CHAPTER VI. 



*THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 



THE accident came in this wise. 



Alfred Russel Wallace, a young Welsh biologist, 

 went out at twent y-four, in 1848, to the Amazons River, 

 in company with Bates (the author of ' The Naturalist 

 on the Amazons ' ), to collect birds and butterflies, and 

 to study tropical life in the richest region of equatorial 

 America. Like all other higher zoologists of their time, 

 the two young explorers were deeply interested in the 

 profound questions of origin and metamorphosis, and of 

 geographical distribution, and in the letters that passed 

 between them before they started they avowed to one 

 another that the object of their quest was a solution of 

 the pressing biological enigma of creation or evolu- 

 tion. Starting with fresh hopes and a few pounds in 

 pocket, on an old, worn-out, and unseaworthy slave- 

 trader, they often discussed these deep problems of life 

 and nature together upon the Sargasso sea, or among 

 the palms and lianas of the Brazilian woodlands. The 

 air was thick with whifis and foretastes of evolutionism, 

 and the two budding naturalists of the Amazous expe- 

 dition had inhaled them eagerly with every breath. 

 They saw among the mimicking organisms of that 



