![]() Here we see him developing his distinctive professional characteristics. Wallace’s four years in the Amazon are chronicled by Sandra Knapp in Footsteps in the Forest, with excerpts from Wallace’s own account set alongside commentary based largely on her experiences as a field botanist in South America. Darwin travelled as Captain FitzRoy’s ‘gentleman companion’ Wallace and Bates travelled as professional collectors, their trip underwritten by the sale of specimens to museums and to wealthy amateurs intent on improving their ‘cabinets’. In 1848, aged 25 and 23 respectively, Wallace and Bates travelled together to the Amazon: Wallace’s version of Darwin’s Beagle voyage was underway, but in very different circumstances. Bates (who also became a prominent tropical biologist). A slump in the surveying business, however, found him teaching in Leicester, where he met another budding naturalist, H.W. Drawing parallels between them does Wallace an injustice because it neglects his many non-scientific dimensions.īorn in Usk, Gwent, in 1823 into a hard-up middle-class family, Wallace left school at 13 and ended up working with his brother as a surveyor. Even Wallace’s biographers have been sucked into the vortex – a 1966 biography was called Darwin’s Moon.ĭespite the obvious overlaps between their careers – formative years spent immersed in the natural history of distant regions, later years in the upper echelons of Victorian science – Darwin and Wallace were very different men. It has caused him to be forever bracketed with Darwin, but not as an equal he has been condemned always to play Watson to Darwin’s Holmes. In fact, what was in many ways Wallace’s finest hour may paradoxically have contributed to his neglect by posterity. History, however, has been kinder to Darwin than he feared, and it is Wallace who has been relegated to the footnotes. ‘So all my originality,’ he wrote, ‘whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.’ Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet published. In a feverish ‘flash of light’, Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin.
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