ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 15 



In considerable quantity in the sandy bed of the Palmones 

 Eiver, near Algeciras, within tidal influence (2062). Dr. Stapf, 

 who has very kindly revised my description, informs me that there 

 are Portuguese specimens at Kew, labelled A./estucceforniis. 



ALFEED RUSSEL WALLACE. 

 (1823-1913.) 



By the death of Alfred Russel Wallace, which took place at 

 Broadstone, near Wimborne, on November 7th, the last of the 

 giants of English nineteeth-century science is removed. He was 

 born, of Scottish ancestry, at Usk, Monmouthshire, January 8th, 

 1823; "educated" at Hertford Grammar School, which he left 

 before he was fourteen ; and apprenticed to an elder brother who 

 was a land-surveyor. This employment was distasteful : his 

 attention had already been turned towards Natural History, and, 

 as in so many other cases, Humboldt's Personal Narrative had 

 fired him with a desire to visit the Tropics. It is noteworthy that 

 he began by collecting British plants, though he was eagerly 

 reading books of travel, so that when, during a short time in 

 1844-5, when he was acting as a master in the Collegiate School 

 at Leicester, he made the acquaintance of Bates, then already an 

 ardent entomologist, it required but little encouragement to make 

 him decide to start for America. He himself says {Travels on 

 the Ainazon, Pi-eface): — "My attention was directed to Para and 

 the Amazon by Mr. Edwards's little book, A Voyage ujj the 

 Amazon, and I decided upon going tliere, both on account of its 

 easiness of access and the little that was known of it compared 

 with most other parts of South America. I proposed to pay my 

 expenses by making collections in Natural History, and I have 

 been enabled to do so." Writing to Bates at the time, he 

 expressly says that one of their objects must be the collection of 

 facts " towards solving the problem of the origin of species " ; 

 but, although they were not then published, it must be re- 

 membered that Darwin had then not only received the initial 

 suggestion of the theory of natural selection from reading 

 Malthus on Population in 1838, but had, in June, 1842, and 

 during the summer of 1844, written out the first and second 

 abstracts of his theory. 



Wallace and Bates sailed for Para in April, 1848 ; and a year 

 and a half later they were joined at Santarem by Spruce, another 

 Collegiate School master, who, encouraged by Bentham and 

 Hooker, and probably also, as Wallace suggests (Spruce, Notes 

 of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, Introduction, p. xxxiii.), 

 by what he heard from entomological friends at the British 

 Museum of how successful Bates and Wallace had already been, 

 had determined to undertake the botanical exploration of the 

 region. 



The three collectors separated, Wallace first ascending the 

 Eio Negro to the Uaup6s. In September, 1851, Spruce writes 



