48 Obituary — Dr. Alfred Russet Wallace. 



1852 the ship took fire; all on board had a narrow escape, and the 

 naturalist's collections were totally lost. Wallace published his 

 Travels on the Amazons and Rio Negro and then set out for the Far 

 East. From 1854 until 1862 he spent amid the Malay Islands, then 

 practically but little known to naturalists. In eight years of 

 wanderings - and voyages, amid those "green islands of glittering 

 seas ", he gathered the material for his Malay Archipelago, his 

 Tropical Nature, his Island Life, and his Geographical Distribution 

 of Animals. 



During an illness at Ternate in 1858 he spent his enforced idleness 

 by thinking out the problem of natural selection, which had occupied 

 his mind and he had written about unsatisfactorily three yeai's earlier. 

 Wallace knew Darwin, and sat down and wrote to his friend a letter 

 suggesting his ideas as to " the survival of the fittest", not knowing 

 that Darwin had, nearly twenty years before that date, come to the 

 same conclusion as Wallace, and had been collecting data to prove 

 his theory. After much discussion with Sir Charles Lyell and 

 Sir Joseph Hooker, it was decided that Wallace's and Darwin's 

 independent papers should be read simultaneously in 1858 before the 

 Linnean Society. Looking Nature in the face for long years and in 

 many lands, both had arrived at the same great induction, that all 

 living beings are descended from previous living forms and that these 

 have changed and advanced in fashion from the beginning, those 

 surviving that were the fittest. The Linnean Society recognized the 

 equal merit of the two naturalists and awarded a medal to each. 

 But Darwin and his followers held the field, and Wallace with true 

 nobility and self-denial acquiesced in giving precedence to his friend. 

 Thereafter Darwin's Origin of Species became known and accepted 

 world-wide, and Wallace himself joined in its praise. In after years 

 Wallace retained a vigorous pen and wrote prolifically upon many and 

 various subjects, both books and scientific papers. 



The Royal Society in 1868 awarded Wallace the Royal Medal and 

 in 1890 the Darwin Medal. In 1908 he received the Copley Medal. 

 It would be impossible to give a full account of Wallace's literary 

 labours. He lectured in America in 1886-7. Alfred Russel Wallace 

 was never in affluent circumstances. In 1881 he received a Civil 

 List pension of £200 a year in recognition of the amount and value 

 of his scientific work, and in the King's list of Birthday Honours for 

 1908 the name of Alfred Russel Wallace was deservedly placed in 

 the list of the ' Order of Merit '. 



3VEISCElLI....^]srEOTJS. 



We learn from Nature (December 4) that Dr. W. T. Gordon has 

 been appointed lecturer and head of the geological department at 

 King's College, in succession to Dr. T. F. Sibly, appointed professor 

 of geology at the University of South Wales, Cardiff. Dr. Gordon 

 has been lecturer in palaeontology and assistant in geology at the 

 University of Edinburgh since 1910, and has made extensive 

 researches in palseobotany and some investigations in stratigraphical 

 geology. 



