The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace

  • Ross Slotten
Columbia University Press: 2004. 648 pp. $39.50, £26.50 0231130104 | ISBN: 0-231-13010-4
Alfred Russel Wallace wrote some 700 articles and 20 books on a wide range of subjects. Credit: G. BECCALONI

Lying ill with fever on the remote Molluccan island of Halmahera in February 1858, the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace puzzled over the phenomenon of ‘species transmutation’ — a subject that had rarely been absent from his thoughts for the past 13 years. Three years earlier he had published an important but largely unnoticed paper on this topic, now known as evolution, in which he strongly argued that organisms must have evolved from earlier forms. But the mechanism of this process had so far eluded him — as it had (virtually) everyone else.

Suddenly, a flash of insight led him to the idea of natural selection as the mechanism driving evolutionary change. Once he had recovered enough strength, he fleshed out his ideas in an essay entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”. Knowing that his occasional correspondent Charles Darwin was also keenly interested in the ‘species problem’, he sent the essay to him on the next mail boat that departed from the neighbouring island of Ternate. Unknown to Wallace, Darwin had in fact discovered natural selection some 20 years earlier and, urged on by the geologist Charles Lyell, he was slowly writing a huge tome in which he planned to present his ‘heretical’ theory to the world.

The events that unfolded following Darwin's receipt of Wallace's essay have become legendary. Realizing that Wallace had independently reached the same conclusion as himself, Darwin was thrown into a state of confusion and despair. He wrote to Lyell: “Your words have come true with a vengeance ... all my originality will be smashed.” Lyell contacted another of Darwin's influential friends, the botanist Joseph Hooker, and together they sought to remedy the awkward situation as best they could.

Without first asking Wallace's permission, they arranged for his essay to be read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in July 1858, along with an abstract of an unpublished manuscript on natural selection that Darwin had written in 1844, and an abstract of a letter outlining the concept of descent with modification that Darwin had sent to the American botanist Asa Gray the year before. By arranging these texts in the order in which they had been written, Lyell and Hooker secured Darwin's priority, and when they were published a month later, Darwin's name naturally appeared as first author of what became the first publication to explicitly propose the theory of evolution by natural selection. This, together with the fact that Darwin's Origin of Species (an abstract of his “big book”) was printed only a year later, are two of the reasons why Wallace often receives little or no recognition for the discovery.

The Heretic in Darwin's Court by Ross Slotten and An Elusive Victorian by Martin Fichman are the latest in a recent spate of books that examine Wallace's fascinating life and often controversial work. Slotten's book is a conventional, chronologically arranged biography, whereas Fichman's aims to provide “a contextualist and analytical study of Wallace's major intellectual and cultural views and activities”.

Slotten's book is the most detailed study of its kind published to date and provides a vivid account of Wallace's rich 90-year life. It covers his early impecunious years at school in Hertford (he left school aged 13) and his training as a land surveyor; his four years collecting biological specimens in the Amazon basin (many of which were destroyed when his ship sank on the way back to Britain); his eight years collecting in Southeast Asia (he sent back 126,000 biological specimens, including 1,000 species new to science); and his years in England, during which he wrote some 700 articles and 20 books on an eclectic range of subjects and made a prodigious number of seminal contributions to the fields of biology, geography, geology and anthropology, among others. Slotten attempts to produce a “three-dimensional portrait of a man whose forays into spiritualism, socialism, antivaccinationism, and other unorthodox ‘isms’ have been caricatured, overanalyzed, or ignored by specialists in the academic world”. However, like most previous biographers, Slotten seems perplexed by some of Wallace's seemingly crackpot beliefs, and although he discusses them at length, he makes little attempt to analyse them in depth.

An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace

  • Martin Fichman
Chicago University Press: 2004. 416 pp. $40, £28 0226246132 | ISBN: 0-226-24613-2

Fichman, in contrast, tries to do just that and adopts a thematic approach to scrutinize each of Wallace's major interests in turn. He argues that Wallace sought to integrate his beliefs into a single internally consistent world view, which he calls Wallace's “teleological evolutionary cosmology”, and he maintains that many of Wallace's putative unorthodoxies are in fact artefacts of historiography. From a modern perspective, it may seem inappropriate for an ‘objective’ scientist to espouse beliefs such as spiritualism, as Wallace did, but in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth it was entirely acceptable for scientists to do so.

Fichman's book is the more challenging read and is likely to appeal mainly to serious Wallace scholars. But to understand why a book like Fichman's is needed in the first place, anyone unfamiliar with Wallace's work should probably study a biography such as Slotten's.