35. “Infidelity is of the spirit of the present”: Scottish Association for Opposing Prevalent Errors, Report of the Proceedings of the First Public Meeting of the Scottish Association for Opposing Prevalent Errors, Held in the Salon of Gibb’s Royal Hotel, Princes Street, Edinburgh on Tuesday 9th March, 1847, cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 289.
36. “The thing that was most curious of all”: Cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 444.
37. “Mr Chambers studiously excludes all religious subjects”: Ibid., 294–95.
38. “somewhat less amused at it”: Joseph Hooker to Charles Darwin, December 30, 1844, Letter 804, DCP.
39. the group he called “us transmutationists”: Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, April 18, 1847, Letter 1012, DCP.
40. “almost as unorthodox about species as Vestiges itself”: Charles Darwin to T. H. Huxley, September 2, 1854, Letter 1587, DCP.
12. ALFRED WALLACE’S FEVERED DREAMS
1. He had published a paper about the species question: Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species,” dated Sarawak, Borneo, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 2nd series, 16 (1855): 184–96. I am indebted to the fine biographer Peter Raby for providing generous feedback on this chapter, for talking over the finer points of what is known about Wallace’s life, and for his masterly biography of Wallace.
2. the feverish bolt-from-the-blue moment of realization: Wallace was always a little foggy about where the fever-induced idea occurred. He claimed it was in Ternate, a small town across the water on the island of Ternate that served as his base camp, but his field notes indicate that he was staying in Dodinga on the island of Gilolo for all of February. As his biographer Ross A. Slotten points out, this is likely to have been because most of his readers would have heard of Ternate but Gilolo was too small to have any geographical significance in the West. Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 509n6.
3. the “checks” that stopped populations from growing: A. R. Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), 1:361.
4. “it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live?: Ibid., 362.
5. But out here in this hut in the Malay Archipelago, there was only Ali: Wallace wrote about Ali in his autobiography—he employed him in 1855 and trained him to hunt and prepare specimens; on Ali, see also Jane R. Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” in H. Kuklick and R. Kohler, eds., “Science in the Field,” Osiris 11 (1996): 55–56. Wallace’s other main assistant, Charles Allen, who had sailed with him from England, had left him in 1856 in order to enter a monastery. He rejoined Wallace in 1860.
6. Ali was smart, a fine collector, a hard worker: In 1862, when Wallace sailed from Sumatra by mail steamer for Singapore, he left Ali a rich man, giving him money and his two guns, ammunition, stores, and tools. In presenting Ali’s photograph in his autobiography, he described him as the faithful companion of nearly all of his journeys in the East and the best native servant he ever had.
7. “I said that I hoped,” he remembered later: Wallace, My Life, 1:363.
8. he had been diving for it for years: As Jim Endersby has pointed out in his review essay of 2003, Wallace is rarely presented as anything other than the also-ran in the history of evolution and his life rarely seen as anything but a shadow in the Darwin story—see Jim Endersby, “Escaping Darwin’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Biology 36, no. 2 (2003): 385–403; of the many biographies of Wallace available, Peter Raby’s is still the finest—see Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Slotten, Heretic in Darwin’s Court.
9. Wallace had been interested in … geographical borders: For these insights into Wallace’s early interest in borders and borderlines, I am indebted to James Moore’s important essay of 1997, “Wallace’s Malthusian Moment: The Common Context Revisited,” in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 290–311.
10. the “little Saxon”: Wallace, My Life, 1:29.
11. Daniel Defoe’s History of the Great Plague: Wallace also read, at around the same time, Thomas Hood’s moral tale of a gang of robbers breaking into the deserted houses of plague evacuees, “The Tale of the Great Plague.”
12. Defoe described the three weeks in 1665: Defoe was only four years old when the plague struck; the journal he published in 1722 as the journal of a single eyewitness was part fictionalized, part assembled from multiple eyewitness accounts.
13. “Nothing but the immediate finger of God”: Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, 282.
14. London gave the young Wallace a political education: Wallace, My Life, 1:80.
15. “a pervading spirit of scepticism”: Ibid., 227.
16. “the word ‘atheist’ had always been,” he wrote, “used with bated breath”: Ibid., 226.
17. Wallace would later call the Enclosure Acts land theft: Wallace makes a long and eloquent attack on the principle of enclosure in his autobiography: ibid., 78–84; he was later active in the land nationalization movement.
18. mobs of young farmers and agricultural workers: These were called the Rebecca Riots (1839–43) after the biblical Rebecca. Many of the agitators, who were mostly agricultural workers and farmers, attacked toll-booths at night in gangs disguised as women. See David Williams, The Rebecca Riots: A Study in Agrarian Discontent (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955).
