by Peter Raby
The main cause of the antagonism between religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other than blind forces on the one hand, and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God on the other. The apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of angels and archangels, with no defined duties but that of attendants and messengers of the Deity, perhaps increases this antagonism, but it seems to me that both ideas are irrational. If, as I contend, we are forced to the assumption of an infinite God by the fact that our earth has developed life, and mind, and ourselves, it seems only logical to assume that the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity is to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development, and the control of the universe.25
Wallace’s book is the sum of his long journey, a journey that he sees as only one stage in the spirit’s never ending progression. Two of the quotations he uses as epigraphs demonstrate the two poles of his thinking. The first is from the great Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle:
Every plant, whether beech, lily, or seaweed, has its origin in a cell, which does not contain the ulterior product, but which is endowed with, or accompanied by a force, which provokes and directs the formation of all later developments. Here is the fact, or rather the mystery, as to the production of the several species with their special organs.
Wallace would have been delighted by the clarity of genetics, but it is unlikely that genetics would have shaken his belief in a directive intelligence, which he expressed by these lines from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’:
All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
The year 1909 was the centenary of Darwin’s birth, celebrated at Cambridge, and marked by a volume of essays. Wallace was invited to contribute, but declined ‘for many reasons’, partly because of the company he might be keeping. Thiselton-Dyer wrote a paper, ‘very good and thoroughly suitable to the occasion’, but did not go to Cambridge because, he informed Wallace, he ‘could not stand being told that Darwin’s mantle had fallen upon Bateson, – that the Origin of Species has still to be discovered, and that specific differences have no reality’; under such provocation he might have lost his temper.26 Wallace put off reading Bateson’s and De Vries’s chapters – it was absurd and incongruous that such persons should have a prominent place in a Darwinian celebration. Meldola, always thoughtful about Wallace’s feelings, made sure that a suitable telegram was sent to the old warrior and prophet.
At Broadstone, waiting for the book’s publication, he was more concerned about the view from his garden. His ‘charming lodge in a wilderness’ was once again in danger of being surrounded by buildings. People were ‘in treaty’ for a good deal of the field all round, and Lord Wimborne had raised his price to £250 an acre. Could Will and Violet manage an acre each, to secure a bit more of the wood? He might be able to find enough for an acre himself when the book was out – he badly wanted a permanent right of way out to the Poole road.27 Once again, enclosure and development threatened his peace. Somehow, the money was found, and Violet moved to join her parents, eventually starting a little school in a house built next door, Tulgey Wood.
He did not go far in his last years, preferring to enjoy his garden, and to let visitors come to him. But he did not retreat from what was going on in the rest of the world. At last, he told Will, there was a review of The World of Life in Nature, under the annoying heading ‘Science & Speculation’. The writer recognised ‘the amount of novel and interesting facts and conclusions’ and the ‘various new applications of the theory of Natural Selection’ – but, being plainly an agnostic, deplored that he had not been able to avoid the ‘pitfalls of teleological speculation’. Perhaps, though, it was better than he could have expected from Nature. Meanwhile, he was taking an infusion of cocoa shells for breakfast, harmless, yet quite refreshing: he offered to send Will some to try.28 His public correspondence continued: letters to the annual meetings of the Land Nationalisation Society, and the Anti-Vaccination League; a letter on the relation of the present flora of the British Isles to the Glacial Period; letters of protest to The Times and the Daily Chronicle about the iniquities of the Insurance Act. In his ninetieth year he gave interviews, on ‘The Great Strike – and After. Hopes of a National Peace’ to the Daily Chronicle, and on ‘The Problem of Life’ to the Daily News. He fired off a ‘short but big letter’ to Lloyd George, suggesting that he and Asquith should take over the management of the railways ‘of the entire country, by Royal Proclamation – on the ground of mismanagement for seventy years, and having brought the country to the verge of starvation and civil war …’29 The old socialist in him was very much alive. He was working on two short books for Cassell, Social Environment and Moral Progress and The Revolt of Democracy. Although he believed in the ultimate goodness of mankind, he never stopped trying to make this present life better and less uncomfortable for as many people as possible, though he now worked very slowly, he confided to Poulton, ‘and the war-news every day must be read’.30
In the summer and autumn of 1913, he grew weaker, as did his wife, suffering badly from arthritis. His project for a book, Darwin and Wallace, in collaboration with his friend James Marchant made little progress. At first, the gardener would wheel him round the grounds to see his best-loved flowers; he had developed ‘a sad mania for Alpine plants’. Then he asked for some of his favourite plants to be placed in front of his study windows. ‘Too many letters and home business. Too much bothered with many slight ailments, which altogether keep me busy attending to them. I am like Job, who said “the grasshopper was a burthen to him.”’ But he still felt able to ‘jog on a few years longer in this very good world …’31 On Sunday, 2 November, he fell ill, and went to bed. News of his condition brought journalists to the house. His manservant was approached: when the moment came, would he lower the blind in the bedroom as a signal? This was reported to the family doctor, Dr Norman. What, Norman recalled, testing the blind, like this? In Norman’s memory, one newspaper printed a premature obituary.32 Wallace died on 7 November. His immediate family was present, and William wrote a note for the press: ‘Dr Wallace passed away very peacefully at 9.25 a.m. without regaining consciousness.’
