In 1853, he published an account of his trip, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.įrom 1854 to 1862, Wallace traveled through the Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia), to collect specimens and study nature. He himself and the other passengers and crew were rescued by a passing ship. However, in the mid-Atlantic, the ship caught fire and sank, along with almost all of his collection and most of his diaries. In 1852, after more than four years of collecting thousands of birds, beetles, butterflies, and other animal specimens, Wallace set forth on a ship, with his collection, to return to England. While there, Wallace and Bates went in separate directions to cover more area. Beagle and an account by Alexander von Humboldt on his journeys to South America. Among their inspirations were Charles Darwin's book on his voyage on the H.M.S. In 1848, Wallace, together with Henry Walter Bates, whom he had met four years earlier, left for Brazil to collect specimens in the Amazon Rainforest, with the express intention of gathering facts in order to solve the riddle of the origin of species. Wallace in Singapore, 1862 Exploration and study of the natural world After the death of his brother William in 1845, Wallace left his teaching position to assume control of his brother's firm.Ī. While at Leicester, he became a friend with Henry Walter Bates, a naturalist, who introduced Wallace to the art of collecting beetles. In 1844, Wallace was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester, England. Between 18, he spent his time surveying in the west of England and Wales. After a stint as an apprentice builder in London, England, he began to work as a surveyor with his older brother William. His father died a few years earlier, when Wallace was but 11 years old. He attended grammar school in Hertford until financial ruin forced his family to withdraw him in 1836. He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. Wallace was born in 1823 at Usk, Monmouthshire in Wales. The publication in the opening years of the twenty first century of at least five Wallace biographies and two Wallace anthologies carried the implication that his contributions would not be forgotten. Due perhaps to his scientifically aberrant views, Wallace was under-appreciated in the twentieth century for his scientific contributions. Among scientists he was the last living member of a cluster of great nineteenth century British natural scientists that had included Charles Darwin the geologist, Sir Charles Lyell the botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker and the philosopher and anatomist, Thomas Henry Huxley. In some of his writings, Wallace would report on individuals' experiences of various psychic phenomena.Īt the time of his death, he was widely known in conventional intellectual circles as a naturalist, explorer, and evolutionary thinker and in popular culture as an advocate of psychical research, a humanist, and advocate for social reform. He also asserted that the soft, sensitive human skin, color sense, speech, and sensibilities in music, art, and morality could only have arisen through the guidance of a superior intelligence. He differed from Darwin and most modern evolutionists in two major aspects: He considered natural selection insufficient to account for the human intellect and consciousness and he was a spiritualist who maintained that human beings had a "second self" that continued after the death of the body, and could not have come about through survival of the fittest. Wallace had his own evolutionary theories distinct from Darwin and was considered a major evolutionary thinker of his day. Wallace is sometimes called the "father of biogeography" for his work in correlating the distribution of animal species with geography, both current and through long periods of geological change. He independently proposed a theory of natural selection that prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own more developed and researched theory sooner than he had intended. Alfred Russel Wallace, Order of Merit, Fellow of the Royal Society (Janu– November 7, 1913), was an English (Welsh) naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist.
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