Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin’s writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.
Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of innovation through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published in imitation of some of Charles Darwin’s writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.
Like Darwin, Wallace did extensive fieldwork—first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two Definite parts: a western part in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century’s leading expert upon the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the “father of biogeography”.
Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the progress of evolutionary theory moreover being co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concepts of scolding colouration in animals, and reinforcement (sometimes known as the Wallace effect), a hypothesis upon how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the increase of barriers adjoining hybridisation. Wallace’s 1904 book Man’s area in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to consider the likelihood of life on other planets. He was then one of the first scientists to write a all-powerful exploration of the subject of whether there was life upon Mars.
Aside from scientific work, he was a social campaigner who was essential of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system (capitalism) in 19th-century Britain. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material line for the sophisticated mental faculties of humans strained his link with some members of the scientific establishment. His incorporation in natural history resulted in his monster one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns on peak of the environmental impact of human activity. He was then a prolific author who wrote upon both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and comments during his explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, was both popular and severely regarded. Since its revelation in 1869, it has never been out of print.
Alfred Russel Wallace was born upon 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire. He was the eighth of nine kids born to Mary Anne Wallace (née Greenell) and Thomas Vere Wallace. His mother was English, while his dad was probably of Scottish ancestry. His family, like many Wallaces, claimed a relationship to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century. Thomas graduated in play a part but never practised law. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family’s financial position. His mom was from a middle-class Hertford-based family. When Wallace was five years old, his relatives moved to Hertford. There he attended Hertford Grammar School until financial difficulties annoyed his relatives to desist him in 1836 later he was aged 14.
Wallace next moved to London to board in imitation of his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. This was a stopgap work until William, his oldest brother, was ready to take him on as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and right of entry books at the London Mechanics Institute (current Birkbeck, University of London). Here he was exposed to the advocate political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live considering William and act out as his apprentice for six years. At the fall of 1839, they moved to Kington, Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace did house surveying bill in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. By the stop of 1843, William’s thing had declined due to hard economic conditions, and Wallace, at the age of 20, left in January.
One repercussion of Wallace’s in the future travels is a militant controversy more or less his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh. However, some historians have questioned this because neither of his parents was Welsh, his family solitary briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because Wallace himself consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh (even behind writing virtually his get older in Wales). One Wallace scholar has declared that the most within your means interpretation is correspondingly that he was an Englishman born in Wales.
After a brief grow old of unemployment, he was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester to tutor drawing, mapmaking, and surveying. Wallace spent many hours at the library in Leicester: he read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, and one evening he met the entomologist Henry Bates. Bates was 19 years old, and in 1843 he had published a paper upon beetles in the journal Zoologist. He befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects. His brother William died in March 1845, and Wallace left his teaching point of view to agree to control of his brother’s supreme in Neath, but his brother John and he were unable to make the event work. After a few months, Wallace found measure as a civil engineer for a nearby final that was working upon a survey for a proposed railway in the Vale of Neath.
Wallace’s work upon the survey effective spending a lot of get older outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to indulge his further passion for collecting insects. Wallace persuaded his brother John to member 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 manage to pay for lectures there on science and engineering. In the autumn of 1846, John and he purchased a cottage near Neath, where they lived considering their mom and sister Fanny (his daddy had died in 1843).
During this period, he way in avidly, exchanging letters with Bates virtually Robert Chambers’ anonymously published evolutionary treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology.
Inspired by the records of earlier and contemporary travelling naturalists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Ida Laura Pfeiffer, Charles Darwin and especially William Henry Edwards, Wallace fixed that he too wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist. In 1848, Wallace and Henry Bates left for Brazil aboard the Mischief. Their plan was to amassed insects and extra animal specimens in the Amazon Rainforest for their private collections, selling the duplicates to museums and collectors back up in Britain in order to fund the trip. Wallace furthermore hoped to assemble evidence of the transmutation of species.
Wallace and Bates spent most of their first year collecting close Belém, then explored inland separately, occasionally meeting to discuss their findings. In 1849, they were briefly associated by another juvenile explorer, botanist Richard Spruce, along past Wallace’s younger brother Herbert. Herbert left soon thereafter (dying two years later from orangey fever), but Spruce, like Bates, would spend greater than ten years collecting in South America.
Wallace continued charting the Rio Negro for four years, collecting specimens and making notes upon the peoples and languages he encountered as capably as the geography, flora, and fauna. On 12 July 1852, Wallace embarked for the UK upon the brig Helen. After 25 days at sea, the ship’s cargo caught blaze and the crew was annoyed 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 keep a few remarks and pencil sketches and Tiny else.
Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open ship before swine picked up by the brig Jordeson, which was sailing from Cuba to London. The Jordeson’s provisions were strained by the immediate passengers, but after a hard passage upon very rushed rations the ship finally reached its destination on 1 October 1852.
After his compensation to the UK, Wallace spent 18 months in London living upon the insurance payment for his lost store and selling a few specimens that had been shipped incite to Britain prior to his starting his exploration of the Rio Negro until the Indian town of Jativa on Orinoco River basin and as far afield west as Micúru (Mitú) on the Vaupés River. He was extremely impressed by the grandeur of the virgin forest, by the variety and beauty of the butterflies and birds, and by his first war with Indians on the Vaupés River area, an experience he never forgot. During this period, despite having aimless almost anything 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 upon the Amazon. He along with made connections with a number of extra British naturalists.
From 1854 to 1862, age 31 to 39, Wallace travelled through the Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia), to comprehensive specimens for sale and to psychotherapy 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. Among these, his most trusted accomplice was a Malay by the publicize of Ali who forward-thinking called himself Ali Wallace. While Wallace collected insects, many of the bird specimens were collected by his assistants including concerning 5000 collected and prepared by Ali. Wallace’s remarks 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 beyond 125,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago (more than 83,000 beetles alone). Several thousand of them represented species other to science. One of his better-known species descriptions during this vacation is that of the gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, known as Wallace’s carried by the wind frog. While he was exploring the archipelago, he refined his thoughts about encroachment 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 checking account of Darwin’s own theory, in the same year.