The obituaries were long, and laudatory. The funeral was quiet, undemonstrative. Suggestions about burial in Westminster Abbey were turned aside by the family. Wallace was buried in Broadstone cemetery, after a service conducted by the Bishop of Salisbury. William and Violet were there but Annie was too incapacitated to attend. (She died just over a year later, on 10 December, 1914.) Raphael Meldola came, to represent the Royal Society, and his old friend Edward Poulton, on behalf of the Linnean, and Joseph Hooker, of the Land Nationalisation Society.32 A tall fossilised tree trunk, found on a Dorset beach, was raised above the grave, a link to his wanderings in the forests of the Amazon and the Archipelago, and his days in the redwood and sequoia groves of California: a reminder of his belief in the unity of all living things.
15 The Old Hero
ON SATURDAY, 15 April 2000, on a damp English afternoon, there was a simple and moving ceremony at Wallace’s resting place in Broadstone cemetery. His two grandchildren, William’s sons John and Richard, laid a wreath, his great-great-grandson placed some flowers on the gravestone, and the Wallace family formally entrusted the lease of the grave, and the care of the memorial, to the Linnean Society, which was received by Sir Ghillean Prance, the President. Earlier in the day, at a special meeting of the Linnean Society held in the Wallace Lecture Theatre of Bournemouth University, a series of papers celebrated some of Wallace’s achievements. In 1998, the Linnean Society unveiled a full-length portrait of Wallace, which hangs now side by side with that of Darwin. Forty years before, on
the centenary of the joint papers, a commemorative plaque was unveiled, to commemorate the joint communication. The Linnean Society could not have done more to mark Wallace’s part in the theory of natural selection, nor to herald his achievements.1 The joint expedition of Wallace and Bates to the Amazon, and Wallace’s own epic voyages in the Malay Archipelago, formed a significant segment of the exhibition ‘Voyages of Discovery’ at the London Natural History Museum. Wallace’s pioneering travels up the river Vaupés, and his unique drawings of rare fish, have been beautifully presented by Sandra Knapp in Footsteps in the Forest;2 his better-known journeys in the east form the springboard and structure of Archipelago, a book tracing a kind of evolutionary line from Wallace’s own perceptions to a contemporary appreciation of the rich flora and fauna of the islands, and the precariousness of their natural resources.3 To generations of field naturalists, Wallace shines as an inspiration, not just because of his achievements and discoveries, but because of his independence, resilience, courage, and the joy that flashes out again and again in his response to a plant or a butterfly, to any one of the ‘perfect little organisms’ he encountered in the forest.
John Wilson, a descendant of Wallace’s aunt, subtitled his recent book, In search of Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘The Forgotten Naturalist’.4 Somehow, Wallace, who must have been one of the world’s best-known scientific thinkers at his death, slipped out of the consciousness of the general public, almost a willed act of Wallacean self-effacement. By the close of his life, he was, if something of a living legend, a kind of relic: science was moving on, and even Darwin would be eclipsed for a while. Marchant’s Letters and Reminiscences appeared in 1916, when the Western world had other things on its mind. Even within the scientific community, the verdict on Wallace was heavy with reservation. In a letter to the Reverend St John Thorpe, who had complained in 1917 that a notice in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society about Wallace and vivisection was ‘really impertinent’, the Secretary replied: ‘He was a regular paradoxer in astronomy, and his opinions on vaccination, vivisection and such like matters were utterly opposed to the whole body of scientific thought … Outside his special subject of Natural History Dr Wallace’s judgement was not to be relied on.’5 Wallace’s little heresies overlay his earlier scientific achievements; neither his biographer, Marchant, nor Wallace himself, in his autobiography, sought to deflect attention away from the political and social campaigns of the last phase, nor from his strengthening belief in the spiritual dimension. It became possible, perhaps convenient, to see Wallace as an eccentric, an enthusiastic stumbler on part of the truth.
