ODOARDO BECCAEI. 
169 
wise modified by Beecari was published in 1904. It is de- 
dicated to “ Marquis Doria, Macaenas of naturalists,” and the 
dedication is perhaps the clearest indication of the happy conditions 
under which Beecari commenced his wanderings abroad. The soli- 
tary traveller misses much — Guillemard in his editorial note says 
“ What would I not have given for the companionship in my 
journeys of so skilled a botanist and so enthusiastic a nature-lover 
as the author of this volume.” One can imagine the keen en- 
thusiasm and abounding energy of youth : the interest in everything 
so new, the questions and problems which crowded in on Bec-cari 
at every turn, and then, beside him, Doria, the trained naturalist- 
explorer companion, whose maturer views and sound reasoning 
must have served as a wonderfully safe guide to useful observation 
and as an ever-present stimulus to further research on steady lines 
into the wonders of Nature, just as no doubt Beec-ari’s own youthful 
enthusiasm and fertile imagination must have kindled anew the 
keenness of his older companion. 
Small wonder then that under these conditions his diaries are 
so full of varied and suggestive information. The lapse of some 
40 years between those days and the time of writing his book was 
an advantage in that he has allowed the wisdom of later years to 
develop and modify the immature reasonings of his youth; but at 
the same time none of the freshness of a narrative written on the 
spot is lost. 
As is well known, Wallace's essay on Natural Selection, which 
was read before the Linnean Society in conjunction with Darwin’s 
essay in 1858, was written at Ternate. It is, however, not so often 
remembered that his earlier essay on the Origin of Species, which 
may be said to have fore-shadowed that of 1858, was written at 
Santubong. Sarawak, three years before. We may be sure too that 
this problem must have received many hours of careful thought 
during his four weeks stay on Mt. Serambu in Upper Sarawak. 
Just as Galapagos and Ternate will share the fame of being the 
birthplaces of the Darwin-Wallace Theory of Natural Selection, 
so too should Sarawak be remembered as the germinating ground, 
so far as Wallace was concerned, for this remarkable Theory. 
It is therefore of particular interest to read of Beccari’s visits 
to Santubong and Serambu just ten years after Wallace. He too 
formulated a theory of his own in regard to the formation of 
species, one, however, which has failed to find the same general 
acceptance as has that of his famous predecessor. He believed in 
the theory “ that the environment, in the widest sense of the word, 
has been the most powerful and principal agent in causing animals, 
as well as plants, to assume their present form and structure; ” that 
the organized “ beings now living have been originated through 
the action exerted on them by the external world,” and that species 
are “ merely the result of a plasmative force exerted by surround- 
ings on primitive beings.” He did not believe in the present vari- 
ability of species in Nature, but returned to the opposite and long- 
E. A. Soo., No. 83, 1921. 
