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

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Wallace states that he was invited to Boston to give a series of lectures in the autumn of 1886.¹ But this was a half-truth. The trip to the United States was his own doing. He had received an invitation to lecture in Sydney, and friends advised him to go by way of America and perhaps give some lectures there as well. In January 1886, he sought advice about the prospects of making such a tour “a financial success” from Othniel Charles (O. C.) Marsh of Yale University, the most famous paleontologist in the United States, whom he had met in London some years back and who had vaguely suggested coming to America to lecture.

Wallace had several reasons for going to the United States, but the most pressing was financial; in fact, he underlined the words “financial success” in his letter to Marsh. The civil pension that Darwin had procured for him provided some security, but it was not enough to live on comfortably. Wallace told Marsh that he would do anything in his power to make more money to support his family, even if it meant risking a sea voyage despite his age and “somewhat precarious” health. (At home were two teenagers, Violet, aged sixteen, and Will, aged fourteen, and he was determined that they would enjoy every advantage he had been denied in his adolescence.) He would go only if Marsh thought that the prospect for financial success was good. Less important reasons, which he did not mention to Marsh, included visiting leading American spiritualists and progressive political and social thinkers. Moreover, a journey to the United States offered a rare opportunity to examine the North American flora and fauna and indulge his other passion—geographic distribution. He also hoped to travel to California to visit his brother John, whom he had not seen in forty years.²

Wallace planned to arrive on the East Coast in the early autumn. After lecturing in Boston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., he would proceed to California in early winter. He would remain there until the spring and then cross the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia, where he had relatives. From Australia, he would sail to South Africa and return to London in December 1887 or early January 1888. It was an ambitious itinerary, one to which he looked forward with dread. He had not sailed on the open seas for more than twenty-five years, but the memories of the miseries he had suffered were still fresh.

Marsh consented to write to a number of associates at various American universities on Wallace’s behalf. One of them was Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of the newly established Johns Hopkins University, to whom he sent a copy of Wallace’s letter. Marsh told Gilman that anything Wallace was likely to say on natural history would be “good.” As for the land question and depression of trade—two other subjects that Wallace told Marsh he would be willing to discuss—he offered no opinion.³ Wallace had also contacted Carl Wilhelm (C. W.) Ernst, editor of the Beacon, a magazine similar in content to the Athenaeum but more radical, being a beacon for socialists. Ernst praised Wallace’s political writings to Gilman: “I think almost as much [of him] as the most eminent men of science think of his work in natural history and animal geography.” Moreover, Ernst had received an enthusiastic response from the Lowell Institute in Boston, where Wallace was already booked to give a series of lectures. But an opportunity to hear Wallace speak was not something people jumped at. When Thomas Huxley had visited the United States in the 1870s, he attracted crowds of admirers. His fame as an orator and as Darwin’s bulldog had reached beyond English shores, and he was so well received that for a while he contemplated accepting a position at an American university. But there were questions about Wallace. Ernst knew nothing of his “social graces,” for example, and planned to contact a cousin in London to learn more about Wallace’s character; as he told Gilman, he was “quite unwilling to recommend even so eminent a gentleman without previous inquiries.”⁴

It is not clear what Ernst was concerned about, but he seemed to have some reservations. Gilman also had reservations, but for different reasons. (Ernst was a spiritualist who edited Banner of Light, a spiritualist periodical.) Gilman asked another Johns Hopkins faculty member to solicit an opinion from Huxley, who let the cat out of the bag. “The substance of what he has to say is sure to be worth listening to,” Huxley replied in March 1886, “even if it should be about spirit rapping and writing (though I presume that he will keep clear of that topic).” He had “grave doubts” about Wallace’s style of speaking. Although he had never heard Wallace address a large audience, in smaller meetings Wallace was not a dynamic lecturer. Huxley qualified this judgment, however, with his usual dry humor. “I hate listening to leetures,” he confessed to Gilman, “and have often said I would not hear my own if I could help it. … As soon as a man begins to speak I have an irresistible temptation to think of something antipodal to his subject.”⁵ But Wallace would surprise many of his American listeners, for he was later praised as a “more effective speaker than most of the eminent Englishmen who have lectured in the United States.”⁶

Gilman put the matter aside for a couple of months. In early May, the agent Wallace had hired to arrange his lecture tour reminded Gilman of his client’s planned visit. Wallace had sent an outline of his lecture series, which seemed agreeable to Gilman, who passed his recommendation on to the appropriate university committee. Gilman informed the agent that a better venue than Johns Hopkins was the Peabody Institute, established in 1857 by the American philanthropist George Peabody as an educational institution for the working classes to improve themselves—similar in spirit to the Mechanics’ Institutes of Great Britain—which could accommodate larger audiences and pay a larger stipend.⁷

With the first part of his lecture tour secured, Wallace directed his attention to natural history. The topics that people wanted to hear him speak about were zoogeography and his theories on the origin of coloration. He added a lecture on the “Darwinian” theory since natural selection had been coming under increasing attack, especially in the United States. He composed eight lectures, to be given twice weekly during November and December, a little later than he would have liked. The preparation involved more time, trouble, and expense than he had anticipated. He created a number of slides to illustrate protective and warning coloration and mimicry, which required the costly services of an artist. He also encumbered himself with several maps and diagrams that, in their waterproof case, formed an awkward package six feet long.⁸

On October 9, 1886, Wallace bade farewell to Annie, Will, and Violet, and began his ocean journey on a slow steamer that left from London. The days of the many-masted sailing vessels had passed, but voyage on the open seas was no less stomach-churning. By the time he disembarked in New York City two weeks later, on October 23, he had given up any thought of going to Australia and South Africa and decided to limit his travels to the continental United States.

