THE MAKING OF BIOLOGISTS. 517 



long ago reached and passed ; but Agassiz was able to indirectly influence 

 the young people of the whole country, and though he is now dead, he is 

 not gone, and we are all in some sense his pupils. 



Dr. Alfred E. Wallace, writing from Parkstone, Dorset, November 

 7, 1901, has given me the following most interesting account of his 

 early experiences : 



As to my interest in biology, I can trace it I think to two very trifling 

 facts. I doubt if I had or have any special aptitude for it, but I have a natural 

 love for classification and an inherent desire to explain things; also a great 

 love of beauty of form and colour. The two slight facts are these. When a 

 boy at school I heard a Quaker lady say that she and some friend had found 

 the ' Monotropa,' which was quite a discovery as being before unknown in the 

 district. This, and hearing the names of other flowers referred to as rare, made 

 me think it would be very interesting to know the names of all the plants that 

 grew wild,* but as I had no botanical friends the wish remained dormant, till 

 I was about 15, when I purchased for a shilling (I think) a little book on 

 botany published by the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, and 

 which contained the characters of about a dozen of the commonest natural 

 orders in Britain. This was a revelation to me, and kept me employed for a 

 year or two determining the flowers I met with if they belonged to any of these 

 few orders. I then bought Lindley's ' Elements of Botany,' I think it was, but 

 was disappointed in finding no more ' orders ' described, but details of structure 

 which did not much interest me. When recovering from a serious illness I met 

 with Loudon's ' Encyclopaedia of Plants,' and finding that this contained brief 

 characters of all British plants, I amused myself by copying them all, except 

 I think the grasses and sedges, on sheets of note paper, which I interleaved in 

 Lindley's volume, and by means of these I was able to determine most of the 

 species I met with, and made a considerable herbarium. The other incident 

 was, meeting H. W. Bates at Leicester and being started by him as a beetle and 

 butterfly collector. The enormous variety of form and structure in the beetles 

 attracted me, and I think during all my tropical experiences the collection 

 of these gave as much enjoyment as even the gorgeous birds and butterflies. 

 Classification then began to fascinate me, through Swainson, and the ' Vestiges 

 of Creation,' with the works of Herbert Spencer, started me on the problem of 

 the origin of species; and thus my various mental tendencies had full occupa- 

 tion in the contemplation and study of natural objects. I also, very early, 

 became interested in geology, in mechanics, in physics and in astronomy, and 

 this breadth of scientific interest, though with no direct education in any one 

 of them, has been of great service to me in preventing a too exclusive attention 

 to any one aspect of nature. 



With reference to Dr. Wallace's disclaimer at the beginning of his 

 letter, it may be questioned whether there is such a thing as a special 

 aptitude for biology, aside from the combination of just such tastes and 

 aptitudes as he describes. I have always fancied that the same qualities 

 which would make a good historian would make also a good biologist 

 the interest in living things, the love of detail and of classification, the 

 fidelity to truth, the perseverance in inquiry, the lively imagination, and 



* I also heard, to my astonishment, that every minutest weed had been 

 described and had a name. 



