A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro/Introduction
BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION.
(BY THE EDITOR.)
MR. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, the co-discoverer with Mr. Darwin of the principle of natural selection as the main agent in the evolution of species, has in his published works travelled over a much more diversified range of subjects than Mr. Darwin. To books of travel, of philosophical and of systematic natural history, he has added others dealing with the causes of depression of trade, proposing land nationalisation, defending belief in miracles and in modern spiritualism, and attacking vaccination. Although it would not be right here to enter into a criticism of such controversial works, enough may be said to indicate that their author, admittedly a master-mind in regard to the philosophy and the details of evolution, is widely qualified in regard to political and social questions.
Born at Usk in Monmouthshire on the 8th of January, 1823, and educated at Hertford Grammar School, the future adventurous traveller early became a voyager on a small scale, during his residence with an elder brother, a land surveyor and architect. From 1836 to 1848 while so occupied he resided in various parts of England and Wales, and acquired some knowledge of agriculture and of the social and economic conditions of the labouring classes. While living in South Wales, about 1840, he first turned his attention to natural history, devoting all his spare time to collecting and preserving the native plants, and eagerly reading books of travel. While residing at Leicester in 1844-5 (as an English master in the Collegiate School), he made the acquaintance of Mr. H. W. Bates, an ardent entomologist, and when, some years later, the desire to visit tropical countries became too strong to be resisted, he proposed to Mr. Bates a joint expedition to the Amazons, one of the objects, in addition to the collection of natural history specimens, being to gather facts, as Mr. Wallace expressed it in one of his letters to Mr. Bates, "towards solving the problem of the origin of species," a subject on which they had already conversed and corresponded extensively. The two friends met in London early in 1848 to study the collections of South American animals and plants already there; and they embarked at Liverpool in a small trading vessel on the 2oth of April, 1848, reaching the mouth of the Amazons just a month later. From this date the present volume speaks for itself. We will merely note that Mr. Bates took a different route of exploration from Mr. Wallace from March 1850; he remained seven years longer in the country, and in 1863 published his most attractive "Naturalist on the Amazons."
Mr. Wallace's travels on the Rio Negro and to the upper waters of the Orinoco, his adventurous ascent of the rapid river Uaupés, his observations on the natural history and the native tribes of the Amazon valley, are simply and naturally recorded in this volume. His assemblage of facts will be seen to form a broad basis for induction as to causes and modes of transformation of species. His return voyage bade fair to be his last, for the vessel in which he sailed took fire, and was completely destroyed, with a large proportion of Mr. Wallace's live animals and valuable specimens. Ten anxious days had to be spent in boats, tortured not only by shortness of food but by remembrances of the dangers encountered in obtaining valued specimens, now irretrievably lost. It was only after an eighty days' voyage that Mr. Wallace landed at Deal on the 18th of October, 1852. His "Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro," published in the autumn of 1853, had an excellent reception, and after disposing of the collections which had been sent home previous to his return Mr. Wallace started for another tropical region, the Malay archipelago.
From July 1854, when he arrived in Singapore, to the early part of 1862, Mr.Wallace travelled many thousand miles, mostly in regions little explored before, especially for natural history purposes. Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Timor, Celebes, the Moluccas, the Aru and Ké islands, and even New Guinea were visited, some more than once, and long sojourns were made in the most interesting regions. Even those who have read his delightful "Malay Archipelago," first published in 1860, cannot know all the treasures given to science by Mr. Wallace's eight years' expatriation, for before writing his travels he had contributed no fewer than eighteen papers to the transactions or journals of the Linnean, Zoological, and Entomological Societies, and twelve articles to various scientific periodicals, while in his subsequent volumes on "Natural Selection," 187 1, his monumental work on the "Geographical Distribution of Animals," 1876, on "Tropical Nature," 1878, and on "Island Life," 1880, he laid open still more fully his accumulations of travel and thought in both hemispheres. One of the most valuable results of his travels in Malaysia was the establishment of a line dividing the archipelago into two main groups, Indo-Malaysia and Austro-Malaysia, marked by peculiar species and groups of animals. This line, now everywhere known as Wallace's line, is marked by a deep sea belt between Celebes and Borneo, and Lombok and Bali respectively; and it is curious that a similar line, but somewhat further east, divides on the whole the Malay from the Papuan races of man. The new facts on butterflies, on birds of paradise, on mimicry between various animals and plants, and on the Malay and Papuan races are only a few of the subjects of intense interest illuminated by Mr. Wallace as the result of his travels in Malaysia.
In a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for September, 1855, "On the Law that has regulated the Introduction of New Species," Mr. Wallace had already drawn the conclusion that every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. In the same paper is a brief expression of the idea which Mr. Darwin expanded into one of his fine passages comparing all members of the same class of beings to a great tree. The varied facts of the distribution of animal and plant life, set forth and explained in this paper, foreshadow the author's future great work on the subject. Mr. Darwin, already an observer and student of long standing on the question of the origin of species, had noted this paper and agreed to the truth of almost every word of it. In October 1856, Mr. Wallace wrote to Mr. Darwin from Celebes, and in replying to his letter Mr. Darwin, on May Ist, 1857, said he could plainly see that they had thought much alike, and had to a certain extent come to similar conclusions; and later in the same year he wrote to Mr. Wallace, "I infinitely admire and honour your zeal and courage in the good cause of Natural Science."
