Alfred Russel Wallace

“ The plains are always more thickly peopled than the forest; and a temperate zone, as has been pointed out by Mr. Darwin, seems better adapted to the support of large land animals than the tropics."
We have already referred to the fact that at the very early age of 14 Wallace had imbibed his first ideas of Socialism, or how the "commonwealth" of a people or nation was the outcome of cause and effect, largely due to the form of government, political economy and progressive commerce best suited to any individual State or country. ”

“ Early in 1844 another break occurred, due to the sudden falling off of land surveying as a profitable business. His brother could no longer afford to keep him as assistant, finding it indeed difficult to obtain sufficient employment for himself. As Wallace knew no other trade or profession, the only course which occurred to his mind as possible by which to earn a living was to get a post as school teacher.
After one or two rather amusing experiences, he eventually found himself in very congenial surroundings under the Rev. Abraham Hill, headmaster of the Collegiate School at Leicester. ”

“ Wallace lived at Broadstone, the last decade, when he was between eighty and ninety years of age, this period seems to have been one of the most eventful, and as full of work and mental activity as any previous period. He never tired of his garden, in which he succeeded in growing a number of rare and curious shrubs and plants. ”

“ Henry Forbes in a note to the Editor writes: "In his 'Island Life' Wallace extended his philosophical observations to a wider field, and it is in philosophical biology that Wallace's name must stand pre-eminent for all time." "In our own science of biology," say Profs. Geddes and Thomson in a recent work, "we may recall the 'Grand Old Men,' surely second to none in history—Darwin, Wallace, and Hooker." ”

“ By the force of sympathy he re-lived in the life of another the splendid years of early manhood."
The late Prof. Knight recalled meeting him at the British Association in Dundee, during the year 1867, when Wallace was his guest for the usual time of the gathering. He wrote:
I, and everyone else who then met him at my house, were struck, as no one could fail to be, by his rare urbanity, his social charm, his modesty, his unobtrusive strength, his courtesy in explaining matters with which he was himself familiar but those he conversed with were not ”

“ As a systematic zoologist, Wallace took no inconsiderable place; his métier, however, was different. He described, nevertheless, large sections of his Lepidoptera and of his birds, on which many valuable papers are printed in the Transactions of the learned societies and in various scientific periodicals. Of the former, special mention may be made of that on variation in the "Papilionidæ of the Malayan Region," of which Darwin has recorded: "I have never in my life been more struck by any paper." ”

“ He was absolutely satisfied of their genuineness, and indeed no opportunity for imposture seems to exist.
The children of the house tell wonderful tales of how they are lifted up and carried about by the spirits. They seem to enjoy it very much, and to look upon it all as just as real and natural as any other matters of their daily life.
Can such things be in this nineteenth century, and the wise ones pass away in utter ignorance of their existence?—Yours very sincerely,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
At the Glasgow Meeting of the British Association in 1876, Prof. ”

“ Without a lengthy search through the zoological records, it would be impossible to say how many species Wallace added to science; but the constant recurrence in the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum of "wallacei" as the name bestowed on various new species by other systematists, and of "Wallace" succeeding those scientifically named by himself, is an excellent gauge of their very large number.
In the field of anthropology Wallace could never be an uninterested spectator. He took a deep interest, he tells us, in the study of the various races of mankind. ”

“ In an earlier part of the "Journal" he records an evening spent with one living in a lonely place in South America who, "coming from Santiago, had contrived to surround himself with some few comforts. Being a man of some little education, he bitterly complained of the total want of society. With no particular zeal for religion, no business or pursuit, how completely must this man's life be wasted."
In complete opposition to these views, passages occur in the following letters which show that Wallace thought more highly of the Roman Catholic than of the Protestant missionaries. ”

“ I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; ”

“ How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!' And for the development of such a being what is a universe such as ours? However vast it may seem to our faculties, it is as a mere nothing in the ocean of the infinite. ”

“ This he elucidated by recognising that the flora and fauna on the two sides of the line, close though these islands approached each other, were absolutely different and had remained for ages uncommingled. This line was denominated "Wallace's Line" by Huxley, and this discovery alone would have been sufficient to associate his name inseparably with this region of the globe.—H.O.F.
Like Darwin, Wallace gave excessive attention to the suggestions and criticisms of people who were obviously ignorant of the subjects about which they wrote. ”

“ It is the chilliest hour of the twenty-four, and when we were wrapping our sheet or blanket more closely around us, we could hear the plunges and splashings of these early bathers. Rain or wind is all alike to them: their morning bath is never dispensed with. ”

“ Bright flowers and green foliage combine their charms, and climbers with their flowery festoons cover over the bare and decaying stems. Yet, pick out the loveliest spots, where the most gorgeous flowers of the tropics expand their glowing petals, and for every scene of this kind, we may find another at home of equal beauty, and with an equal amount of brilliant colour. ”

“ On this sandy soil, and beneath this bright sunshine, they seem to enjoy every moment of their existence, basking in the hot sun with the most indolent satisfaction, then scampering off as if every ray had lent vivacity and vigour to their chilly constitutions. ”