In the fifty years or so that followed Letters and Reminiscences, little was published on Wallace except in relation to the other major figures of the mid-nineteenth century. He became a footnote, a diversion, the author of one great travel book which studiously avoided explicit reference to his scientific thinking. The 1958 centenary at the Linnean Society was a timely reminder. Wilma George’s biography in 1964, Biologist Philosopher, offered a lucid reappraisal of his scientific thinking.6 American scholars began to explore the course of evolutionary thinking, to chart the various cross-currents of influence, and to look in fine detail at some of the documents. Barbara G. Beddall wrote an influential paper, ‘Wallace, Darwin, and the theory of natural selection’, and followed it up with further probing commentaries.7 In an interview with Arnold Brackman, discussing the absence of certain key letters from the Wallace–Darwin–Hooker–Lyell sequence, she commented that ‘somebody cleaned up the file’.8 (Her suspect was Francis Darwin.) H. Lewis McKinney, in a series of meticulous and ground-breaking researches which culminated in a 1972 book, Wallace and Natural Selection, traced the development of Wallace’s thought by going back to his journals and notebooks, and drew pointed attention to the timing of the Ternate letter.9 When did it reach Downe? Why did it not reach Downe earlier, at the same time as the letter that Wallace sent to Bates? If it had reached Downe earlier, what did Darwin do with it? Did he sit stunned by the contents – or did he make use of them? Where had he reached with his own writing of his ‘big book’? The answer was ‘divergence’. According to Darwin’s personal journal, he began a section on divergence for his ‘long’ version on 14 April, and concluded it on 12 June. McKinney’s account is very carefully phrased: he raises questions, and qualifies the word ‘deception’ with ‘perhaps’. Could Darwin have used Wallace’s ideas to clarify his own, and then written to Lyell to ask advice on what to do with Wallace’s brilliant paper? Into this inviting gap strode two more Americans, Arnold Brackman, who constructed a compelling piece of investigative journalism and research called A Delicate Arrangement: the Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace,10 and a historian of science John L. Brooks, who produced an equally riveting and minutely researched account, Just before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution.11 Brooks and Brackman offer a conspiracy reading of the 1858 events. They tell a gripping story, built around the reconstructed journey of the fatal envelope, investing it with enough explosive power to blow up Darwin and the whole official narrative. Brooks concludes that Darwin ‘must have received Wallace’s manuscript on either of two dates in May’: ‘Receipt on May 18 would leave 25 days for a completion of those folios (on ‘Divergence’) by June 12; May 28–29 would leave scarcely two weeks. But it must be conceded that desperation will make the pen move quickly.’12 In Brackman’s more extreme version, the episode becomes a piece of typical British, or English, hypocrisy, an exercise in the politics of class and education, in which Wallace, the species man, the working naturalist, the humble collector, is seen off by the scientific toffs. Because of his personality, Wallace colluded in the ‘delicate arrangement’, and ‘turned the other cheek’.13
Never has an intriguing theory been built on slenderer evidence, or on its admittedly intriguing absence. Darwin’s letter to Lyell, announcing the arrival of Wallace’s paper – ‘He has today sent me the enclosed’ – is dated ‘18th’, and ‘June’ has been added, presumably by Francis Darwin; the other letters in the sequence follow on 25 and 26 June 1858.14 The envelope to Frederick Bates is stamped ‘JU 3 58’ – 3 June.15 McKinney, Brooks and Brackman argue that the letter to Darwin should have arrived at least a fortnight before the 18 June date. Brooks investigated the postal schedules of the Royal Dutch Mail, and calculated that it was entirely possible for the letter to Darwin to have arrived on 18 May. The letter to Bates was routed via Southampton, the slower and cheaper passage for ‘heavy’ mail. Brooks assumed that the letter to Darwin would go via Marseilles, and therefore arrive sooner. The total reliability of the mail service is taken as absolute. However thin the paper on which Wallace wrote his Ternate essay, the package to Darwin was a different weight, and, literally, heavier, than the letter to Bates; it could have been delayed at any stage along its route. There is no reason to suppose that Darwin did not write immediately to Lyell; his letter certainly reads as an entirely spontaneous reaction to a most unpleasant shock.
Brooks goes on to suggest that Darwin might have used the interval between receiving Wallace’s paper and forwarding it to Lyell to write a section of his manuscript, on divergence, building on the clues he found in Wallace to fill in a gap in his own theory. In support of this, he points out that a crucial section in Darwin’s ‘big species book’, the projected work on ‘Natural Selection’ which was condensed into The Origin of Species, was inserted at this precise point in time: Darwin, by his own account, was working on divergence during the months of May and early June. The impact of Wallace on Darwin was, of course, already considerable; ever since Lyell, and Blyth, alerted him to the implication of Wallace’s Sarawak paper, and in response to Lyell’s further urging him to publish a ‘sketch’ of his views, he had been accelerating with his ‘species’ book. Brooks argues that the arrival of the Ternate essay not only provided vital clues in itself, but prompted Darwin to revisit the Sarawak material. Having done so, he hastily, and radically, revised his views on t
he significance of extinction and divergence, and their place within a system of natural affinities.
Again, there is no evidence for this sequence of cause and effect, though it is an entirely possible interpretation of events, once the ‘delay’ hypothesis has been accepted. But why should Darwin do this? Darwin was keeping Lyell and Hooker in close touch with the progress of his work. There was no secret about it so far as they were concerned; Lyell, and particularly Hooker, were the two people in whom he consistently confided. So far as priority was concerned, the notes on divergence were irrelevant. Darwin had no ready-made sketch at hand ripe for publication, whereas the Wallace essay seemed complete, polished and fluent. In fact, by sending it to Lyell with his accompanying letter, Darwin succeeded in accelerating the path of Wallace’s theory: no key scientific paper can ever have been so swiftly refereed and placed in the public domain.