Alfred Russel Wallace(1823–1913)

Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 at Kensington Cottage near Llanbadoc in Monmouthshire on the Welsh border, the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace, an English-born solicitor of failing fortune and Border-Scottish descent, and Mary Anne Greenell. The Wallace surname came down to him through his paternal grandfather William Wallace, a Hertfordshire grain merchant of Lowland Scottish family who claimed cousinship with the Border Wallaces of Riccarton. Thomas Vere Wallace had lost most of his modest inheritance by the time Alfred was five, and the family moved to Hertford to economise. Alfred was schooled at Hertford Grammar to fourteen, then apprenticed to his eldest brother William, a land surveyor working the country railways and tithe maps of the late 1830s.

For six years from 1837 he tramped the lanes of Bedfordshire, Herefordshire and the south Welsh Marches with a theodolite and a chain, surveying enclosure and tithe maps in the days when ten thousand miles of new English railway were being laid. The work taught him the close reading of landscape and plant communities that became the foundation of his natural history. He met the entomologist Henry Walter Bates in Leicester in 1844; the two of them spent the next two years collecting beetles in the Marches, reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and resolving in the autumn of 1847 to fund a Brazilian expedition by selling specimens to British museums. They sailed for Pará in April 1848. The four-year expedition took Wallace up the Rio Negro and the upper Vaupés to the headwaters in Colombian territory, the first European since the Spanish missionaries to reach them. The voyage home tested him hard: the Helen caught fire in mid-Atlantic and he spent ten days in an open boat before a passing brig brought him safely to Deal on 1 October 1852.

He organised a second, longer expedition to the Malay Archipelago, sailing in March 1854. The Malay expedition lasted eight years. Wallace collected over 125,000 specimens from Singapore down through Borneo, Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, Halmahera, Ternate, the Aru Islands and New Guinea. He noticed, between Bali and Lombok, the sharp faunal break between Asian and Australasian wildlife that he later mapped as the Wallace Line. In February 1858, prostrate with malaria in his hut on the volcanic island of Ternate in the Moluccas, he wrote out in a single sustained session what he later called the Ternate letter: a four-thousand-word essay titled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, setting out the theory of evolution by natural selection. He posted it from Ternate in March 1858 to the only person he knew in England who he thought would understand it, the Down House correspondent who had been writing him friendly letters for two years: Charles Darwin.

The letter reached Darwin at Down House on 18 June 1858. Darwin, who had been working on the same theory for twenty years and had not published, was, by his own letter to Charles Lyell that afternoon, dismayed. Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker, after a week of frantic correspondence, proposed the solution that became one of the most famous arrangements in the history of science: a joint reading at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858 of Wallace's Ternate letter and an extract from Darwin's unpublished manuscripts of 1844 and 1857, the priority shared between the two men. Wallace, still in Ternate, did not learn of the arrangement for some months and accepted it without complaint when he did. Darwin's On the Origin of Species followed in November 1859. Wallace's own The Malay Archipelago (1869) was the bestselling scientific travelogue of the century. The two men were friends for the rest of Darwin's life, and Wallace was a pall-bearer at Darwin's funeral in 1882.

Wallace returned to England in 1862 and lived the next half-century as the senior figure of British evolutionary biology, the founder of zoogeography (the Wallace Line and the six biogeographical regions are his), and a campaigner for women's suffrage, free trade and land nationalisation. He received the Royal Society's Royal Medal (1868) and Copley Medal (1908), the Linnean Society's first Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908, and was made a Member of the Order of Merit in 1908. He died at his home Old Orchard near Broadstone in Dorset on 7 November 1913, aged ninety, and is buried at Broadstone under a fossilised tree trunk from the Portland quarries. The Wallace name today carries his memory as the surname of the man who, working alone in a malarial hut on a Moluccan volcanic island, independently arrived at the theory that had taken Darwin twenty years and the Beagle voyage to formulate, and posted it to the only man in England capable of recognising what it was.