7 November: Boreham on Alfred Russell Wallace

Rivalry and Chivalry
Alfred Russell Wallace, the anniversary of whose death this is, will always be remembered as the friend of Darwin, but he was no mere subordinate or understudy. He himself penetrated and explored many spacious and important fields that Darwin never troubled to enter. Travelling extensively, and with his eyes wide open, he knew the world pretty thoroughly, and made effective use of all his observations. Few books of travel have appealed more deeply to the popular fancy than the story of his adventures on the Amazon. His experiences among the gigantic forests, the gorgeous birds, the titanic reptiles, and the barbarous peoples of the South American jungles are always fascinating and often sensational. His biography is as variegated as an Oriental mosaic. His alert and hungry mind was perpetually searching for fresh realms of conquest. Political economy, the problems of industry, the conundrums of philosophy, and the mysticism of theology were all within the compass of his domain. He hated to feel that any stick or stone in the entire universe had eluded him.

He was, however, dogged by early misfortune. He was 25 when he went to South America. Darwin was then 39. With a view to elaborating his conclusions and proving his points, Wallace gathered from the recesses of the South American wilds one of the most extraordinary and exhaustive zoological collections ever carried across the Atlantic. It was a floating menagerie. All at once, to the horror of the unhappy naturalist, the ship caught fire. Wallace, with the crew, escaped in a leaky boat, but he suffered the indescribable mortification of watching the birds, beasts, and reptiles that he had been at such pains to capture, plunging either into the flames on the one hand or into the sea on the other.

Making His Own Loss His Rival's Gain
Wallace has himself described the mental anguish of that tragic moment. To obtain that collection, he had penetrated to places on which no European foot had previously trod. He had struggled on, when almost overcome by ague, in the rapturous prospect of displaying to the people of England the weird and attractive fauna of the unexplored territories in which he had repeatedly risked his life. And now everything was gone! "I knew," he adds, philosophically, "that such bitter regrets and lamentations were vain, and I tried to think as little as possible about what might have been." Would the preservation of that remarkable and priceless collection have expedited the development of Wallace's theories, and, by so doing have given him an advantage over Darwin? We shall never know. He himself could never make up his mind upon that point; but, at the time he regarded his loss as the most devastating that a man could suffer.

A few years later, whilst Darwin was putting the finishing touches to the book that gave men an entirely new conception of the universe, and that created a greater sensation than any scientific treatise since the days of Copernicus, Wallace was lounging under the palm groves of a tropical island in the Pacific, revolving in his restless brain the stateliest problems with which science is called to deal. Wrapped in heavy blankets, he was slowly recovering from a serious illness, and had plenty of time for abstract cogitation. "All at once," he says, "there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest, and, in the two hours that elapsed before the ague fit was over, I had thought out the whole of the theory." How was he to know that, for 20 years, Darwin had been painfully working his way to the very same conclusion? Yet, confident of Darwin's interest, he wrote to him. Darwin received the letter on June 18, 1858. "It contains," Darwin told a friend, "the astounding news that the theory that I have been elaborating during 20 years has been suddenly reached by Mr. Wallace in the East. I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit." Here was a dilemma! What was to be done?

A Pooling Of Ideas That Enriched Mankind
Darwin sent Wallace's letter to Sir Charles Lyell. "I never saw a more striking coincidence," he told Lyell. "If Wallace had seen my manuscript, he could not have made a better abstract. Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed." Wallace's sentences, penned before he had seen Darwin's book, represent the articulation of Darwinism in its most pronounced form. The most engaging feature of this remarkable web of circumstance lies in the fact that the dual discovery awoke in the breast of neither philosopher the slightest tinge of jealousy. Darwin admitted Wallace's claims with the utmost frankness, whilst Wallace, recognising that his rival held the field, hurried to his side and rendered him all the assistance in his power.

A fast friendship sprang up between them, and, when Wallace forgot his own part in the formulation of the theory, Darwin had more than once to remonstrate with him concerning his self-effacement. "You are the only man I ever heard of," Darwin wrote, "who persistently does himself an injustice and never demands justice. But you cannot burke yourself, however hard you try!" Darwin was right and the world soon came to recognise that, whilst Darwin and Wallace agreed generally, they differed in detail. Wallace's discipleship was not slavish, but distinctive. In one or two respects he out-Darwined Darwin; but, as against this, he held strongly that the complexity of living structures emphatically implies a creative power, a directive mind, and an ultimate purpose. He closes his monumental work by stating his agreement with Darwin as to the fundamental spirituality of man, although he reached that goal by a somewhat different route. Darwin was inclined to the view that the human mind could have been evolved from those of a lower order. Wallace dissented. Both, however, were very sure of God and very jealous of the majesty of man. And, blending their voices in that basic and exalted harmony, we may very well take our leave of them.

F W Boreham

Image: Alfred Russell Wallace