successor, Lord Bristol, contain many references to Wall. They are creditable to him. Though a constant partisan of peace and good relations with England, Wall was firm in asserting the rights of the government he served. During the early stages of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) he insisted on claiming compensation for the excesses of English privateers in Spanish waters. He frequently complained to the English ministers of the difficulties which the violence of these adventurers put in his way. As a foreigner he was suspected of undue favour to England, and was the object of incessant attacks by the French party. The new king, Charles III. (1759-1788), continued Wall in office. When war was declared by Spain in 1761 the minister carried out the policy of the king; but he confessed to the English ambassador, Lord Bristol, that he saw the failure of his efforts to preserve peace with grief. The close relations of Charles III. with the French branch of the House of Bourbon made Wall's position as foreign minister very trying. Yet the king, who detested changing his ministers, refused all his requests to be allowed to retire, till Wall extorted leave in 1764 by elaborately affecting a disease of the eyes which was in fact imaginary. The king gave him handsome allowances, and a grant for life of the crown land known as the Soto de Roma, near Granada, which was afterwards conferred on Godoy, and finally given to the duke of Wellington. Wall lived almost wholly at or near Granada, exercising a plentiful hospitality to all visitors, and particularly to English travellers, till his death in 1778. He left the reputation of an able minister and a very witty talker.
A full account will be found in volume iv. of Coxe's Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon (London, 1815). Further details of his early career can be gathered from the Diario del viaje a Moscovia, 1727-1730, of the duke of Liria (vol. xciii. of the Documentos inéditos para la historia de España), (Madrid, 1842, et seq.).
WALL (O. Eng. weal, weall, Mid. Eng. wal, walle, adapted from Lat. vallum, rampart; the original O. Eng. word for a wall was wág or wáh), a solid structure of stone, brick or other material, used as a defensive, protecting, enclosing or dividing fence, or as the enclosing and supporting sides of a building, house or room. The Roman vallum was an earth rampart with stakes or palisades (vallus, stake; Gr. ἧλος, nail) and the Old English word was particularly applied to such earth walls; for the remains of the Roman walls in Britain see Britain. The word, however, was also applied to stone defensive walls, for which the Latin word was murus. The history of the wall as a means of defence will be found in the article Fortification and Siegecraft, the architectural and constructional side under the headings Architecture, Masonry and Brickwork. In anatomy and zoology the term “wall,” and also the Latin term paries, is used for an investing or enclosing structure, as in “cell-walls,” walls of the abdomen, &c. In the days when footpaths were narrow and ill-paved or non-existent in the streets of towns and when the gutters were often overflowing with water and filth, the side nearest to the wall of the bordering houses was safest and cleanest, and hence to walk on that side was a privilege, hence the expressions “to take” or “to give the wall.” The term “wall-rib” is given in architecture to a half-rib bedded in the wall, to carry the web or shell of the vault. In Roman and in early Romanesque work the web was laid on the top of the stone courses of the wall, which had been cut to the arched form, but as this was often irregularly done, and as sometimes the courses had sunk owing to the drying of the mortar, it was found better to provide an independent rib to carry the web; half of this rib was sunk in the wall and the other half moulded like the transverse and diagonal ribs, so that if the wall sank, or if it had to be taken down from any cause, the vault would still retain its position.
The word “wall eye” or “wall-eyed” is applied to a condition of the eye, particularly of a horse, in which there is a large amount of white showing or there is absence of colour in the iris, or there is leucoma of the cornea. It is also applied to the white staring eyes of certain fishes. The word has no connexion with “wall” as above, but is from the Icelandic vagleygr, vagl, a beam, sty in the eye, and eygr, eyed.
WALLABY, a native name, used in literature for any member of a section of the zoological genus Macropus, with naked muffle, frequenting forests and dense scrubs. With respect to their size they are distinguished as large wallabies and small wallabies, some of the latter being no bigger than a rabbit. From the localities in which they are found they are also called brush kangaroos. See Kangaroo.
WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL (1823–), British naturalist, was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the 8th of January 1823. After leaving school he assisted an elder brother in his work as a land surveyor and architect, visiting various parts of England and Wales. Living in South Wales, about 1840 he began to take an interest in botany, and began the formation of a herbarium. In 1847 he took his first journey out of England, spending a week in Paris with his brother and sister. In 1844–1845, while an English master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, he made the acquaintance of H. W. Bates, through whose influence he became a beetle collector, and with whom he started in 1848 on an expedition to the Amazon. In about a year the two naturalists separated, and each wrote an account of his travels and observations. Wallace's Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro was published in 1853, a year in which he went for a fortnight's walking tour in Switzerland with an old school-fellow. On his voyage home from South America the ship was burnt and all his collections lost, except those which he had despatched beforehand. After spending a year and a half in England, during which time, besides his book on the Amazon, he published a small volume on the Palm Trees of the Amazon, he started for the Malay Archipelago, exploring, observing and collecting from 1854 to 1862. He visited Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, Timor, New Guinea and the Aru and Ké Islands. His deeply interesting narrative, The Malay Archipelago, appeared in 1869, and he also published many important papers through the London scientific societies. The chief parts of his vast insect collections became the property of the late W. W. Saunders, but subsequently some of the most important groups passed into the Hope Collection of the university of Oxford and the British Museum. He discovered that the Malay Archipelago was divided into a western group of islands, which in their zoological affinities are Oriental, and an eastern, which are Australian. The Oriental Borneo and Bali are respectively divided from Celebes and Lombok by a narrow belt of sea known as “Wallace's Line,” on the opposite sides of which the indigenous mammalia are as widely divergent as in any two parts of the world. Wallace became convinced of the truth of evolution, and originated the theory of natural selection during these travels. In February 1855, staying at Sarawak, in Borneo, he wrote an essay “On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species” (Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., 1855, p. 184). He states the law as follows: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.” He justly claims that such a law connected and explained a vast number of independent facts. It was, in fact, a cautious statement of a belief in evolution, and for three years from the time that he wrote the essay he tells us that “the question of how changes of species could have been brought about was rarely out of my mind.” Finally, in February 1858, when he was lying muffled in blankets in the cold fit of a severe attack of intermittent fever at Ternate, in the Moluccas, he began to think of Malthus's Essay on Population, and, to use his own words, “there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest.” The theory was thought out during the rest of the ague fit, drafted the same evening, written out in full in the two succeeding evenings, and sent to Darwin by the next post. Darwin in England at once recognized his own theory in the manuscript essay sent by the young and almost unknown naturalist in the tropics, then a stranger to him. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote to Lyell on the very day, on the 18th of June, when he received the paper: “if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.” Under the advice of Sir Charles Lyell