He spent his first night in a hotel. The next morning, a Sunday, Albert G. Browne, an editor for one of the New York newspapers who had called on him at Godalming earlier that summer, picked him up at his hotel. Browne had come with Henry George, and the three men drove through Central Park to Browne’s house on East Nineteenth Street. At the time, George was campaigning for mayor of New York City as the Labor Party candidate. (He would lose to the Democrat, Abram S. Hewitt, though he pulled in more votes than Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican candidate who was favored to win the election.) Wallace attended one of George’s political rallies at the Brooklyn Bridge and was asked to speak on his behalf, but being no populist barn burner he failed to impress his audience, who wanted to be whipped into a frenzy in support of their man. A few days later, he boarded the train to Boston, where he would live in a simple business-class hotel, the Quincy House, for the next two months.⁹ Wallace’s agent had done a good job advertising his client’s lecture series. He billed Wallace as “England’s Great Naturalist” and “the most distinguished living naturalist in the world” and included clippings of favorable reviews of Wallace’s most recent books.¹⁰

The eight lectures in Boston were well received. One reporter called his lecture on Darwinism “a masterpiece of condensed statement … a most beautiful specimen of scientific work” and complimented Wallace on his modest and straightforward, if somewhat lackluster, manner and style.¹¹ Although Wallace steered clear of spiritualism per se, he could not resist inserting some remarks about his belief in a guiding Mind and a reference to human beings’ true nature, which he said was spiritual, not material. He had abandoned his earlier suggestion that certain aspects of the human form were derived by some process other than natural selection, introducing in its place a teleological explanation of human origins:

Wallace enjoyed the intellectual ferment of an American city with the pretensions and class consciousness of London. He made the formal acquaintance of Darwin’s American confidant, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray; met with O. C. Marsh; and participated in the meetings of the National Academy of Sciences. At times, the amount of attention he received disconcerted him. When asked by Marsh to make some remarks about geographic distribution at the academy’s annual meeting, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said in his autobiography that, having been caught off guard, he had mumbled something about the phenomenon of seed dispersal by the wind. In fact, he made a more formal presentation. Standing before America’s leading scientific savants, he read “The Wind as a Seed-Carrier,” which focused on “one of the most significant problems in geographical distribution.” A large number of arctic plants, he said, were now so widely distributed throughout the Southern and Northern Hemispheres that plants in New Zealand, Australia, and the extreme southern tip of South America were nearly identical to those on the high mountains of more temperate zones. Darwin had theorized that the effects of a glacial epoch might explain this phenomenon, but no such epoch was known to have occurred in the tropics. Wallace’s studies of the fauna of oceanic islands offered another possible explanation. Under favorable circumstances, new species of plants could appear in out-of-the-way places thanks to the transfer of seeds by wayward birds, humans, or the wind. An occasional storm, perhaps of a magnitude that occurred only once in a century, could transport light seeds for great distances. Wallace later noted that this was a novel theory to the participants at the meeting, and no doubt it stimulated considerable discussion.¹³

At one of Gray’s evening gatherings, Wallace was cajoled into talking about the circumstances leading up to his famous discovery of natural selection and the penning in 1858 of “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” a story by then almost legendary.¹⁴ He also spent several evenings with the essayist and novelist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who expressed a keen interest in spiritualism when he had a few moments alone with Wallace. During the day, Wallace visited the various libraries and museums and found the quality of the museums high in comparison with similar institutions in England. The superior organization of the zoological and archaeological collections at Harvard stimulated him to address one of his pet issues—”museums for the people”—in a series of articles that he published the following year in the Fortnightly Review.¹⁵ He also made several excursions to other parts of the Northeast to lecture at local colleges and universities. At Yale, he met James Dwight Dana, whom he described as “the first of American geologists.” From New Haven, he proceeded to Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he was impressed by the novelty of higher education for women, with half the faculty being “lady professors”—a concept alien to the British—and noted that the curriculum was as rigorous as the one for men.¹⁶ He spent ten days in Baltimore speaking on Darwinism and Zoogeographie distribution at the Peabody Institute and lectured at Johns Hopkins University on November 30 and December 2, 7, and 9. A reporter for the American journal Science attended these lectures and noted that Wallace delivered them “in a clear and easy manner, and [with] that indefinable attractiveness which comes from many years of original research.” Concerning the evolution of the human mind, the reporter politely observed that “the lecturer expressed [a] view peculiar to himself.”¹⁷ Wallace returned to Boston and divided his time during the last three weeks of December between scientific and spiritualist gatherings, feeling equally at ease in both worlds.