19. bringing a mechanics’ institute and science library to Neath: Wallace wrote his first essay in these years in Neath, “The South-Wales Farmer,” which was later published in My Life, 1:207–22; it is now anthologized in Jane R. Camerini, ed., The Alfred Russel Wallace Reader: A Selection of Writings from the Field (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 18–60.
20. “It was,” Wallace wrote later, “the first work I had yet read”: Wallace, My Life, 1:232. He read Malthus in 1844 and his understanding of natural selection came in 1858, so the time lapse was actually less than he remembered.
21. a “wild, neglected park with the ruins of a mansion”: Ibid., 237.
22. The scandalous and much discussed red-leathered book: R. Elwyn Hughes, “Alfred Russel Wallace: Some Notes on the Welsh Connection,” British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 4 (1989): 401–18.
23. “I do not consider it as a hasty generalization”: Wallace to Bates, December 28, 1845, reproduced in Wallace, My Life, 1:254.
24. Wallace plunged into preparations for a journey: Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace, 28.
25. “I begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection”: Wallace, My Life, 1:256–57.
26. “The more I see of this country, the more I want to”: Cited in David Quammen, “The Man Who Knew Islands,” in his The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (London: Hutchinson, 1996), 65.
27. “Wherever I go dogs bark, children scream”: From Wallace’s Ms Journal, 39, 54, Linnaean Society archives; cited in Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” 53.
28. “And now everything was gone,” he wrote, “and I had not one specimen”: Cited in Quammen, “The Man Who Knew Islands,” 71.
29. “the limits beyond which certain species never passed”: Cited in ibid., 73–74.
30. the sheer labor of collecting and surviving: He had developed routines and rituals, patterns for his days, that made him a highly successful collector: he was always up at half past five, arranging and drying insects and preparing equipment for the day; from nine until three he would collect out in the jungle or fields or forests, returning to kill and pin insects with his assistants; then he would have dinner at four and work again until six or later depending on the weight of the day’s catch, and then he would have a few hours of reading or talking before bed. Details from a letter Wallace sent from Singapore on May 28, 1854, cited by Wallace My Life, 1:337–
38.
31. he decided to nail his colors to the mast and publish a paper: Wallace’s essay “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” appeared in 1855 in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.
32. “forty black, naked, mop-headed savages”: Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1869), 2:176, 177, 179.
33. he roamed across these scattered islands: Wallace’s descriptions of his time on the Aru Islands are particularly fascinating—see ibid., 2:196–298.
34. “I was startled at first to see you already ripe”: Henry Bates to A. R. Wallace, November 19, 1856; cited in Slotten, Heretic in Darwin’s Court, 135.
35. “By your letter & even still more by your paper in Annals”: Charles Darwin to A. R. Wallace, May 1, 1857, Letter 2086, DCP.
36. “As this subject is now attracting much attention among naturalists”: Cited in Slotten, Heretic in Darwin’s Court, 139.
37. “I had discovered the exact boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races”: Wallace, Malay Archipelago, 2:20; cited in Moore, “Wallace’s Malthusian Moment: The Common Context Revisited,” 296.
38. “Your words have come true with a vengeance”: Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, June 18, 1858, Letter 2285, DCP.
39. “I would far rather burn my whole book”: Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, June 25, 1858, Letter 2294, DCP.
40. Darwin asked others to make the necessary decisions: Some historians have suggested that Darwin behaved in a less than gentlemanly way; others that he actively manipulated the situation to his own advantage; still others that he stole some of Wallace’s ideas. John Langdon Brookes has pointed out that Wallace’s paper could have arrived as early as May 18 and thus Darwin could have had it for at least two weeks and perhaps even a month before he noted its receipt in his private journal. That would have provided him with enough time to “appropriate” some of Wallace’s ideas. Arnold Brackman suggests that there was a conspiracy between Darwin, Hooker, and Lyell and that class was an issue. Another view is that the two theories are not the same, that Wallace’s version of natural selection acted at the level of varieties and species while Darwin’s acted at an individual level—see Slotten, Heretic in Darwin’s Court, 159.
41. “The interest excited was intense”: Hooker wrote this account for Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1887), 2:126.
42. “Allow me in the first place sincerely to thank yourself”: A. R. Wallace to Joseph Hooker, October 6, 1858, cited in Slotten, Heretic in Darwin’s Court, 160.
43. “I was stopped in the street one day”: Thomas Barbour, Naturalist at Large (London: Scientific Book Club, 1950), 36; cited in Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” 55.
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