ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE was born on January 8, 1823, in Usk, Wales, the eighth child of Thomas Vere and Mary Anne Wallace.1 By a quirk in the registry, his middle name was misspelled “Russel” and was never corrected. The Wallace side traced itself back, like all Wallaces, to Sir William Wallace, the thirteenth-century hero who had led an unsuccessful revolt against Scotland’s English overlords. His mother’s relatives, French Huguenots, had fled to England at the end of the sixteenth century, anglicizing their name from Grenaille to Greenell. The Wallaces, devout Anglicans, were of the middle class, but Thomas Wallace, a lawyer who never practiced his profession, had squandered his inheritance of £500 a year as a result of a series of poor business decisions. To minimize expenses, in 1818 or 1819 he moved his family from Hertford, a town north of London, to Usk, a remote and picturesque market town in southeastern Wales, where rents were low and prices of goods half those of London. The Wallace family, which with Alfred’s birth included five surviving children and a servant, occupied a spacious cottage along the Usk River. There Thomas Wallace learned the art of self-sufficiency; he grew his own fruits and vegetables, raised his own chickens, and tutored his children. It was the most satisfying period of his life.
In 1828 Mary Anne Wallace Inherited Money from her stepmother and the Wallaces returned to Hertford, where Alfred received his only formal education. At the local grammar school, he was taught elementary French but not enough Latin to make sense of Virgil, Cicero, or the other great Roman writers. Geography, which would become a lifelong fascination, was almost as tedious as Latin grammar, and science was not a part of the curriculum. In My Life, his autobiography, he writes that he acquired more knowledge from his father and older brothers than from his schoolmasters. From his father, who read the plays of Shakespeare and other classics to the family in the evenings, he developed a love of all types of literature. By the age of thirteen, he had read Tom Jones, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, and the Inferno—demonstrating not only a precocious intellect but also a high degree of self-motivation. From his brother John, who was six years his senior and a talented mechanic, he learned to “appreciate the pleasure and utility of doing for one’s self everything that one is able to do.”2
But prosperity and tranquility were to be short-lived. In 1832 Alfred’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Eliza, died from tuberculosis, a devastating blow to his parents, who already had endured the deaths of three other daughters. Four years later, Thomas Wallace lost the last of his personal savings as a result of bad real-estate investments. Shortly thereafter, Alfred’s maternal uncle, the executor of the Greenell family’s estate, declared bankruptcy, having (without anyone’s knowledge or consent) borrowed against the Wallace children’s small legacies and Mary Anne’s modest inheritance to settle his debts. Once again driven to the brink of destitution, Thomas and Mary Anne Wallace and their youngest child, Herbert, moved from their comfortable house in Hertford to a small red-brick cottage in the village of Hoddesdon, a few miles south, to be near Fanny, their only remaining daughter, who at the age of twenty-four had taken a job as a governess to help support the family.3 For thirteen-year-old Alfred, the reversal in the family fortunes altered the course of his life. His father could no longer afford to pay for his education. Moreover, there was no room for him in the new cottage. Around Christmas 1836, Thomas removed him from school and packed him off to London to board with John, an apprentice carpenter at a builder’s yard, where he was expected to make his own way in the world.