Spiritualism had attracted a number of prominent Bostonians, among them William James, professor of philosophy and religion at Harvard and brother of the novelist Henry James. For years, William James had been fascinated with trance mediums, thought transference, clairvoyance, and extrasensory perception. He had helped found the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884, shortly after meeting Wallace’s friend the physicist William Barrett, who had come to the United States in August 1884 with a contingent of English researchers to encourage American scientists to undertake a serious investigation of psychic phenomena.¹⁸ Barrett had been instrumental in organizing the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882, after the failure of his efforts to win recognition by members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Wallace was elected one of its honorary members, but he declined, citing his reputation as a “crank.” His name remained on the list of honorary members anyway, and in the early twentieth century he was invited to become its president, an offer he also refused. Wallace kept his distance from the society because it had ignored his and Sir William Crookes’s early work and approached the subject too cautiously and skeptically for his tastes.¹⁹

Wallace spent the afternoon of December 12 with James and other Harvard faculty, with whom he discussed both spiritualism and psychic research; two days later, he dined with James and several of these psychic researchers. In his American journal, Wallace reported that James invited him to a “remarkable” séance at which a beautiful woman materialized. This woman took Wallace by the hand, identified herself as having joked with him at a London séance, and allowed him to feel her ear, as he had done back then. Another figure also appeared—an elderly gentleman with a vague resemblance both to his father and to Darwin but who answered to the name of a deceased Australian cousin.²⁰ But Wallace and James did not always see eye to eye on spiritualist issues. In the 1880s James approached the subject as a skeptic, whereas at this point in his life Wallace accepted almost everything without reservation. Twenty years later, James would sound more Wallacean in his attitude toward the paranormal. In a 1909 essay he wrote:

On December 29, his final evening in Boston, Wallace was the honored guest at a dinner at the posh Parker House that included James, Holmes, Gray, and about a dozen other distinguished American scientists and savants. The dinner, “luxurious in the extreme,” was clearly meant to impress Wallace; the tables were decorated with a profusion of ferns, daffodils, violets, and roses. The conversation was at first a bit pedantic and obscure. The arrogance of a few of his hosts astonished him. The poet James Russell Lowell, for example, directed a remark to Wallace in Latin, evidently intending to test his scholastic abilities; by now, Wallace had forgotten the little Latin he once knew, and he waffled, failing the test. As the wine flowed, the bonhomie increased and the conversation became relaxed and wide-ranging, covering politics, travel, Sir James Brooke, and spiritualism—but the snobbery had spoiled the evening for Wallace. “I was not so much impressed by the Boston celebrities as I ought to have been,” he recollected in his autobiography.²²

The following day, during a snowstorm, he boarded a train for Washington, D.C., without any set itinerary. He lodged for four days with Charles Valentine Riley, chief of the United States Entomological Commission, and then moved to the Hamilton Hotel. Except for a ten-day stint in Canada, where he stayed with the parents of his colleague and sometime critic Grant Allen, he was stranded in the American capital for four months because his agent had failed to book any lectures there in advance. Not until March did he have his first official speaking engagement in the city, a lecture to the Women’s Anthropological Society on the origin of the human races and the nature of language.

The failure of his agent notwithstanding, Wallace enjoyed Washington more than Boston, especially its intellectual life. It must have been Riley who arranged to get him free access to the Cosmos Club and its library. Founded in 1878, the club was composed of men and women who had done meritorious work in science, literature, and the arts or had distinguished themselves for their public service. Riley took him to one of its evening receptions, where he met most of Washington’s leading scientific and political figures. One of the first men he met there was Major John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War hero who headed the United States Geological Survey. Powell and Wallace, both self-taught scientists and self-reliant individuals, took an instant liking to each other. In 1869, at the age of thirty-five, Powell had led an expedition with nine other men to explore the Colorado River. It was a daring and dangerous journey, never previously attempted, but he fulfilled his mission, which was to prove that the Colorado River had carved out (in line with Sir Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian doctrine) the Grand Canyon. Wallace considered Powell to be not only a first-rate geologist but also a great anthropologist and psychologist, but on what basis he made such a claim is unclear. It appears that Powell was an “advanced thinker,” as Wallace liked to call people who shared—or at least were open to—his radical political ideas. He introduced Wallace to Charles Nordhoff, a journalist who in 1875 had published The Communistic Societies of the United States, a study of the Shakers, some Native American tribes, and other communal groups. Wallace spent a good deal of time in the Geological Survey’s library, reading about the history of glaciation and the antiquity of man in America. He frequently lunched with Powell and two other members; while dining “in an informal way” on bread, cheese, fruit, cakes, and tea, they had many “interesting conversations [on] all kinds of subjects.”²³

