Alfred Russel Wallace 



Looking over the long list of the departed whose names 

 are enshrined in our Minster, one has sorrowfully to observe 

 that contemporary opinion of their pla^e in history and 

 abiding worth was not infrequently astray; that memory 

 has, indeed, forgotten their works; and their memorials 

 might be removed to some cloister without loss of respect 

 for the dead, perhaps even with the silent approval of 

 their own day and generation could it awake from its end- 

 less sleep and review the strange and eventful course of 

 human life since they left '^ this bank and shoal of time." 

 But may it not be safely prophesied that of all the names 

 on the starry scroll of national fame that of Charles Dar- 

 win will, surely, remain unquestioned ? And entwined 

 with his enduring memory, by right of worth and work, 

 and we know with Darwin's fullest approval, our suc- 

 cessors will discover the name of Alfred Russel Wallace. 

 Darwin and Wallace were pre-eminent sons of light. 



Among the great men of the Victorian age Wallace 

 occupied a unique position. He was the co-discoverer of 

 the illuminating theory of Natural Selection ; he watched 

 its struggle for recognition against prejudice, ignorance, 

 ridicule and misrepresentation ; its gradual adoption by 

 its traditional enemies ; and its final supremacy. And he 

 lived beyond the hour of its signal triumph and witnessed 

 the further advance into the same field of research of 

 other patient investigators who are disclosing fresh phases 

 of the same fundamental laws of development, and are 

 accumulating a vast array of new facts which tell of still 

 richer light to come to enlighten every man born into the 

 world. To have lived through that brilliant period and 

 into the second decade of the twentieth century; to have 

 outlived all contemporaries, having been the co-revealer of 

 the greatest and most far-reaching generalisation in an era 

 which abounded in fruitful discoveries and in revolutionary 



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