ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 



17 



work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt 

 to write The Origin of Species. I have long since measured my 

 own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to 

 that task." On the other hand, Darwin writes to Wallace: — 

 " You are the only man I ever heard of who persistently does 

 himself an injustice, and never demands justice." 



In March, 1859, Wallace wrote to Dr. Sclater from Batchian 

 accepting, with some suggested minor alterations, the six zoolo- 

 gical provinces that Sclater has proposed ; whilst another essay, 

 written about the same time, " On the Zoological Geography of 

 the Malay Archipelago," gives further details as to the boundary 

 between the Indian and Austsi'-alian regions that he located ^ in 

 Lombok Channel. Circumstances thus forced upon his attention 

 the problems of the geographical distribution of animals, and both 

 as collector and as writer he became a zoologist rather than a 

 botanist. 



The sale of his Malay collections brought him a small fortune, 

 which, when invested, yielded a modest income for a single man ; 

 but in 1866 he married the daughter of William Mitten, the 

 bryologist, by whom he had a son and a daughter ; and his subse- 

 quent hfe in England was one of unremitting literary toil, at first 

 in London and later at several successive country homes. The 

 two fascinating descriptive volumes on The Malay Archipelago, 

 published in 1869, were followed in 1876 by his magnum opus, the 

 classical Geographical Distribution of Animals, which he himself 

 described as an endeavour to do for the twelfth and thirteenth 

 chapters of the Origin of Species what Darwin's own Animals and 

 Plants under Domestication had done for the first chapter. Island 

 Life, first published in 1880 and enlarged in the second edition of 

 1895, was supplementary to the main treatise, and had appended 

 to it an elaborate treatment of the two subsidiary questions of the 

 Glacial Period and the permanence of continents and ocean-basins. 

 In this work there is a considerable amount of botanical matter. 

 Profoundly influenced by the briUiant suggestions of Edward 

 Forbes, Wallace was always impressed by the importance of 

 geological history in dealing with the past and present distribution 

 of land and water. He made much use of such considerations 

 in modifying Croll's theory of the Glacial Period ; and, though 

 considered by a younger antagonistic school the champion of the 

 permanence of continents and oceans, he constantly accepted 

 very extensive distributional interchanges of land and water. The 

 World of Life, one of his last works, deals with new evidence on 

 the same questions. 



In 1881 Wallace was granted a Civil List Pension : in 1882 

 the University of Dublin honoured itself by conferring upon him 

 the degree of LL.D. ; and other universities followed suit at later 

 dates. From his receipt of the Royal Medal of the Eoyal Society 

 in 1868 to the award of the first Darwin- Wallace Medal by the 

 Linnean Society in 1908, Wallace's manifold services to biology 

 have been fully recognized by his confreres ; and he was naturally 

 one of the earliest recipients of King Edward's Order of Merit. 

 Journal of Botany. — Vol. 52. [January, 1914.] c 