What Powell thought of a lecture that he had arranged for Wallace is not known. Presumably he had been forewarned about its content, for it was given at his request before the all-male Anthropological Society of Washington on February 15. The lecture, “Social Economy versus Political Economy,” offended many of Wallace’s listeners by denigrating the “blind” acquisition of wealth so characteristic of the American capitalist culture and championing the rights of the oppressed and underprivileged working classes. As Wallace would later recall:

Wallace made two enduring friendships in Washington: one with the noted ornithologist Elliot Coues and the other with the equally noted paleobotanist Lester Frank Ward. Wallace usually spent his Sunday evenings at the home of Coues (pronounced “cows”), a nonpracticing physician who, as both a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research and a leader in the American theosophical movement, was as unorthodox as Wallace. The theosophical movement, which originated in 1875 when Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (more commonly known as Madame Blavatsky, or HPB), who had been born into a noble Russian family, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott founded the Theosophical Society, was an outgrowth of spiritualism, but it was inspired by Eastern religions (Olcott was a Buddhist). Like the most progressive spiritualists, theosophists denied the existence of a personal deity, denigrated the role of priests, preached that each person controlled his or her destiny, and renounced affiliation with any particular religious organization. Theosophy was thus a universal religion. Unlike spiritualists, theosophists believed in reincarnation. Moreover, HPB and her disciples repudiated one of the fundamental principles of spiritualism: the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through the intercession of a medium. The souls of good people, they said, were unreachable; only those souls bent on mischief appeared at séances in order to deceive credulous sitters. Wallace understandably wrote very little about Blavatsky, but he must have found Coues’s brand of theosophy more congenial than hers, for the two men became good friends. One evening, at a meeting of the American Society for Psychical Research, a paper on “atoms, molecules, force, matter, organism, spirit, etc.” generated a lively discussion on the “atom-force theory,” spiritualism, and theosophy. Coues, Wallace wrote, “glorified” Madame Blavatsky and theosophy, while Wallace claimed a higher position “for our spiritualism.” Nevertheless, Wallace noted, it was a good discussion.²⁶

Coues, an assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution, was highly respected in his field and had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He also had helped found the American Ornithological Union. In 1879 he had earned “one of the highest compliments paid of recent years to American science” when he was presented with a document—or memorial, as the English liked to call such an honor—signed by the leading English naturalists of the day, including Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin, John Gould, Alfred Newton, and Wallace, commending his Birds of the Colorado Valley: A Repository of Scientific and Popular Information Concerning North American Ornithology. Coues’s book was the most comprehensive treatise on the bird life of the Colorado River basin to date; the English naturalists singled out its remarkably thorough bibliography for special praise. At thirteen hundred pages (excluding indexes), it catalogued every observation ever published by other ornithologists, professional and amateur, of some four hundred species of birds. Moreover, for each bird Coues described the geographic distribution, anatomy, plumage, migration route, behavior, affinities, courtship, food habits, nest, egg, and songs. Not even Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, the author of the Conspectus Generum Avium, had been so encyclopedic.²⁷

Coues introduced Wallace to the leading spiritualists of the nation’s capital and took him to the séances of a public medium with the odd name of P. L. O. A. Keeler. Keeler conducted his sittings in front of a large curtain through which a number of items—pencils, paper, tambourines, pocket watches—were thrust, as though the fabric were as permeable as air. Wallace found Coues to be an ideal companion—as brilliant as Huxley, in his opinion, but much less intimidating (and less incredulous).²⁸

The other man Wallace befriended, Lester Ward, shared Wallace’s predilection for natural history and political philosophy. Although he had earned degrees in medicine and law, he was largely self-educated in science—perhaps another reason for Wallace’s attraction to him. At the time of Wallace’s visit, Ward was a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian. His careful study of the venation of leaves of fossil plants provided Wallace with material that he referred to in his chapter on the geologic evidence of evolution in his book Darwinism, published in 1889. Later Ward would leave a career in science to become a prominent sociologist, one of the pioneers in that field in the United States. The two men took long walks on Sunday afternoons in the country around Washington, D.C., where Wallace collected a number of interesting botanical specimens, which he shipped back to England to plant in his garden. While breaking for lunch, they launched on their favorite subjects. Ward was a liberal thinker—in fact, he was a socialist. “In that respect,” Wallace wrote in 1905, “he was in advance of me.” In 1906 Ward published a theory of planned progress called telesis, which hypothesized that humans, through education and development of intellect, could direct social evolution. It was an idea that Wallace undoubtedly shared. But when it came to metaphysical issues, Ward remained an “absolute agnostic” or monist, a person who believes that mind and matter are one rather than distinct entities, as spiritualists preached. In this respect the two men differed. Although Wallace later became a committed socialist, Ward never became a spiritualist. Nevertheless, Wallace and Ward maintained a cordial relationship and exchanged letters for years. When Ward came to England in 1894 to attend the British Association meeting in Oxford, Wallace invited him to spend a few days with him and Annie.²⁹

