A GREAT NATURALIST 

 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, 1823-1913 



By Henry Fairfield Osborn 



THE nineteenth century in Great Britain, the Victorian Age, will be 

 compared in history with the greatest intellectual periods in the 

 history of Athens, of Rome and of Florence. Brilliant as were 

 England's achievements in art, literature and the spreading of civilization, 

 her achievements in science outshine them all. No country has ever pro- 

 duced such a constellation of stars of the first magnitude in the same brief 

 period of time, especially in the sciences of geology and biology. The 

 dominant figure of course is that of Darwin, whose influence upon the world 

 of thought is to be compared with that of Aristotle only. Anticipating 

 and surrounding Darwin were members of an unrivaled group of men, 

 beginning with Sir Charles Lyell, a geologist, and including Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, the botanist, Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist, and Thomas 

 Henry Huxley, the anatomist and natural philosopher. 



Wallace, the last survivor of this remarkable group, died on November 7, 

 1913, in the ninety-first year of his age and the sixty-fourth year of service 

 and discovery. He followed by only a few months another member of the 

 group,' Sir Joseph Hooker, who was present at the Darwin celebration at 

 Cambridge in 1909, the centenary of the birth of Darwin. 



Because the fame of Wallace rests chiefly on his codiscovery with Dar- 

 win of the theory of natural selection he is sometimes thought of as Darwin's 

 contemporary but he was actually fourteen years younger and made the 

 discovery of natural selection twenty years later than Darwin. He was 

 always the first to recognize Darwin's seniority and leadership. In his 

 remarkable journeys in South America and in the Malay Archipelago, filling 

 the years 1848 to 1862, Wallace was influenced by Darwin's classic work, 

 best known as the Voyage of the Beagle. 



The simultaneous publication of the law of natural selection independ- 

 ently discovered by these two great naturalists was followed on the part of 

 Wallace by a lifetime of devotion to this chief principle of Darwin's special 

 theories of the causes of evolution. While Huxley was the stalwart defender 

 of the evolution theory and of Darwinism in general without committing 

 himself to either of Darwin's special interpretations of the theory, Wallace 

 devoted himself continuously to the support of Darwin's special hypotheses. 

 Yet almost from the first he differed from Darwin in some very important 

 particulars. He never could bring himself to believe that the mind and 

 spirit of man were the results of the same evolution process as that which 

 had developed his bodily structure and that of all the lower orders of animal 



The half tone of Alfred Russel WaUace is used by courtesy of Popular Science Monthly 



331 