The abrupt relocation to London seemed not to be too traumatic, however, and Alfred quickly adjusted. He shared a room and bed with John on Robert Street, off Hampstead Road, a five-minute walk from the workshop of a Mr. Webster, John’s employer (and future father-in-law). At first he was not expected to work; he was merely an observer of working-class life. But it was an eye-opening experience. Here in London, the rudiments of his social conscience were awakened. At John’s instigation, for the next six months he was exposed to the radical ideas of working-class men at the London Mechanics’ Institute, one of several such institutions of higher learning scattered throughout the British Isles and established by forward-thinking entrepreneurs who needed skilled, educated men to manage their factories. Fired by the egalitarian teachings of the Welsh socialist and philanthropist Robert Owen, Alfred rejected the artificial constraints of the English class system, which pigeonholed every citizen and blocked the lower classes from sharing power and wealth with the ruling elite. Owen believed (and convinced the teenage Alfred) that one’s character was formed by one’s circumstances—that every child, from every class, was a blank slate who could be taught to behave in a morally correct or incorrect manner. In A New View of Society, published in 1813, he wrote that the supposition that every individual is accountable for all his sentiments and habits, and consequently deserves reward or punishment depending on his actions, was founded on “erroneous principles.” According to Owen, society and its leaders—the clergy and politicians—were responsible for the criminal behavior that blighted the lower classes. He demonstrated in his mills at New Lanark, near Glasgow, that drunkenness, theft, lying, and violent quarrels—common events in the workplace—could be replaced by an improved work ethic and proper moral values if the work environment was more humane and children were sent to school and not to sweatshops. The promotion of the happiness of every individual and of society as a whole, known as utilitarianism, was Owen’s goal, one that stirred the hearts of the workingmen (and their middle-class sympathizers) who came to hear his lectures at the Mechanics’ Institutes.4
The antiecclesiastical diatribes of the deist Thomas Paine were also popular at the Mechanics’ Institutes. In The Age of Reason, which Alfred read at this time, Paine stated that science and the mechanical arts were the engines of improvement; religion, he said, kept the citizenry ignorant of its natural rights and had become nothing more than a means of wealth for avaricious priests. Moreover, the “obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness” that filled half the Bible had taught people to persecute and revenge themselves on others instead of imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God.5 Paine transformed Alfred into an agnostic.
In the summer of 1837, Alfred joined his oldest brother, William, as an apprentice land surveyor in the countryside north of London. (Boarding with John had been a stopgap measure until William was ready to take him on.) William was twenty-seven years old, intelligent, well read, and worldly; his more radical political views clashed with those of their father, “a genuine Tory,” Alfred reported many years later, who believed that political reform was “a sad giving-way to the ignorant clamour of the mob.”6 Alfred barely knew his brother when they began their travels, but he had great respect for William and was even a little afraid of him. In his autobiography, he portrays William as ascetic and humorless, an image that may or may not have reflected reality. William was saddled with considerable responsibilities, having inherited Alfred because his brother had nowhere else to go. His pecuniary circumstances were little better than their father’s, and money was a constant source of anxiety—reflected in his reluctance to buy new clothes for Alfred, who was ashamed to be seen in the threadbare jackets and trousers he was rapidly outgrowing. Despite their fourteen-year age difference, however, the two brothers got on surprisingly well. They led a peripatetic existence, moving from town to town, never remaining anywhere long enough to develop lasting relationships. This gypsy life seemed to be in the Wallace blood; Alfred had never remained in any one place for more than a few years, nor would he for the rest of his long life.
The seven years that he spent with his brother were critical in terms of his intellectual and emotional development. Much of the time, William was his only steady companion; sometimes he was left alone for days or weeks, cut off from civilization, while William searched for work. This isolation allowed his keen mind to grow in its own direction, without guidance or pressure to follow a preconceived course, while his natural optimism kept him from succumbing to depression. His isolation also nurtured an idiosyncratic view of life. To survive in hard times—rural England in the early nineteenth century was difficult for all but the thin upper crust of society—one needed great inner strength and firm convictions, no matter how unorthodox, and the young Wallace had both to a remarkable degree. This unusual combination of emotional stability and intellectual fortitude was undoubtedly the foundation of his later unconventionality.
Alfred valued these periods of solitude, when he could roam the countryside on sturdy legs while his imagination was free to wander anywhere it liked. Both his legs and his brain covered a lot of territory in those years. When he began his apprenticeship with William, he knew virtually nothing about natural science; by the end of 1843, when he left William’s service, he was beginning to grapple with the fundamental questions preoccupying the greatest philosophical naturalists of his era, including that of the origin of species.
