16 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



from ManAos (then Barra do Rio Negro) to John Smith, the 

 Curator at Kew, that Wallace had just come down from the 

 frontier bringing sketches of several palms, many probably new. 

 Three months later he informs the same correspondent that 

 Wallace, who had started up the Eio Negro a month before 

 Spruce had done so, was " almost at the point of death from a 

 mahgnant fever," whilst his younger brother, Herbert Wallace, 

 who had come out with Spruce, had succumbed in the previous 

 May. Wallace, however, having fortunately sent home his first 

 two years' collections, started for England at the end of July, 

 1852. The vessel in which he sailed took fire, and the bulk of 

 the specimens he had with him, his sketches and notes, were 

 destroyed. After drifting ten days in open boats, Wallace and 

 the crew were picked up; but the voyage had lasted eighty-two 

 days when he landed in England on October 18th, 1852. 



In 1853 Wallace published his little book on the Palms of 

 the Amazon, illustrated from his own sketches. Though useful at 

 the time, it was practically superseded by Spruce's classical 

 " Palmse Amazonicae " in the Linnean Society's Journal, vol. xi. 

 (1870). The same year saw the publication of Travels on the 

 Amazon and Bio Negro, Bates's Naturalist on the Amazons 

 appearing in 1863, and Spruce's Notes of a Botanist on the 

 Amazon and Andes (edited by Wallace) not till 1908. Wallace's 

 journal abounds in botanical notes, and contains one brilliant 

 chapter specially devoted to the vegetation of the Amazon Valley. 

 Few passages in his writings are better known than the para- 

 graphs in this chapter in which he contrasts the gloomy solemnity 

 of the tropical forest with the brilliant colours of temperate land- 

 scapes. 



In 1854 Wallace started once more for the Tippies, reaching 

 Singapore in July, spending in all eight and a half years in 

 the Malay Archipelago, and collecting in Sumatra, Java, Timor, 

 Celebes, Borneo, and New Guinea. An essay, written at Sarawak 

 in February, 1855, and published in the Annals and Magazine of 

 Natural History for September, 1855, " On the Law which has 

 regulated the introduction of new species," is even more impor- 

 tant in the history of biogeography than in that of biogenesis. 

 Though it attracted the attention of Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley, 

 Wallace was disappointed to find that it obtained little general 

 recognition. It was after reading Malthus's book, as Darwin had 

 done just twenty years before, that Wallace, while prostrated with 

 fever at Ternate in February, 1858, wrote the essay " On the 

 tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original 

 type," which he sent to Darwin, and which was read, together 

 with Darwin's chapter " On the variation of organic beings in a 

 state of nature," on the momentous July 1st, 1858, at the 

 Linnean Society. Everyone is familiar to-day with the story of 

 the admirable magnanimity with which the two great naturalists 

 recognized each other's work. 



" I have felt all my life, and I still feel," writes Wallace in 

 1870, " the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at 



