332 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



creation. As early as 1864 he advanced the hypothesis that so soon as man 

 learned to use fire and make tools, to grow food, to domesticate animals, to 

 use clothing, and to build habitations, the action of natural selection was 

 diverted from his body to his mind and that thenceforth his bodily form 

 remained comparatively stable while his mental faculties improved. 



Five years later Wallace had definitely broken away from Darwin's 

 conceptions with regard to natural selection and developed the opinion that 

 this law is wholly inadequate to account for several of the bodily as well as 

 psychical characteristics of man, such as his soft and sensitive skin, his 

 speech, his color-sense and his mathematical, musical and moral attributes. 

 He drew the inference from this class of phenomena, that a superior intelli- 

 gence has guided the development of man in definite directions and for 

 special purposes, just as man guides the development of many animal and 

 vegetable forms. 



Another striking divergence of the views of Wallace from those of Dar- 

 win related to the theory of the origin of the very striking differences which 

 exist between males and females in many divisions of the animal kingdom. 

 Darwin in his theory of sexual selection advanced the idea that the female 

 was attracted by the brilliant and gaudy appearance of the males, as for 

 example among birds, and that throughout the animal kingdom generally, 

 beauty of coloring is especially characteristic of the males, is consciously 

 perceived by females and thus selected. Wallace, on the other hand, 

 sought to explain all the instances of brilliant and gaudy coloring on other 

 principles. Thus in 1868 he propounded an original explanation of the 

 quiet colors of nesting birds, pointing out that when the nest is exposed to 

 view the female is always inconspicuous in coloring or imitative of its 

 surroundings, while the male of the same species may be conspicuously or 

 gaudily colored. Among other varieties of birds where both the sexes are 

 conspicuously colored he noticed that the nest is such as to completely 

 conceal the sitting bird. 



Wallace specialized in the interpretation of the coloring of animals. He 

 developed the theory of mimicry, or protective resemblance, the conception 

 of which we owe chiefly to Bates and to Miiller. One of his famous observa- 

 tions is that of mimicry in the leaf butterfly, which we find described in his 

 delightful volume of 1869, the Malay Archipelago. In his own language his 

 first observation of Kallima paralekta was as follows: 



This species was not uncommon in dry woods and thickets, and I often endeavored 

 to capture it without success, for after flying a short distance it would enter a bush 

 among dry or dead leaves, and however carefully I crept up to the spot I could never 

 discover it till it would suddenly start out again and then disappear in a similar place. 

 At length I was fortunate enough to see the exact spot where the butterfly settled, 

 and though I lost sight of it for some time, I at length discovered that it was close 

 before my eyes, but that in its position of repose it so closely resembled a dead leaf 



