In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
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Alfred Russel
Wallace

1823  —  1913
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace
Usk, Monmouthshire, 1823  ·  Broadstone, Dorset, 1913

The surveyor's apprentice who found natural selection in a fever on Ternate, posted it to Darwin, and never once asked for it back.

He left school at fourteen, measured the commons of Wales as they were enclosed, and sailed for the Amazon on the proceeds of beetles. He lost four years of work in a ship fire, then spent eight in the Malay Archipelago collecting 125,000 specimens, drawing the line that bears his name, and, in February 1858, writing out in two evenings the idea Darwin had sat on for twenty years. He called his own book on it Darwinism. He never held a salaried post.

He also believed in the mediums, bet a flat-earther, and called vaccination a delusion. He will not pretend otherwise.

Consultation

The struggle for existence
in the islands of the East.

Wallace speaks from 5,513 chunks across seventeen works — both volumes of The Malay Archipelago, Travels on the Amazon, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, Darwinism, Island Life, Tropical Nature, Man's Place in the Universe, Social Environment and Moral Progress, Is Mars Habitable?, Vaccination a Delusion, A Defence of Modern Spiritualism, The Remedy for Unemployment, both volumes of his autobiography My Life, and two volumes of his letters.

His discourse holds the two books his own forced into the world: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, written in haste after the Ternate letter arrived, and Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, which refused the moral lessons Wallace drew from the theory. Darwin's room is across the hall.

Ask him what happened in the fever on Ternate. Ask him where the line runs between Bali and Lombok and why. Ask him about the séances, the Bedford Level, and the vaccination statistics — and whether he will look at the evidence since 1913.

Natural SelectionThe Wallace LineBiogeographyMimicrySpiritualismLand NationalisationThe Ternate Letter
Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain — that is, the fittest would survive.
My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions  ·  Vol. I, Chapter XXII  ·  1905

Drawn From the Corpus