Like most good land surveyors of the time, William was an amateur geologist. As the two brothers hiked through the parishes north of London, surveying the vast properties of the great landowners, William scoured hillsides and streambeds for unusual stones, which held in their mineral lattices the secrets of the past history of the earth. He dispelled some of the myths of Alfred’s childhood, one of which was the nature of belemnites—cigar-shaped rocks known to English schoolboys as “thunderbolts”—which were abundant in the chalk and gravel deposits in the places they surveyed. Despite their nickname, they had not been hurled from heaven by a raging God during a thunderstorm. William said that they were not rocks at all, but the fossilized internal shells of ancient squid that had thrived in some mysterious distant past, when the earth’s flora and fauna differed from those existing today. With no previous instruction in natural history, Alfred also had assumed that chalk, a substance encountered everywhere around Hertford and reached in other places by digging ten to twenty feet below the surface, was the “natural and universal” substance of the earth, “the only question being how deep you must go to reach it.”7 William let him know that there was a science called geology and showed him that chalk was not found everywhere. Under William’s tutelage—for William was often more like a teacher than a brother—a new world opened up to Alfred, one governed by laws and principles that his schoolmasters had neglected to include in their parochial curriculum.
Alfred was intrigued by fossils and geologic formations, but his enduring interest in geology and natural history would not develop until a few years later. In 1837 and 1838, he was more excited by surveying and mapping. Among William’s cache of books and magazines, he had discovered a treatise on surveying, and he taught himself everything he could learn about his new occupation. His capacity for concentration and his predilection for the complete mastery of a subject showed themselves at an early age; now and for the rest of his life, he would throw himself into a field of study until he had exhausted all its possibilities. From the Trigonometrical Survey of England, he taught himself the fundamentals of mapmaking, and in his idle moments practiced calculating the distances between towns by measuring the angles and lengths of triangles formed by conspicuous landmarks, such as church spires and hilltop villages. The book familiarized him with the panoply of surveying instruments necessary to make more sophisticated calculations, but the only instrument he could afford was a pocket sextant, which he carried with him at all times, becoming expert in its use. He was learning the importance of boundaries and borders, concepts that would later emerge as crucial to his understanding of the geographic distribution of plants, animals, and the various races of Homo sapiens. He was always making maps, perhaps outmapping his brother, whose sketching abilities he could not match and deeply envied. Sibling rivalry may have motivated him as much as a genuine interest in the technical minutiae of surveying.8
In late 1839 or early 1840, Alfred and William moved to the small town of Kington, near the Welsh border. A few years earlier, Parliament had passed the Tithe Commutation Act, which established a monetary system for the payment of tithes to the Church of England. To improve government record keeping and augment the revenues of the church and its allies, the aristocratic landowners, every parish in England and Wales had to be surveyed and maps drawn listing the landowner, tenant, property, acreage, and tithe payable.9 The Wallace brothers’ job was to survey and make plans for the enclosure of the common lands, a euphemism for denying poor farmers access to pasture for their small herds of domestic animals and sources of fuel and building materials for their daily survival. Many of these previously open areas were the last remnants of pristine nature, where one could breathe clean air and enjoy the beauty of an unaltered landscape. Although in later years Wallace would express outrage at the loss of these lands, which he called an “all-embracing system of land-robbery,” in his youth no such ideas ever occurred to him. He was absorbed in surveying and the pleasures of the wild, picturesque, boggy, and barren moors and felt no shame for his part in depriving his fellow citizens of their natural patrimony. For part of the time, he traveled through the counties of Shropshire and Radnorshire (now Powyshire), where he meticulously resurveyed a river called Senni Street, whose unusually twisted course had been erroneously mapped. In retrospect, he complained in his autobiography that “the numerous bends [had] been inserted at random as if of no importance.”10 He also took the opportunity to examine the boundaries of two distinct rock formations near Ludlow, sandstone on one side and Silurian shales on the other. By early 1841, when he was eighteen, he had acquired a good grasp of the basic principles of geology.
Later that year, the two brothers moved south to Neath, a Welsh town located on Swansea Bay, off the Bristol Channel. For the next two years, they helped design and superintend the erection of warehouses by means of powerful cranes. At night they taught themselves the fundamentals of civil engineering and the intricacies of making blueprints, guided by a book on Gothic architecture. They also learned methods for sounding rivers as they worked on a project to improve navigation in the Neath harbor. But for long periods they were idle, with William spending much of his time away, seeking employment or engaging in matters of business that did not interest his younger brother.
