Alfred Russel Wallace
an outline biography
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was born in Usk,
Monmouthshire (now part of Gwent), Wales.
He travelled and collected plant samples in the Amazon basin
in association with Henry Walter Bates (1842-52) and was
similarly employed the Malay Archipelago and the Spice Islands
(1854-62).
Wallace theorised on the basis of his findings and was
influenced in this theorising by Thomas Malthus' Essay on
Population. The outcome of Wallace's ruminations was that he
went on to propound a theory of the evolutionary origin of
species by natural selection.
It was a memoir sent to by Wallace to the influential expert
naturalist Charles Darwin in 1858 that prompted Darwin to make
public his own theorisings about the evolution of species.
Darwin's own theorisings on evolution had largely taken their
final form some fifteen years previously but he had been most
hesitant about making them public !!!
Prompted by Wallace's memoir Darwin, in consultation with Sir
Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, agreed that there should be
a public presentation of his own and Wallace's potentially
dramatically controversial views.
Neither Wallace nor Charles Darwin were present at the
historic meeting of the Linnaean Society in July 1858 when papers
attributable to each were brought to the attention of the wider
scientific public. Wallace's paper was presented under the title
"On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the
Original Type."
Following on from Wallace's initial approach Darwin, besides
preparing a paper that was read to the Linnean Society, made
efforts to draw his notes together into a work intended for
publication. That work was prepared and published under the title
The Origin of Species in 1859.
Wallace contributed greatly to the scientific foundations of
zoogeography, including his proposal, based on his observations
in the Malay Archipelago, for the evolutionary distinction
between the fauna of Australia and Asia (Wallace's line).
Wallace's Line is located between the Islands of Borneo and
Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Malay Archipelago.
Alfred Russel Wallace' works include Malay Archipelago
(1869), Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection
(1870), The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876),
and Man's Place in the Universe (1903).
More information about Wallace is available at an external site which attracted
one of Scientific American's 50 Best Sci-Tech Websites of 2003 awards. Please
follow this link to access this series of pages:-
The Alfred Russel Wallace Page
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