ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 531 



taken iij) as a suhjcci of iiH|iiiry. These opinions of 1889 were the sum- 

 mation of twenty-nine yeai'S of work. 



To return to the life narrative, the autumn of I860 found Wallace 

 in the Moluccas reading (lie "Origin of Species" through five or six 

 times, each time with increasing admiration. A letter of September 1 

 to his friend George Silk contains the key to the subsequent direction of 

 his research, namely, his recognition of the vast breadth of Darwin's 

 principles and his determination to devote his life to their exposition: 



I could never have approached the completeness of his book, its vast accumu- 

 lation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable tone and spirit. 

 I really feel thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the 

 world. Mr. Darwin has created a new science and a new philosophy; and I be- 

 lieve that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowl- 

 edge been due to the labors and researches of a single man. Never have such vast 

 masses of widely scattered and hitherto quite unconnected facts been combined 

 into a system and brought to bear upon the establishment of such a grand and 

 new and simple philosophy. 



The discovery of "Natural Selection" again turned the course of 

 Wallace's life. In his autobiography he writes : 



I had, in fact, been bitten with the passion for species and their description, 

 and if neither Darwin nor myself had hit upon "natural selection," I might have 

 spent the best years of my life in this comparatively profitless work, but the new 

 ideas swept all this away. . . . This outline of the paper will perhaps enable my 

 readers to understand the intense interest I felt in working out all these strange 

 phenomena, and showing how they could almost all be explained by that law of 

 "Natural Selection" which Darwin had discovered many years before, and which 

 I also had been so fortunate as to hit upon. 



The coloring of animals as observed in the tropics and the Malayan 

 Islands was the subject in wdiich Wallace made his most extensive and 

 original contributions to Darwinism. In his "Sketch" of 1858-9 he 

 wrote : 



Even the peculiar colors of many animals, especially insects, so closely re- 

 sembling the soil or the leaves or the trunks on which they habitually reside, are 

 explained on the same principle; for though in the course of ages varieties of 

 many tints may have occurred, ye^ those races having colors hest adapted to con- 

 cealment from their enemies would inevitably survive the longest. 



Eeturning from the Archipelago in 1862, he published in 1864 his 

 pioneer paper, " The Malayan Papilionidge or Swallow-tailed Butterflies, 

 as illustrative of the Theory of Natural Selection," in which he at once 

 took rank beside Bates and Miiller as one of the great contributors to the 

 color characteristics of animals. We see him step by step developing the 

 ideas of protective resemblance which he had fully discussed with Bates, 

 of alluring and warning colors, and of mimicry, pointing out the preva- 

 lence of mimicry in the female rather than in the male. The whole 

 series of phenomena are believed to depend upon the great principle of 

 the utility of every character, upon the need of color protection by 

 almost all animals, and upon the known fact that no characteristic is so 