It was at this point in his life, when he had little else to do, that Wallace says he was first introduced to the variety, beauty, and mystery of the plant kingdom. But he already had an interest. Years earlier, while he and his father were walking through Hertford, they met a woman who remarked that she had found a rare saprophytic plant, the Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), which lives in a complex relationship with soil fungi that derive nourishment from the roots of forest trees. His father knew little about plants and could tell Alfred nothing about it, and William, his later mentor, would show no interest in native plants or animals unless they were fossils. At the time, Alfred hardly knew that there was a science of systematic botany, “that every flower and every meanest and most insignificant weed had been accurately described and classified and that there was any system or order in the endless variety of plants and animals which I knew existed.”11 But the chance remark of the Hertford woman stood out in his memory, and he admired anyone who knew the names of rare plants. On his ramblings through the rugged Welsh landscape during his brother’s absence, he developed a passion for wildflowers, which he began to collect. He was more than a collector, however, for he possessed the scientist’s drive to understand what he saw.
Alfred cultivated the friendship of the owner of a bookshop in Neath, a man named Charles Hayward, who directed him to numerous books, journals, and magazines on all aspects of science. From this shop, he acquired a small book containing good descriptions of a dozen or so of the most common natural orders of British plants. For the next year, he spent most of his free time wandering over the hills or along streams gathering flowers, becoming adept at plant identification. While learning to recognize the members of one order after another, he recollected in My Life, he grasped for the first time that there was a pattern underlying nature, a discovery that excited his curiosity. Confronted by numerous beautiful species that he could not categorize, he also discovered the limitations of his book, which was meant for readers with only a passing interest in botany. Obsessed by his new avocation, Alfred combed the advertising sections of scientific and educational publications that he found in the bookshop and among the various magazines of the proprietor of his lodging house. One day he was attracted by an advertisement for John Lindley’s Elements of Botany, Structural and Physiological. Lindley, an expert on orchids, was one of England’s foremost botanists, and his book was said to contain descriptions of all the natural orders of plants as well as numerous woodcut illustrations.12 But the price of 10 shillings, 6 pence was steep for an eighteen-year-old apprentice surveyor. Alfred was paid less than £1 a week by his brother, who kept a small amount for himself and sent the rest of their salary to their parents. He had just enough money to buy the book, which he ordered impulsively from the bookseller without consulting William, who would certainly have disapproved.13
When The Elements of Botany finally arrived, however, Alfred was surprised to discover that he had not obtained the textbook on English wild-flowers he thought he had ordered, but a treatise on systematic botany, which was useless for identifying British plants. “Not a single genus was described,” he later wrote. “[It] was not even stated which orders contained any British species and which were wholly foreign, nor was any indication given of their general distribution or whether they comprised numerous or few genera or species.”14 Lindley’s book, however, turned out to be well suited for a young man of raw intellect. It taught him how to apply scientific principles and methodology to the natural world. “Method, zeal, and perseverance” was Lindley’s motto, and a careful study of his book grounded Wallace in the science of botany. “An extensive knowledge of structure … strengthens the perceptive powers and accustoms the mind to habits of careful generalisation,” Lindley wrote. “It more especially leads to the consideration of the relationship one plant bears to another; and as plants which are most closely akin in structure are also most similar in their sensible properties, it often enables men to judge of the use of an unknown plant by the ascertained properties of those species in whose vicinity it takes its place by virtue of its natural affinities.”15
Alfred borrowed a plant encyclopedia from Hayward and copied out the structural details of all genera and species of English plants, including ferns, mosses, and lichens, which he interleaved into the text of The Elements of Botany—an ambitious task. In the space of a few months, he became a highly competent amateur botanist, mastering the British flora. Method, zeal, and perseverance were virtues that the young Wallace readily embraced. Lindley’s system also had practical ramifications that Wallace did not anticipate at the time: the roving botanist could take his principles to any part of the world and classify unknown species.
