Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Wallace, Alfred Russel
WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL (1823–1913), naturalist, was born 8 January 1823, at Usk, Monmouthshire. He was the third son and seventh of the eight children of Thomas Vere Wallace, by his wife, Mary Anne Greenell. The father, a dabbler in many subjects but master of none, had lost most of his money in a literary venture. Alfred Wallace was educated at the grammar school at Hertford, whither the family had moved in 1828, and acted as pupil-teacher there from 1836 to 1837. His tastes were those of the average intelligent boy. He was fond of reading and of making toys and mechanical devices, two traits which, in his own opinion, were of importance to his later life. When fourteen he left school, joined his brother William in London, and set himself to learn surveying with him. In connexion with the practical work of surveying he also learnt the rudiments of geology. A year later (1838) he went to live as apprentice with a watchmaker named Matthews at Leighton Buzzard, and would probably have settled down in that business had not William Wallace been enabled to take Alfred with him to Herefordshire in 1839 to help in his surveying work. Here Alfred became interested in astronomy, in agriculture, and particularly in botany and in botanical problems, such as that of a natural classification. About 1843 he began the valuable practice of systematizing his ideas on subjects which interested him by writing them down. In that year his father died; and in 1844, his brother's prospects not being good, he became a master at the collegiate school at Leicester. Here he read much and conducted experiments in hypnotism. One set of experiments in what he called ‘phreno-mesmerism’ is of considerable interest, although the phenomena seem more likely to shed light on suggestion and telepathy than on phrenology. Here also—a turning-point in his career—he made the acquaintance of Henry Walter Bates [q.v.], the naturalist, by whom he was introduced to the science of entomology; and he read Malthus On Population, a book which for him, as for Darwin, was one of the foundations for the theory of natural selection.
In 1846 William Wallace unexpectedly died. Alfred left the collegiate school in order to take up his brother's work, finding plenty of well-paid employment in connexion with the railway mania. After a short interlude at Neath, where he was joined by his brother John, and added building and architectural designing to his other work, and also gave his first public lecture, he suggested to Bates that they should join forces for a collecting trip on the Amazon. Expenses were to be defrayed by the sale of specimens. Bates agreed, and they sailed in April 1848. In March 1850 they parted company, Wallace remaining four years in all, Bates returning after a stay of no less than eleven years. In 1849 Wallace was joined by his younger brother Herbert, who, however, died of yellow fever in 1851. Wallace tells us that the three things which impressed him most in the Amazons were the majesty and variety of the equatorial forest, the beauty and strangeness of the butterflies and birds, and the contact with savage man—a contact which had made a deep impression on Darwin also. During the return voyage the ship was destroyed by fire. The ship's company, after ten days in open boats, were rescued; but all of Wallace's collections and notes which had not previously been sent home were lost—a circumstance which, he wrote in his old age, was of great service to him in the long run, as it stimulated him later to visit the Malay Archipelago. On his return he settled in London to work out his collections. He became a regular attendant at scientific meetings, and made the acquaintance of many notable men of science.
In 1854, having satisfied himself that the Malay Archipelago offered the richest field for a collector, Wallace set off thither by himself, on a voyage which lasted no less than eight years. He visited every important island in the group, often more than once, and became fascinated both by the practical and by the theoretical side of the work. When urged by his brother-in-law, in 1859, to return to England, he answered that he had set himself to work out ‘the whole problem’ of the Archipelago, and would not think of coming home before he had done so to his satisfaction. One of his most interesting discoveries was that the Archipelago is divided zoologically into two very distinct regions by the narrow but deep strait between Bali and Lombok (now known as ‘Wallace's Line’); the western area is Oriental in the character of its fauna, the eastern, Australasian. In 1855 he published his first contribution to the species problem, an Essay on the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species, in which he laid down the evolutionary conclusion that ‘every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely-allied species’. He gradually became a convinced evolutionist; but it was not till 1858, during an attack of fever at Ternate, in the Moluccas, that the idea of natural selection as the solution of the method of evolution flashed upon him, and he thought it out in the course of a few hours. The next two days he spent in writing down his views and sending them to Darwin. Darwin was fourteen years his senior, and a man of established reputation, whereas Wallace was a young collector with his reputation still to make. The result, a monument to the natural generosity of both the great biologists, was the famous joint paper at the Linnaean Society on 1 July 1858, in which the modern theory of evolution was first given to the world. Darwin had been working privately on the identical theme for years, but insisted on this joint publication; while Wallace, who might have raised a technical claim to priority as having been the first to write out his views for publication, never dreamt of such a procedure [see Darwin, Charles Robert]. In 1860 he obtained a copy of the Origin of Species, and read it five or six times, ‘each time with increasing admiration’. He felt that Darwin had done the work as well as it could be done, and wrote to Bates to say how thankful he was that Darwin and not himself had been called upon to set forth the theory in detail. However, he later did great service to the cause of evolution by his lucid volume, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870).
