1 24 PIONEERS OF E VOL UTION PART 



ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE was born at Usk, in 

 Monmouthshire, on the 8th January 1823. He 

 was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in 

 his fourteenth year began the study of land-survey- 

 ing and architecture under an elder brother. Quick- 

 witted and observing, he studied a great deal more 

 on his own account in his journeyings over England 

 and Wales, the results of which abide in the wide 

 range of subjects scientific, political, and social 

 engaging his active pen from early manhood to the 

 present day. 



About 1 844 he exchanged the theodolite for the 

 ferule, and became English master in the Collegiate 

 School at Leicester, in which town he found a con- 

 genial friend in the person of his future fellow-traveller, 

 Henry Walter Bates. Bates was then employed 

 in his father's hosiery warehouse, from which he 

 escaped, as often as the long working hours then 

 prevailing allowed, into the fields with his collecting- 

 box. Both schoolmaster and shopman were ardent 

 naturalists, Mr. Wallace, as he tells us, being at that 

 time ' chiefly interested in botany/ but he afterwards 

 took up his friend's favourite pursuit of entomology. 

 The present writer, when preparing his memoir of 

 Bates (which prefaces a reprint of the first edition 

 of the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons), learned 

 from Mr. Wallace that in early life he did not keep 

 letters from Bates and other correspondents. But, 

 fortunately, among Bates's papers, there was a 

 bundle of interesting letters from Wallace written 

 between June 1845 and October 1847, from Neath, 

 in South Wales, to which town he had removed. 

 In one of these, dated the Qth November 1845, 



