Alfred Russel Wallace 



Wallace made no claim to be an original investigator. 

 He knew his limitations, and said again and again that 

 he could not have conducted the slow and minute re- 

 searches or have accumulated the vast amount of detailed 

 evidence to which Darwin, with infinite patience, devoted 

 his life. He was genuinely glad that it had not fallen to 

 his lot to write "The Origin of Species." He felt that his 

 chief faculty was to reason from facts which others dis- 

 covered. Yet he had that original insight and creative 

 faculty which enabled him to see, often as by flashlight, 

 the explanation which had remained hidden from the eyes 

 of the man who was most familiar with the particula-r 

 facts, and he elaborated it with quickening pulse, anxious 

 to put down the whole conception which filled his mind 

 lest some portion of it should escape him. Therein lay 

 one secret of his great genius. He often said that he was 

 an idler, but we know that he was a patient and industrious 

 worker. His idleness was his way of describing his long 

 musings, waiting the bidding of her whom God inspires — 

 Truth, who often hides her face from the clouded eyes of 

 man. For hours, days, weeks, he was disinclined to work. 

 He felt no constraining impulse, his attention was relaxed or 

 engaged upon a novel, or his seeds, or the plan of a new 

 house, which always excited his interest. Then, appar- 

 ently suddenly, whilst in one of his day-dreams, or in a 

 fever (as at Ternate, to recall the historical episode when 

 the theory of Natural Selection struck him), an explanation, 

 a theory, a discovery,^ the plan of a new book, came to him 

 like a flash of light, and with the plan the material, the argu- 



1 " I have been speculating last night," wrote C. Darwin to his son Horace, 

 " what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things ; and a most per- 

 plexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever — much cleverer than 

 the discoverers — never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the 

 art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything 

 which occurs." — " Emma Darwin," p. 207. 



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