Accounts of his studies and adventures there were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago, which became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century, and has never been out of print. It was praised by scientists such as Darwin (to whom the baby book was dedicated), and Charles Lyell, and by non-scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad, who called it his “favorite bedside companion” and used it as source of counsel for several of his novels, especially Lord Jim.
In 1862, Wallace returned to England, where he moved in behind his sister Fanny Sims and her husband Thomas. While recovering from his travels, Wallace organised his collections and gave numerous lectures practically his adventures and discoveries to scientific societies such as the Zoological Society of London. Later that year, he visited 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 then corresponded afterward Darwin about a variety of topics, including sexual selection, warning colouration, and the feasible effect of natural selection upon hybridisation and the divergence of species. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
After a year of courtship, Wallace became engaged in 1864 to a young girl whom, in his autobiography, he would forlorn identify as Miss L. Miss L. was the daughter of Lewis Leslie who played chess similar to Wallace. However, to Wallace’s good dismay, she broke off the engagement. 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 after that a good buddy of Annie Mitten’s father, William Mitten, an expert upon mosses. In 1872, Wallace built the Dell, a home of concrete, on land he leased in Grays in Essex, where he lived until 1876. The Wallaces had three children: Herbert (1867–1874), Violet (1869–1945), and William (1871–1951).
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was agreed concerned very nearly 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 intentionally invested by the agent who sold the specimens for Wallace. However, on his compensation to the UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines that squandered most of the money, and he found himself terribly in infatuation of the proceeds from the message of The Malay Archipelago.
Despite instruction from his friends, he was never accomplished to safe a unshakable salaried perspective such as a curatorship in a museum. To remain financially solvent, Wallace worked grading doling out 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.
In 1876, Wallace needed a £500 sustain from the publisher of The Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of his personal property. Darwin was unquestionably aware of Wallace’s financial difficulties and lobbied long and difficult to gain Wallace awarded a direction pension for his lifetime contributions to science. When the £200 annual allowance was awarded in 1881, it helped to stabilise Wallace’s financial slant by supplementing the allowance from his writings.
John Stuart Mill was impressed by clarification criticising English help that Wallace had included in The Malay Archipelago. Mill asked him to link the general committee of his Land Tenure Reform Association, but the attachment dissolved after Mill’s death in 1873. Wallace had written only a handful of articles upon political and social issues amongst 1873 and 1879 when, at the age of 56, he entered the debates higher than trade policy and land reform in earnest. He believed that rural estate should be owned by the confess and leased to people who would make anything use of it that would pro the largest number of people, thus breaking the often-abused aptitude 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 pardon trade policies for the negative impact they had upon working-class people. In 1889, Wallace read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and stated himself a socialist, despite his earlier foray as a studious investor. After reading Progress and Poverty, the best selling cassette by the progressive home reformist Henry George, Wallace described it as “Undoubtedly the most remarkable and important CD of the present century.”
Wallace opposed eugenics, an idea supported by other prominent 19th-century evolutionary thinkers, on the grounds that contemporary organization was too corrupt and unjust to permit any within your means determination of who was fit or unfit. In the 1890 article “Human Selection” he wrote, “Those who succeed in the race for large quantity are by no means the best or the most intelligent …” In 1898, Wallace wrote a paper advocating a truth paper maintenance 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 upon other social and diplomatic topics including his maintain for women’s suffrage, and repeatedly upon the dangers and wastefulness of militarism. In an essay published in 1899 Wallace called for popular counsel to be rallied against warfare by showing people: “…that everything modern wars are dynastic; that they are caused by the ambition, the interests, the jealousies, and the insatiable greed of capacity of their rulers, or of the good mercantile and financial classes which have faculty and influence beyond their rulers; and that the results of warfare are never good for the people, who still bear all its burthens”. In a letter published by the Daily Mail in 1909, with aviation in its infancy, he advocated an international pact to ban the military use of aircraft, arguing adjoining the idea “…that this additional horror is “inevitable,” and that everything we can attain is to be positive and performance the belly rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no additional term can correspondingly 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 wedding album entitled The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures about developments in the 19th century. The first allocation of the baby book covered the major scientific and technical advances of the century; the second ration covered what Wallace considered to be its social failures including: the destruction and waste of wars and arms races, the rise of the urban destitute and the dangerous conditions in which they lived and worked, a prickly criminal justice system that futile 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 get off of his life, publishing the book The Revolt of Democracy just weeks past his death.
Wallace continued his scientific play a part in parallel afterward 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 allow a series of popular lectures. Most of the lectures were upon Darwinism (evolution through natural selection), but he plus gave speeches upon biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-economic reform. During the trip, he was reunited in the same way as his brother John who had emigrated to California years before. He plus spent a week in Colorado, with the American botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide, exploring the flora of the Rocky Mountains and increase evidence that would gain him to a theory upon 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 supplementary prominent American naturalists and viewed their collections. His 1889 book Darwinism used instruction he collected on his American vacation and guidance he had compiled for the lectures.
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at house 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 fantastic group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose exciting investigations revolutionised and evolutionised the thought of the century.” Another affix in the same edition said: “No apology obsession be made for the few college or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the ‘Malay Archipelago’.”
Some of Wallace’s links suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and had him buried in the small cemetery at Broadstone, Dorset. Several prominent British scientists formed a committee to have a medallion of Wallace placed in Westminster Abbey close where Darwin had been buried. The medallion was unveiled upon 1 November 1915.