Obituary. 133 



V. — Obituary. 



Alfred Eussel Wallace. 



The deatli of Dr. Wallace, which took place on November 

 the 7th, in his 91st year, severs the last remaining link of 

 the chain of great names of the mid-Victorian era associated 

 with the introduction and confirmation of the doctrine of 

 Evolution by Natural Selection. 



. First conceived by Charles Darwin as far back as 1842, 

 and communicated only to Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, his most intimate friends, it was not till 1858 that 

 he received from Wallace, who was then in the Moluccas, 

 an essay for publication, " On the Tendency of Varieties to 

 depart indefinitely from the Original T}*pe," which almost 

 exactly reproduced Darwin's own views. 



Wallace's essay, together with a sketch of Darwin's own 

 ideas, were communicated jointly to the Linnean Society on 

 July the 1st, 1858, and his views were furtlier elaborated in his 

 ' Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection ' (London, 

 1875) and in 'Darwinism; an Exposition of the Theory of 

 Natural Selection, with some of its Applications ' (London, 

 1889). It was in these two volumes that Wallace con- 

 tributed to the progress and understanding of the Darwinian 

 doctrines. But he did not quite see eye to eye with Darwin 

 in every respect. He was of opinion that Natural Selection 

 alone could not account for the development of the human 

 race, and adopted views of a teleological character which he 

 elaborated in a later volume, the ' World of Life,' published 

 in 1910, in which he argued that the complexity of the 

 structure of living beings necessarily implied a creative 

 power, a directive mind, and an ultimate purpose, and that 

 man was the one crowning product of the whole cosmic 

 process of development. 



Wallace was born at Usk in Monmouthshire, on January 8, 

 1823, and was educated at Hertford Grammar School. During 

 his early years he first earned his living as a land surveyor 

 and an architect in company with an elder brother, and 