During his first walk with Ward on February 13, Wallace noticed at once the differences and similarities between English and American flora; this was to become a theme that would pervade his travels. Although it was winter, the woody country northwest of Washington, D.C., contained a good number of flowers. On dry banks, he found the “beautiful little May-flower (Epigoea repetís)” and the “pretty spotted wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata),” both members of the heath family and both genera peculiar to the United States, except for a few allied species in Japan. The forest slopes were covered with the attractive mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), another wholly American genus. In fact, of fourteen flowering plants that he discovered on this ramble, only three belonged to British genera and four or five to European genera; the majority were either endemic to the United States or found elsewhere only in Japan, eastern Asia, and the Pacific Islands.³⁰

Wallace filled his time with visits to museums, art galleries, libraries, and other cultural institutions. He got a taste of American-style politics when he spent a day at the House of Representatives. One evening, he went (much to his chagrin) to a “large and brilliant” reception in his honor at the home of Stilson Hutchins, the founder and editor of the Washington Post, and hosted by Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leading spiritualist, suffragette, and trance medium, who was better known as the sister of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher Hooker made a point of introducing Wallace to her guests—mainly congressmen and their families—and installed him at the head of a receiving line, where he was obliged to shake hands with fifty or sixty people who knew nothing about him. This reception attracted the attention of the press; a reporter described Wallace as a “tall, large, well-preserved man of sixty-five, with white hair and a full white beard, having a slight resemblance to the late poet [William Cullen] Bryant.”³¹

On April 24, Wallace finally boarded a westbound train and rid himself of his winter accoutrements. Despite the significant dent in his budget and the considerable loss of time, he had few regrets about his stay in Washington. He had developed several important friendships and felt comfortable in both the scientific and spiritualist communities—more comfortable, in fact, than he had been in London, where the scientific and the spirit world failed to mix. He crossed the American continent slowly, taking notes on the geology, geography, and vegetation en route. What struck him most, he later wrote, was the newness and rawness of the country, the almost universal absence of that harmony between wild nature and human cultivation that charmed visitors to England. As he would later write in an article for the Fortnightly Review, “In these North-Eastern States, the native forests have been so ruthlessly destroyed, that fine trees are comparatively rare, and such noble elms, beeches, oaks, and sycamores as are to be found arching over the lanes and shading the farmhouses and cottages in a thousand English villages, are only to be seen near a few towns in the older settled states, or as isolated specimens which are regarded as something remarkable.”³²

He made an early stop at Coalburg, West Virginia, where the naturalist William Henry Edwards, author of A Voyage up the River Amazon, awaited him. It was Edwards who had persuaded him to embark with Henry Bates on the Brazilian adventure that became a defining event in their lives. Wallace had corresponded with Edwards intermittently during the ensuing forty years, mostly on entomological subjects. Edwards had retired to this picturesque, impoverished region twenty-five years earlier. He lived in a “nice house with a broad verandah” in the midst of an orchard that extended to the foot of a steep, forested mountain. During Wallace’s four-day visit, he and Edwards took walks in the Appalachians. West Virginia—with its high and sloping hills, tramways, coal trucks on railways, and coal-mine engines—reminded him of some of the valleys of southern Wales. The backwoods life of rural America—with its “ugly snake fences,” “queer little wooden huts,” and “ragged, dirty children”—evidently did not impress him. Wallace was impressed, however, with his host’s extensive collection of North American butterflies and his elaborate drawings of the larvae. Edwards had accurately depicted the larvae “at every moult, from their first emergence from the egg up to the pupa stage, which often served to determine otherwise too-closely allied species.”³³

After Coalburg, Wallace continued by train through the heartland, stopping in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here, in late April, the woods were “carpeted” with the flower called spring-beauty, while elsewhere there were “sheets” of Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), small patches of “exquisite little” blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia verna), the “handsome” celandine poppy, the “elegant” purple phlox, and the blood-root (Sanguinaria canadensis), with its white star-shaped flowers—all endemic species. But there were more “homely-looking” species, like creeping yellow buttercups and blue, white, and yellow violets, which were “utterly insignificant” compared with the many new and strange forms he encountered.³⁴

He continued onward to Indianapolis, Indiana; St. Louis, Missouri; Sioux City, Iowa (where he met Bandusia Wakefield, “a fine botanical artist and amateur botanist”); and several towns in Kansas—including Lawrence, where he examined the University of Kansas’s fine collection of Cretaceous plants, and Manhattan, where Edwin Alonzo Popenoe of Kansas State Agricultural College showed him the “peculiar” prairie flora.³⁵ As he traveled west, it grew hotter and dustier, and his nights aboard the train, usually in a sleeping compartment he shared with a stranger, often were uncomfortable. His diagrams, which could not be stored with ordinary luggage, had been left behind in Cincinnati, and he was forced to lecture without them, substituting impromptu drawings. The novelty of transcontinental travel quickly palled, and he considered cutting short his journey and returning home, perhaps concerned about his health in such a miserable climate. But he changed his mind and on May 23, 1887, finally arrived in Oakland, California, where he boarded a ferry to San Francisco.