“ I have never seen in the tropics such brilliant masses of colour as even England can show in her furze-clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her glades of wild hyacinths, her fields of poppies, her meadows of buttercups and orchises—carpets of yellow, purple, azure-blue, and fiery crimson, which the tropics can rarely exhibit. ”

“ SIR W.T. THISELTON-DYER TO A.R. WALLACE Kew. January 12, 1893.
Dear Mr. Wallace,— ... I was very vexed to hear that I had misunderstood your wishes about the Royal Society. Of course, the matter must often have presented itself to your mind, and I confess that it argued a little presumption on the part of a person like myself, so far inferior to you in age and standing, to think that you would yield to my solicitation.
I was obliged for my health to go to Eastbourne, and there I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Huxley, who, you will be glad to hear, is wonderfully well, and an ardent gardener! ”

“ Our susceptibility to the higher agonies is a condition of our advance in life's pageant.
Take another instance. Amongst his numerous correspondents there were not a few who decided not to take life, for food, or science, or in war. One young man who went out with the assistance of Wallace to Trinidad and Brazil to become a naturalist, and to whom he wrote many letters71 of direction and encouragement, gave up the work of collecting—to Wallace's sincere disappointment—and came home because he felt that it was wrong to take the lives of such wondrous and beautiful birds and [pg 245] insects. ”

“ There is a grandeur and solemnity in the tropical forest, but little of beauty or brilliancy of colour. The huge buttress trees, the fissured trunks, the extraordinary air roots, the 306 twisted and wrinkled climbers, and the elegant palms, are what strike the attention and fill the mind with admiration and surprise and awe. ”

“ The powerful retractile talons of the falcon-and the cat-tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; but among the different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized forms of these groups, those always survived longest which had the [42] greatest facilities for seizing their prey. ”

“ We permit absolute possession of the soil of our country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil, to the vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; ”

“ The first sight of the great blue Morphos flapping slowly along in the forest roads near Para—of the large, white-and-black semi-transparent Ideas floating airily about in the woods near Malacca—and of the golden-green Ornithopteras sailing on bird-like wing over the flowering shrubs which adorn the beach of the Ké and Aru islands, can never be forgotten by any one with a feeling of admiration for the new and beautiful in nature. Next to the size, the infinitely varied and dazzling hues of these insects most attract the observer. ”

“ A fine clump of large bamboos is perhaps the most graceful of all vegetable forms, resembling the light and airy plumes of the bird-of-paradise copied on a gigantic scale in living foliage. Such clumps are often eighty or a hundred feet high, the glossy stems, perhaps six inches thick at the base, springing up at first straight as an arrow, tapering gradually to a slender point, and bending over in elegant curves with the weight of the slender branches and grassy leaves. The various species differ greatly in size and proportions ”

“ There is nothing impure in nature, but only in the mind of man. Rather than put on the fig-leaf I would dash the model to pieces.” “But the drapery?” said a friend, the late Alexander Russel of the Scotsman. “What I have done I have done, and I will not spoil my design. Wallace was once a man, and if he had lived in the last century and I had to model his statue, I would have draped it or put it in armor as if he had been the Duke of Marlborough or Prince Eugene. But the memory of Wallace is scarcely the memory of a man but of a demigod. Wallace is a myth ”

“ But the greatest novelty and most striking feature to my eyes were the tree-ferns, which, after seven years spent in the tropics, I now saw in perfection for the first time. All I had hitherto met with were slender species, not more than twelve feet high, and they gave not the least idea of the supreme beauty of trees bearing their elegant heads of fronds more than thirty feet in the air, like those which were plentifully scattered about this forest. There is nothing in tropical vegetation so perfectly beautiful. ”

“ for it is indisputably the mediocre, if not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence, who succeed best in life and multiply fastest. ”

“ The following law may be deduced from these facts:—Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. ”

“ I have carefully measured the proboscis of a specimen of Macrosila cluentius from South America, in the collection of the British Museum, and find it to be nine inches and a quarter long! One from tropical Africa (Macrosila morganii) is seven inches and a half. A species having a proboscis two or three inches longer could reach the nectar in the largest flowers of Angræcum sesquipedale, whose nectaries vary in length from ten to fourteen inches. That such a moth exists in Madagascar may be safely predicted; ”

“ For a moment he stood over her, glowering down at her upturned face.
“Work!—Comrades!” he grated with a laugh. “D’ye think I’m going to risk my precious neck any further?”
He did not hear the door open softly, nor the footfall of the two men who entered.
“Are you blind as well as mad?” he went on brutally. “Don’t you see that the thing is finished? The Four Just Men have us all in the hollow of their hands! They’ve got us like that!” He snapped his fingers contemptuously. “They know everything—even to the attempt that is to be made on the Prince of the Escorials! Ha! ”

“ The chief looked suspicious.
“I am the editor,” he said.
The man looked over his shoulder, then leant forward.
“I am one of The Four Just Men,” he said hesitatingly. Welby took a step towards him and scrutinised him closely.
“What is your name?” he asked quickly.
“Miguel Thery of Jerez,” replied the man.
It was half-past ten when, returning from a concert, the cab that bore Poiccart and Manfred westward passed through Hanover Square and turned off to Oxford Street.
“You ask to see the editor,” Manfred was explaining; “they take you up to the offices—you explain your business to somebody ”