In February 1858 Mr. Wallace wrote an essay at Ternate, "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original Type," which proved to be the proximate cause of the publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species." The manuscript of this paper was sent to Mr. Darwin, and reached him on June 18th, 1858, and the views it expressed coincided remarkably with those developed in Mr. Darwin's mind by many different lines of investigation. He proposed to get Mr. Wallace's consent to publish it as soon as possible; but on the urgent persuasion of Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, a joint communication of some extracts from a manuscript written by Mr. Darwin in 1839—1844, and a letter written by him to Professor Asa Gray of Boston, U.S., in 1857, together with Mr. Wallace's paper, was made to the Linnean Society on July Ist, 1858. As Sir Joseph Hooker wrote, "The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring;" and there was no attempt at discussion. The further history of the "Origin of Species" controversy is well known, and has previously been sketched in the first volume of this library. ihat deserves repeating and emphasizing is that Mr. Wallace must rank as a completely independent and original discoverer of the essential feature of the "Origin of Species." Mr. Wallace originally termed his view one of progression and continued divergence. «This progression," he wrote in the Linnean essay, "by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit." Nothing in scientific history. is more interesting or more admirable than the way in which the two great discoverers in biological evolution fully admired and recognized each other's independent work; and continued their intercourse through life untinged by any shadow of unworthy feeling. Mr. Darwin wrote to Mr Wallace on January 25th, 1859, " Most cordially do I wish you health and entire success in all your pursuits, and, God knows, if admirable zeal and energy deserve success, most amply do you deserve it;" and in 1876 he wrote to him, "You have paid me the highest conceivable compliment by what you say of your work in relation to my chapters on distribution in the 'Origin,' and I heartily thank you for it."
In one important point Mr. Wallace early found himself in divergence from Mr. Darwin. 'This was as to the limits of natural selection as applied to man. Mr. Darwin saw no reason to imagine a break or a new force or kind of action in regard to the development of man, and especially of his brain and mind; while Mr. Wallace, from the belief that savage man possesses a brain too large for his actual requirements, from the absence of a general hairy covering in lower men, from the difficulty of conceiving the origin of some of man's physical and mental faculties by natural selection, and from the nature of the moral sense, came to the conclusion that a superior intelligence, acting nevertheless through natural and universal laws, has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose.
This divergence of view from that of Darwinism pure and simple may be interestingly illustrated from an autobiographical passage in Mr. Wallace's Essays "On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," 1881. He says: "From the age of fourteen I lived with an elder brother, of advanced liberal and philosophical opinions, and I soon lost (and have never since regained) all capacity of being affected in my judgments, either by clerical influence or religious prejudice. Up to the time when I first became acquainted with the facts of spiritualism, I was a confirmed philosophical sceptic, rejoicing in the works of Voltaire, Strauss, and Carl Vogt, and an ardent admirer (as I am still) of Herbert Spencer. I was so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other agencies in the universe than matter and force. Facts, however, are stubborn things. My curiosity was at first excited by some Slight but inexplicable phenomena occurring in a friend's family, and my desire for knowledge and love of truth forced me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed from anything that modern science taught, or modern philosophy speculated on. The facts beat me." By slow degrees he came to believe in the existence of a number of preterhuman intelligences of various grades, and that some of these, though invisible and intangible to us, can and do act on matter and influence our minds. He was thus led to attack the à priori arguments against miracles, and to believe that many of the so-called spiritualistic phenomena are genuine and occasioned by. unseen beings. He further championed spiritualism as teaching valuable moral lessons, and leading to moral and spiritual improvement, when rightly followed out. Here he claims that he does not depart in any way from scientific principle. "The cardinal maxim of spiritualism," he says, "is that every one must find out the truth for himself. It makes no claim to be received on hearsay evidence; but on the other hand it demands that it be not rejected without patient, honest, and fearless inquiry."
In yet another field Mr. Wallace has proved himself a bold originator. His early gained knowledge of land-tenure and the condition of tenants and labourers gave him an experience which with riper years produced the conviction that there was no way to remedy the evils resulting from landlordism but the adoption of a properly guarded system of occupying ownership under the State as landlord. He has endeavoured to show the necessity and the practicability of his views in his work entitled "Land Nationalisation, its Necessity and its Aims," first published in 1882. In a third edition he has added an appendix on the nationalisation of house property, the State being destined, he believes, to become sole ground landlord. A later work of his on "Bad Times," 1885, is an essay on the then existing depression of trade, tracing it to the evils caused by great foreign loans, excessive war expenditure, the increase of speculation, and of millionaires, and the depopulation of the rural districts. Among other remedies he is strongly in favour of the increase of labourers' allotments, and of personal culture of the land by the occupier. In the same year his zeal and fearlessness in championing causes which he identifies with that of liberty, were exhibited in a pamphlet entitled "Forty-five Years of Registration Statistics," in which he sought to prove vaccination both useless and dangerous. Beside all this, Mr. Wallace has been a frequent contributor to scientific transactions, and to the leading magazines and reviews. Finally, this year he has produced a standard work on "Darwinism," which is the most perfect as well as the most readable form in which the subject has yet been presented.
Such worthy work has not been without recognition. Mr. Wallace was awarded in 1868 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society for his many contributions to theoretical and practical zoology, among which his discussion of the conditions which have determined the distribution of animals in the Malay archipelago, as well as his writings on the origin of species, found prominent mention. In 1870, he received the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of Paris. In 1876 he was President of the Biological Section at the Glasgow meeting of the British Association. After the publication of his work on land nationalisation a Land Nationalisation Society was formed, of which Mr. Wallace is President. In 188 he was awarded a Civil List pension of £200 a year, in recognition of the amount and value of his scientific work; and in 1882 the University of Dublin conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D.
On all occasions Mr. Wallace has persistently exalted Mr. Darwin's work, and, comparatively speaking, made light of his own. Full well may we say with Mr. Darwin, "You are the only man I ever heard of who persistently does himself an injustice, and never demands justice. But you cannot burke yourself, however much you may try." The intelligent minds which honour the name of Darwin, will not forget to honour that of his fellow-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace.