![]() It is evidently possible that two or three distinct species may have had a common antitype, and that each of these may again have become the antitypes from which other closely allied species were created. 8 Referred to as his “Sarawak Law,” he said that:Įvery species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species… each one having had for its immediate antitype a closely related species existing at the time of its origin. This was encapsulated in a paper which plainly described the gradual changes in species, their development, and extinction. Their diversity and intermediate forms from Sarawak in Borneo furthered his searches and ideas about evolution. About 250 of these new species were named after him, usually as Wallacii or Wallacei. ![]() 6,7 In his life he published twenty-one articles containing descriptions of 295 new species: 120 butterflies, 70 beetles, and 105 birds. Over a period of eight years, he had acquired an incomparable collection of about 125,660 specimens, including more than 5,000 species, many not previously described. 5 His account highlights vivid descriptions of birds of paradise and orangutans, and encounters with natives. After years of meticulous observations and collecting he published The Malay Archipelago. Wallace began his travels through the Malay Archipelago (now Malaysia and Indonesia) in 1854. The Malay Archipelago and Wallace’s Line 1854–1862 Undaunted, a year later Wallace left England for further explorations in Malaya. A passing cargo ship rescued the passengers. ![]() When he later set sail for England his ship caught fire in the Atlantic and sank, with the loss of many specimens and field notes. He amassed thousands of animal specimens, mostly birds, beetles, and butterflies. Wallace went north by river, surviving dangerous and hostile conditions in areas previously unexplored in order to observe and collect animal and plant material. ![]() In order to cover more ground, Wallace and Bates split up. Impecunious, they could only finance the trip by collecting numerous specimens and selling them to collectors and museums. Wallace and Bates arrived at the Amazon in Brazil in 1848 to investigate the origin of species. George Beccaloni, director of the Wallace Correspondence Project, has provided excellent documentation. These extracts from my early letters to Bates suffice to show that the great problem of the origin of species was already distinctly formulated in my mind that I was not satisfied with the more or less vague solutions at that time offered that I believed the conception of evolution through natural law so clearly formulated in the “Vestiges” to be, so far as it went, a true one and that I firmly believed that a full and careful study of the facts of nature would ultimately lead to a solution of the mystery.įour years later in 1848, he departed with Bates for the Amazon. In his later autobiography, Alfred Russel Wallace: My Life, pp. In this, we can glimpse into his curiosity and obsessional preoccupation with the origins of living forms. I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species. (The author was revealed in 1884 as the publisher Robert Chambers). Wallace and Darwin had read an anonymous, highly controversial book in 1844: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 3,4 That year he formed a friendship with a Leicester man, Henry Walter Bates, a keen naturalist, who inter alia introduced Wallace to the delights of collecting beetles. After attending Hertford Grammar School he worked at his brother’s surveying firm, then as a teacher at the Collegiate School, Leicester in 1844. He was born in 1823 in Llanbadoc, Usk, Monmouthshire. Wallace (Fig 1.) was a man of many talents - an explorer, collector, naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, and fearless social commentator. 1 In the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey, next to Charles Darwin’s memorial, is a white marble roundel with a profile relief bust to the memory of Alfred Russel Wallace, erected in 1915. Public DomainĪlfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) conceived the original idea of evolution by natural selection entirely independently of Charles Darwin.
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