John, who had come down from his home in Stockton, met him at the train station. Wallace says virtually nothing more about the reunion with the brother he had not seen in four decades. They checked into the Baldwin Hotel that evening, but had little time to talk. For the next two days, they were besieged by callers, including an astronomer from the Lick Observatory; a geologist from the Geological Survey; Joseph Le Comte, a geologist and zoologist who had studied with Louis Agassiz and was now president of the University of California at Berkeley; and a few reporters. John had arranged for his brother to give a lecture on “Darwinism” and on “Colour,” but to whom and where these lectures were given Wallace does not say. He did, however, manage to squeeze in a séance on Friday, May 27, even coaxing John to accompany him. Undoubtedly at Wallace’s instigation, John brought along a blank folding slate. It was a bright, sunny morning, and he, John, and the medium sat at a small table close to the window, while two other men—J. J. (James Jerome) Owen, former editor of the San Jose Daily Mercury and now the editor of the spiritualist newspaper the Golden Gate, and a physician and friend of Owen’s—observed the proceedings from across the room. At one point, John’s folding slate was set on the floor a foot or two away from the table. Although the slate was always in sight as they conversed, a few minutes later it was found to have writing on both inner faces. “I wish I could describe to you my spirit home,” the message read. “But I cannot find words suitable in your earthly language to give it the expression it deserves. But you will know all when you join me in the spirit world.... Your loving sister, Elizabeth Wallace. Herbert is here.” (Elizabeth, the firstborn child, died in infancy in 1808; Wallace might have meant Eliza, a sister who died of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of twenty-two.) It occurred to Wallace to ask the medium whether writing could be produced on paper placed between slates. After a moment’s pause, “as if asking the question of his guides,” the medium told Wallace to take a paper pad, tear off six sheets, and place them inside a folding slate chosen randomly from a pile of slates nearby. This Wallace did, and he and John placed their hands over the folded slate. In a few minutes, the slate was opened and they found six portraits “in a peculiar kind of crayon drawing.” Among the six portraits were simple but recognizable drawings of the early spiritualist and physician Benjamin Rush, one of the co-signers of the Declaration of Independence and confidant of President John Adams; the medium Daniel Dunglas Home; and a girl, who identified herself as “The spirit of Mary Wallace,” probably (according to Wallace) his sister who had died at the age of eight, in 1822, a year before he was born.³⁶

On the day of one of his lectures in San Francisco, Wallace accompanied Henry Gibbons, a professor of field botany at the University of California at Berkeley, and the soon-to-be-famous conservationist John Muir to the remnants of the grand redwood forests in the foothills north of San Francisco. When their carriage reached one particular clump of young redwoods, Gibbons directed Wallace to stand inside a circle of saplings, each twenty to thirty feet high, and showed him that they all arose from the outer edge of a huge charred trunk of an old tree destroyed by fire forty years earlier. The stump was thirty-four feet in diameter, as large as the biggest of the more celebrated sequoias. It was within a hollowed-out area of this mammoth stump that the three men ate lunch, but what they discussed Wallace did not find worthy of recording. He mentioned in his autobiography only that he admired Muir’s book The Mountains of California, which he called a “beautiful volume.”³⁷ Their mutual friend Asa Gray, Muir’s mentor in botany, probably helped arrange the meeting. Ten years younger than Wallace, Muir had tried to emulate his great traveling-naturalist predecessors by walking from Indianapolis to South America, an expedition that ended prematurely on the Gulf of Mexico, where he contracted malaria. He then headed west to California and spent another five years exploring the Sierras from his base in Yosemite Valley. Wallace and Muir shared a passion for preserving the natural environment, and for the next twenty years they occasionally corresponded (their letters appear not to have survived), though they never developed a close relationship. Muir gravitated toward Joseph Hooker, most likely because of Hooker’s greater expertise in botany—or perhaps because Wallace was too unorthodox even for the unorthodox Muir. It has been suggested that Muir’s consultations with Wallace, which may have included a visit to his home in England in 1893, influenced his concept of conservation and his efforts to establish a system of national parks in the United States.³⁸

Wallace joined John and his American family in Stockton for the Decoration Day weekend and then returned briefly to San Francisco on Sunday, June 5, to give a lecture on spiritualism before an audience of more than a thousand people at the Metropolitan Theater. He entitled his lecture—or homily, for it was written more in the spirit of a sermon than an academic discourse—”If a Man Dies, Shall He Live Again?” A reporter noted that those present “were evidently anxious to hear an answer to Job’s significant question,” and Wallace gave it to them.³⁹ It was the question of questions, Wallace said, one that the ancients never solved and modern scientists ignored. Yet he believed that the ultimate decision arrived at, whether negative or affirmative, not only was of vital interest to each individual but also determined the future welfare or misery of mankind. If Job’s question was answered in the negative, it left the human condition “utterly hopeless,” destroying the dream of reward for justice, truth, and unselfishness and placing no restraint on our evil tendencies. The greatest good for the greatest number, a noble philosophical belief of the utilitarians, could not, he felt, sufficiently motivate those who were concerned solely with their welfare. But the universal lesson of science—that all humanity and the world itself would eventually end—also would have no positive influence on the actions of human beings. In such a world, might alone would constitute right and the most selfish and brutal would dominate the world. Happily, he said, such a hell on earth would never exist “because there are causes now at work which forbid a disbelief in man’s spiritual nature and his continued existence after death.”⁴⁰

