion to be rallied
against warfare by showing people:
"...that all modern wars are dynastic;
that they are caused by the ambition,
the interests, the jealousies, and the
insatiable greed of power of their
rulers, or of the great mercantile and
financial classes which have power and
influence over their rulers; and that the
results of war are never good for the
people, who yet bear all its
burthens". In a letter published by
the Daily Mail in 1909, with aviation in
its infancy, he advocated an
international treaty to ban the military
use of aircraft, arguing against the idea "...that this new horror is
"inevitable," and that all we can do is to be sure and be in the front
rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no other term can so fitly
describe the dropping of, say, ten thousand bombs at midnight into
an enemy's capital from an invisible flight of airships."
In 1898, Wallace published a book entitled The Wonderful Century:
Its Successes and Its Failures about developments in the 19th
century. The first part of the book covered the major scientific and
technical advances of the century; the second part covered what
Wallace considered to be its social failures including: the
destruction and waste of wars and arms races, the rise of the urban
poor and the dangerous conditions in which they lived and worked, a
harsh criminal justice system that failed to reform criminals, abuses
in a mental health system based on privately owned sanatoriums, the
environmental damage caused by capitalism, and the evils of
European colonialism. Wallace continued his social activism for the
rest of his life, publishing the book The Revolt of Democracy just
weeks before his death.
Further scientific work
Wallace continued his scientific work in parallel with his social
commentary. In 1880, he published Island Life as a sequel to The
Geographic Distribution of Animals. In
November 1886, Wallace began a ten-month
trip to the United States to give a series of
popular lectures. Most of the lectures were
on Darwinism (evolution through natural
selection), but he also gave speeches
on biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-
economic reform. During the trip, he also
spent a week in Colorado, with the American
botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide,
exploring the flora of the Rocky
Mountains and gathering evidence that would
lead him to a theory on was reunited with his
brother John who had emigrated to
California years before. He how glaciation might explain certain
commonalities between the mountain flora of Europe, Asia and North
America, which he published in 1891 in the paper "English and
American Flowers". He met many other prominent American
naturalists and viewed their collections. His 1889
book Darwinism used information he collected on his American trip,
and information he had compiled for the lectures.
The Race to the Post office
Wallace strongly supported the idea of Natural Selection, so he
wrote to Darwin about his ideas. Darwin, already having the idea of
writing a book about Natural Selection, thought that Wallace wanted
to copy his ideas, so he quickly wrote his book called “On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. He gave his book in to the
post office just before Wallace did. Charles Darwin got all the fame.
Death
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at home in the country house he
called Old Orchard, which he had built a decade earlier. He was 90
years old. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York
Times called him "the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful
group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley,
Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionised
and evolutionised the thought of the century." Another commentator
in the same edition said, "No apology need be made for the few
literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the
'Malay Archipelago'."
Wallace's grave in Broadstone Cemetery, Broadstone,
Dorset, which was restored by the A. R. Wallace Memorial
Fund in 2000. It features a 7-foot (2.1 m) tall fossil tree trunk from Portland mounted
on a block of Purbeck limestone.