Alfred progressed rapidly beyond the stage of plant identification and began to collect and preserve, carefully drying his specimens between sheets of paper and pressing them beneath boards weighted with stones or books. Lindley encouraged the budding botanist to start a herbarium and provided specific instructions about the manner of preserving and protecting specimens. The herbarium consisted of sleeves separated by genus, with the species of each genus placed inside. Following Lindley, he made up tickets to label each specimen, giving the generic and specific name and the place where it was collected.16 William thought that Alfred was wasting his time, but he remained undeterred. Every Sunday he took long walks through the mountains, filling his collecting box with botanical treasures. At night he puzzled out each species, categorizing, drying, and pressing as many as possible before going to bed. Step by step, he taught himself the abstruse science of taxonomy.
Taxonomy—the science, laws, and principles of classification—dates back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle was the first to propose a classification system of the natural world, but not until the mid-eighteenth century did great advances in classification methods occur. The father of all taxonomists is the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), who created the binomial system. Linnaeus assigned every known organism to a genus and species, establishing families, orders, and classes as well. He universalized the language of classification by assigning names in Latin; Latin had been used for short descriptions of plants, but not as a method for classification. However, the Linnaean method for classifying plants relied on a single characteristic—the sexual organs—and was considered artificial because it was not always based on natural relationships. Seeking simple ways for professional and amateur botanists to identify plants, Linnaeus aimed for the practical, recognizing that the flower and fruit are relatively stable characters, not subject to the great variation seen in other plant parts. The characters that Linnaeus used for his classification system included the number of pistils and stamens, the presence or absence of flowers, and the presence or absence of both sexual organs on the same plant.
Although Linnaeus’s grouping of plants and animals into genera and species proved useful—and is still used—his system fell apart when it came to the broader categories of families, orders, and classes. All sorts of exceptions to his rules were found, especially as specimens poured in from different regions of the globe. Most botanists followed his system well into the nineteenth century, but the numerous exceptions to it prompted some naturalists—Lindley among them—to work out revisions. Linnaeus’s maxim (“It is not the character which makes the genus but the genus which gives the character”) did not reflect reality. Linnaeus himself occasionally cheated, classifying into a genus some plants that, in strict adherence to his own principles, should have been classified into another genus or family. Lindley and other advocates of what became known as the natural system disagreed with Linnaeus’s reliance on a single character to classify a specimen: not only the pistil and stamen, but the root, the stem, the leaves, and other parts differentiated one group of plants from another. According to the natural system, plant species were grouped by affinities, or shared characteristics. A specimen was classified into a genus, a family, an order, or a class because of the resemblance of its various parts, properties, and qualities to those of other known plants, which made the natural system harder to learn but more scientific in principle. Reason, not memorization of a single prominent character, was the key to the natural system. The extensive index at the back of Lindley’s book led the reader not only to the identification of a plant genus and species, but ultimately to its higher and broader taxonomic relationships.17
Linnaeus and Lindley assumed that each species had been created separately by God in the beginning. For example, the term “affinity” did not imply evolution or descent with modification from a common ancestor, but reflected the uniform and harmonious plan of God. The vast majority of naturalists at the beginning of the nineteenth century believed that all species had been separately created, with the Creator having placed them only in regions they were ideally suited for and nowhere else. A single pair of individuals had propagated the entire stock. Species were fixed and permanent entities, and whatever laws the Creator had used to regulate the geographic distribution of his creatures was something that would forever remain unknown. Although wedded to natural theology and its notion of a supreme, intentional designer, the natural system set the stage for modern evolutionary theory by arranging organisms based on true morphological relationships.
Alfred did not limit his studies to plants. On September 30, 1842, he opened a new book he had just bought—William Swainson’s Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals, the starting point of his lifelong study of the geographic distribution of fauna.18 How and why he was directed to this book is unknown, but perhaps Hayward, the Neath bookseller, made the initial providential suggestion. Swainson was a well-known English zoologist whose specialty was ornithology. His beautifully designed book, full of high-quality illustrations and plates, must have appealed to the young student of nature, whose experience of the planet’s animal life was limited to a few of the species native to the British Isles.