After briefly outlining the evidence of spiritualist phenomena throughout human history, “proving” that they were natural phenomena, Wallace criticized scientific materialism. Science, he said, had penetrated so far into the mysteries of nature that it could not believe that spirit existed, while physiologists were unable to believe in the possibility of any mind without a corresponding material brain. “It is in the most materialistic epoch of the earth’s history, in the midst of a society which prides itself on discarding all superstition and basing its belief on the solid foundation of physical science, that this new and unwelcome visitor [spiritualism] has intruded itself and maintained a vigorous existence for more than thirty years.” Spiritualism’s entire history, he noted, proclaimed it to be not imposture or delusion or the survival of savage beliefs, but a great and all-important truth:

On Wallace’s return, John and his daughter, May, accompanied him on a trip to Yosemite Valley, traveling for two hours by train and then for a leisurely two days, with frequent stops, by stagecoach in unbearable heat and dust. Despite the intense discomfort, it was a wonderfully instructive journey from the perspective of botany. The least interesting part was the lower foothills, up to about three thousand feet, which had been defaced by gold miners. At first there was scant vegetation, and the only conifer was the spiritless scrub pine (Pinus sabiniana). At about a thousand feet, a “coarse, unornamental” tree, the ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa), took root. Higher up were stands of sugar pine (P. lambertiana), a handsome species with large clusters of pinecones. Only above twenty-five hundred feet did the forests become picturesque, with the appearance of the elegant Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesiï) and red cedar (Thuja plicata). As they steadily climbed to four thousand feet, they began to encounter the most beautiful of all California firs, the white (Abies con-color) and noble (A. nobilis), whose symmetrical growth and dense horizontal branches “adorned with the most delicate of blue-green tints” delighted the eye. In the forest understory were the occasional small oaks and maples, but the most conspicuous plants were the stately white azaleas and the California dogwoods, with their six-inch white blossoms; the forest floor itself was bare except for some creeping herbaceous plants. The true “big trees,” Sequoia gigantea, inhabited the belt from four thousand to the summit at seven thousand feet. Wallace admired the pines, firs, and cedars, but he found them “far exceeded by two others inhabiting the same country, the two Sequoias—S. gigantea and S. sempervirens [the redwood].” No other natural feature on earth was more impressive in its “display of the organic forces of nature” than these two giant species. Their increasing scarcity pained him, for at one time they had covered almost all the coastal and central mountains of California:

After reaching the summit, they zigzagged downward past Bridalveil Fall, the grand precipice of El Capitán always in view, entering Yosemite Valley with its rushing river. They spent two nights at a costly hotel in the valley, during which the two brothers took daily hikes, including a thousand-foot ascent to a point overlooking Upper Yosemite Fall. Wallace, who had lost little of his stamina, took a solitary six-mile walk to a grove of sequoias. The wild beauty of Yosemite captivated him, and he spent many hours examining the wildflowers and trees, especially admiring pink pentstemon (Pentstemon newberryi), a dwarf shrub with deep red flowers, and the brilliant scarlet Indian pink (Silene californica). He also pondered the valley’s geologic origin, concluding that it had been formed by weather and the incursions of vegetation, which together had sculpted it from the crumbling granite over a period of time hard to conceive in human terms but now familiar to him from the work of Lyell. In an essay originally published in Nineteenth Century in 1893, he would write that Yosemite did not owe its exceptional physical features—the Cathedral Spires, the “subquadrangular mass” of El Capitán, the rounded summit of Half Dome—to any catastrophic origin, as some geologists still asserted. They were all, he wrote, “fully explained by that simple theory of earth sculpture by atmospheric agency which has been found applicable to the solution of similar problems in all other parts of the world,” thus proving “the efficiency of causes now in action in producing the varied contours of the earth’s surface.”⁴³

After spending a little more than a week exploring Yosemite, at 4:00 A.M. Wallace, John, and May left for Stockton, which they reached shortly after noon the same day. Waiting for Wallace was an invitation from Senator Le-land Stanford, railroad magnate, politician, and spiritualist, whom he had met while in Washington, D.C. Stanford asked Wallace to be his guest at his estate in Menlo Park, located thirty miles south of San Francisco. The two men spent the day touring the estate’s beautifully manicured grounds, which were tended by thirty Chinese gardeners, and a good part of the rest of Stanford’s eight thousand-acre ranch in neighboring Palo Alto, studded with redwoods and eucalyptus groves. In a few years, the ranch would become the site of the university that the Stanfords were building in memory of their only son, Leland Junior, who had died at age fifteen of typhoid fever. Wallace may not have approved of Stanford’s extravagant lifestyle or conservative politics, but he welcomed the proposed university’s stated mission to “[inculcate] love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He hoped that this clause would be taught “in its spirit as well as in its letter. Never has a grander memorial been raised by parents to a beloved son.”⁴⁴