Early in 1862 Wallace left Singapore for England, bringing with him the first birds of paradise to reach Europe alive. He again settled down in London to work out the huge private collections which remained in his hands, even after the rest had been sold to such good purpose that the money when invested brought him in about £300 a year. He gradually turned from purely systematic description to the broader problems of evolution and geographical distribution; and in 1869 published what is perhaps his most important book, the great work on The Malay Archipelago, a magnificent combination of interesting sketches of travel and vivid pictures of natural history, together with a discussion of the great generalizations of evolutionary biology.
In 1863 Wallace became engaged to be married, but, to his great pain, the lady broke off the match. In 1866 he married Mary, the eldest daughter of William Mitten, of Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, a botanist friend, and embarked upon a long and happy married life. They had two children, a son and a daughter.
During his two periods of life in London Wallace made many friends and acquaintances, scientific and otherwise, among whom were Darwin, Lyell, Huxley, Tyndall, Mivart, W. B. Carpenter, Herbert Spencer, Wheatstone, and Lecky. He also interested himself in various outstanding social questions, especially land nationalization. During the next few years he was a candidate for the posts of assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, director of the Bethnal Green museum, and superintendent of Epping Forest, which had just been acquired for the public; but in every case without success. He was now in the prime of his powers, and in 1876 published another first-class work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals.
In 1871, seized with a desire for country life, Wallace had moved to Grays in Essex. But he was never long in one place. He moved again to Croydon in 1876, to Dorking in 1878, to Godalming in 1881, to Parkstone in 1889, and finally, in 1902, to Broadstone, near Wimborne. In the late 'seventies he had lost most of his money through speculation and very injudicious investments, but in 1881, largely through the influence of Darwin and Huxley, he was granted a Civil List pension of £200. In the same year he became president of the newly-formed Land Nationalization Society. In 1886 he spent nearly a year on a lecturing tour in the United States. On his return, stimulated by the success of a lecture on Darwin's views, he wrote the excellent semi-popular work entitled Darwinism, which was published in 1889.
For the next few years Wallace gave up public lecturing and devoted himself chiefly to the writing of articles on every kind of scientific and social subject. In 1898 he published The Wonderful Century, a resumé of human progress in the nineteenth century. Another work, entitled Man's Place in the Universe (1903), embodied his belief that life could have developed only once in the cosmos, a belief based upon the then generally accepted statement that the solar system was near the centre of the visible universe. In 1905 he published his autobiography, My Life, a very detailed two-volume work. He died at Broadstone, Dorset, 7 November 1913, aged ninety. Much of his peaceful and happy old age was devoted to gardening.
Wallace will chiefly be remembered as a great naturalist who was also an evolutionist. He was not a trained anatomist or physiologist, nor had he the prodigious range of tested knowledge which Darwin amassed. But he was an indefatigable collector, both of specimens and of facts; and he thought about what he collected with originality and vigour. Of his services to biology, not the least was the wealth of material which he sent back during his eight years in the Malay Archipelago. On the theoretical side, his most famous achievement was his independent discovery of the principle of natural selection as a key to the method of evolution. This alone would give him a permanent place in the history of thought. But further, it was he who first called attention to the importance of many colours and markings of animals for purposes of recognition at a distance—a very fruitful idea; he pointed out an important correlation between nesting-site and brilliancy of coloration in female birds; he also amplified and strengthened the theory of warning coloration and mimicry. He was an unsparing critic of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, but on illogical and insufficient grounds; his own theory of ‘male vigour’ as the cause of brighter male plumage has little to recommend it. He came to reject the whole of the Lamarckian element in Darwin's views, and, with August Weismann, became one of the apostles of the neo-Darwinian movement.