Swainson was an ardent supporter of William Sharp Macleay, whose quinarian system of taxonomy enjoyed brief popularity in certain English scientific circles: Thomas Huxley was an early convert, and Charles Darwin seriously considered but eventually rejected it. In the era before the publication of The Origin of Species, Macleay’s theory was one of several systematic treatments that attempted to explain the complex relationships among the earth’s fauna. By applying a natural system to animal classification, Swainson hoped to show that animals were distributed according to a divine plan whose outlines were obvious, comprehensible, and definable. That plan, according to Swainson, harmonized best with Macleay’s theory. The number 5 played a mystical role in the quinarian system: the earth was divided into five great biogeographic divisions—Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia—that roughly paralleled the five varieties of the human species thought to exist. Moreover, among the five basic principles in Macleay’s theory of the natural classification of animals, one stated that the animal kingdom could be subdivided into five circles, each formed from five smaller ones. The Vertebrata, for instance, formed a natural circle because “the reptiles (Reptilia) pass into the birds (Aves), these again into the quadrupeds (Mammalia), quadrupeds unite with the fishes (Pisces), these latter with the amphibious reptiles, and the Amphibia bring us back again to the reptiles, the point from which we started.” According to Swainson’s understanding of Macleay’s theory, animals were related to one another by affinity or analogy. He gave as an example the goatsucker, the swallow, and the bat. The goatsucker and the swallow were related by affinity because both were birds, flew at the same hour of the day, and lived off insects, which were captured on the wing. The goatsucker and the swallow were related by analogy to the bat: all three had wings, flew at dusk, and fed in a similar manner. Circles touched at their nearest points, where a family in one class resembled a family in another, pictorially demonstrating the concepts of analogy and affinity.19
The quinarian system, though touted as “natural,” was as contrived as that of Linnaeus, providing no clue as to the true relationships among organisms. Recognizing the difficulty of distinguishing varieties from species and believing that genera, orders, and classes were more natural assemblages than species, Swainson avoided the species question altogether by invoking creationism—a lapse that irritated Alfred, who had rejected the teleology of revealed religions. He dismissed Swainson’s attempts to reconcile science and Scripture as “ridiculous” and made numerous annotations to that effect in the book’s margins.20
Whatever its deficiencies, Swainson’s book proved an invaluable resource. His clear and concise synopses of the ideas of past authorities as well as the leading scientific philosophers of the day—such as the evolutionary views of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the classification methods of the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier, the quinarianism of Macleay, and the monogenic (single-origin) theory of the human species proposed by the English physician and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard—introduced Wallace to contemporary controversies in natural history. The deeper he dug into these controversies, the more fascinated he became.
In the autumn of 1843, Alfred composed what he called a “popular” lecture on botany, his reaction to a lecture on the Linnaean system of plant classification that he had heard at the Neath Mechanics’ Institute one evening. The instructor, who upheld Linnaeus’s system of classification as the most useful for determining the names of plants, considered the natural system of Lindley too impractical and complicated for the novice. In his essay, Alfred agreed that Linnaeus had made a great advance in classification when he substituted generic and specific names for the short Latin descriptions that had been used up to that point, but he asserted that the Linnaean system was only occasionally natural—accidental rather than logical. Alfred pointed out that Linnaeus grouped together plants that were unlike one another in essential characteristics, and, except for the naming of species, his method was useless when it came to understanding higher taxonomic relationships. The value of Lindley’s observations, he said, was his detection of true affinities “under very diverse external forms.”21 But Alfred never intended to present his rebuttal before the students at the Mechanics’ Institute. It was an exercise, one of a number in which he engaged, to write down, “more or less systematically,” his ideas on various subjects.
In his autobiography, Wallace states that this essay is proof of his early interest in classification. It also demonstrates that he was no longer an amateur or a dilettante. The philosophical questions raised by Lindley and Swainson preoccupied him, and the breadth of his interests—botany, geology, zoology, and anthropology—suggests that he must have entertained greater aspirations than a career as a surveyor. Yet if he fantasized about devoting his life to the search for those laws that Swainson said the Creator would never reveal to mortal eyes, he did not record how he might transform that desire into a reality. The naturalists of his day were men of means; in the early 1840s, it was an unthinkable occupation for someone of his station in life and possessing such limited resources.