Wallace's most solid work was, perhaps, that on geographical distribution. Here he strengthened with various new arguments J. D. Dana's principle of the permanence of the great ocean basins; pointed out how dispersal of temperate and Arctic faunas could take place even across the tropics along mountain-chains; laid stress on the cumulative effect of snow-fall and ice-accumulation in accentuating the temperature changes which led to glacial epochs; and was emphatic in support of a single system of zoo-geographical regions for the distribution of all groups of animals. His zoo-geographical work was fundamental for all subsequent investigations in this field. He himself expressed the hope that his book on the geographical distribution of animals might bear ‘a similar relation to the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the Origin of Species as Mr. Darwin's Animals And Plants under Domestication bears to the first’—a hope which has been fully justified.
As regards human evolution, Wallace was the first to point out explicitly that from an early period in man's evolutionary history, natural selection would act chiefly upon the mind, not on the body, and that therefore we should not expect further physical evolution in the human species. He also advanced some interesting observations concerning what he called ‘mouth-gesture’ in relation to the origin of language, extending the principle of onomatopoeia to great lengths.
On many other matters of scientific opinion Wallace took up a very unorthodox position. He was a convinced phrenologist, anti-vaccinationist, and spiritualist, and believed that natural evolution, while it would account for the development of man's body, must have been supplemented by a supernatural intervention to produce his soul. In politics also he was unorthodox. His socialism was highly theoretical, and his views on land nationalization extreme. A vegetarian ‘in principle,’ he found that a meat diet agreed best with him. His zeal for demonstrating scientific truth once cost him a considerable sum of money and still more vexation. In 1870 a certain Mr. J. Hampden offered £500 to any one who could prove that the earth was round. Wallace took up the challenge, and an experiment was carried out on the Bedford levels. After much dispute the stakes were awarded to Wallace; but owing to technicalities connected with the law on betting Hampden recovered the money. Not content with this, he pursued Wallace in public and private with the most violent and scurrilous invective for nearly twenty years, in spite of being twice sent to jail.
Wallace was a modest man, with a kindly nature. This showed itself in the active interest he would take in the views and plans of younger naturalists; and, together with his strong sense of justice, led him to undertake his various social crusades. It has been said that he combined the most remarkable shrewdness in dealing with natural history, with an equal credulity in dealing with his fellowmen; and, although this statement is exaggerated, there is some truth in it. There was a certain element of the crank in him; but, when he was handling the facts of nature and the ample speculations of evolutionary theory, this could not show itself; and his fondness for nature, his industry, his zeal, his love both of detailed fact and of broad generalization, and his very considerable abilities, here could find their proper scope, with the result that his name will be permanently as long as the theory of evolution is discussed.
Wallace was awarded the first Darwin medal of the Royal Society in 1890; he had received the royal medal in 1868. He held the honorary degrees of LL.D. of Dublin University (1882) and D.C.L. of Oxford (1889). The order of merit was bestowed on him in 1910.
Wallace was the author of the following works, besides numerous scientific papers: Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853), Palm Trees of the Amazon (1853), The Malay Archipelago (1869), Natural Selection (1870), On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1875, new edition 1896), The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), Tropical Nature (1878), Island Life (1880), Land Nationalization (1882), Bad Times (1885), Darwinism (1889), Vaccination, a Delusion (1898), The Wonderful Century (1898, new edition 1903), Studies, Scientific and Social (1900), Man's Place in the Universe (1903), My Life, an Autobiography (1905), Is Mars Habitable? (1907), The World of Life (1910), and Social Environment and Moral Progress (1912).
[Wallace's My Life; Introduction (by G. T. Bettany) to Wallace's Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 1889; Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xcv, B, 1923–1924 (with portrait).]