Wallace lingered in Stockton through the Fourth of July holiday, having been laid up in John’s home for a week with an infected upper lip that required lancing and bandaging before it finally healed. His enforced few days of rest, he later wrote, gave him a rare opportunity to enjoy “that singular America festival,” Independence Day. The firecrackers, Roman candles, and parade consisting of firemen, soldiers, politicians, animals, and clowns, plus the noisy crowds, brought back memories of a Brazilian carnival, though the Stockton display was a good bit smaller and less flamboyant.⁴⁵ Letters confirmed his next lecture schedule, and he made ready to depart, but not before giving his niece, May, his obvious favorite, a writing case and an amber brooch. On July 7 he said good-bye to John, May, and his two nephews, Herbert and Percy—none of whom he would ever see again—and boarded the 9:00 A.M. train to Sacramento.⁴⁶

Wallace’s next scheduled destination was Michigan, but no one expected him there until the end of the month, so he spent three days in the town of Summit in the Sierra Nevada, exploring hidden valleys and collecting flowers he had never seen. In small rocky valleys laced with drifts of snow and rivulets of meltwater, he admired the “grand examples” of ice action, huge granite blocks that were cracking, splitting, and moving slowly down the valley slopes. Frost, snow, vegetation, and sun all aided this gradual process of denudation and degradation. He made a brief excursion by stagecoach to Lake Tahoe, whose wooded, mountainous shores he found “less imposing” than the forested mountains surrounding Loch Lomond in Scotland and Lake Windermere in the English Lake District, and the lake itself far less grand than the lakes of Switzerland and northern Italy. “The rounded forms of the granite rocks are here (Sierra Nevada July 1887 Lake Tahoe) plainly due to glaciation,” he recorded in his journal, “& have quite a different character to the globular or dome form at the Yosemite & elsewhere due to structural exfoliation. Here they have all the character of rugged weathered peaks & pinnacles, worn down smooth in rounded hummocks.”

He continued on to Reno and across hot and arid Nevada into northwestern Utah, noting the appearance of stratified, slaty rocks in an ancient lake basin that was once part of the Great Salt Lake, 250 miles west of the town of Ogden. On July 18, he reached Denver, where Alice Eastwood, a twenty-eight-year-old botanist and expert in the flora of Colorado, acted as his guide. Wallace had met Eastwood in May, having briefly stopped in Denver on his way to California. At the time, Eastwood taught ancient history at a high school in Denver. The principal introduced her to Wallace, who was looking for a local botanist who could show him where to collect alpine plants, and Eastwood had agreed to take Wallace into the nearby mountains on his return journey. In the early 1890s she would move to California, where she would distinguish herself as that state’s leading female botanist (until her death in 1953 at the age of ninety-four). She also developed an important friendship with John Muir.

In the company of Eastwood, Wallace made some interesting discoveries relating to the geographic distribution of the alpine flora of Europe and the United States. They set out on Tuesday, July 19, by rail to the town of Gray-mount, the railway terminus, situated at 9,500 feet at the junction of two valleys. After checking into a hotel, they took a short stroll and immediately discovered two rare British plants, the wintergreen (Pyrola rotundifolia) and the twin-flower {Linnea borealis). The next day, they hiked to an outpost known as Kelso’s Cabin, where some miners had houses above the timber-line at 11,000 feet. Along the way, they found a number of species that had European affinities, like an alpine form of the columbine {Aquilegia coerulea) and Omphalodes nana, var. aretiodes, whose tufts of blue flowers were embedded in the clumps of the common moss campion (Silene acaulis). But it was not until they passed the miners’ houses on the way to the summit of Gray’s Peak that they found “some of the chief gems of the alpine flora of the Rocky Mountains.” Bordering a stream were “fine clumps” of the handsomest American primrose (Primula parryi), with its whorled crimson-purple flowers and yellow eye. In boggy places was an arctic species, the Greenland louse-wort, and in rocky crevices grew a moss that was abundant in Scotland and Wales. The following morning, they explored Grizzly Gulch, a valley not far from their hotel, where they met two miners, who offered them lunch and showed them a good place to search for flowers. There Eastwood and Wallace “luxuriated” in the finest alpine flower garden they had yet seen, though Eastwood had visited the region numerous times. What especially attracted Wallace’s attention was the number of species identical to those in Great Britain and Europe. That night, they slept in a miner’s cabin at about a 12,500-foot elevation. The next morning, they ascended to the top of Gray’s Peak, 14,500 feet above sea level, evidently without difficulty. Among the alpine plants allied to arctic species also found in Europe they noted pretty yellow flowers in the short turf just below the summit that, on closer examination, proved to be two distinct species shaped alike and flowering at the same time—an uncommon finding. It occurred to him, as a natural selectionist, that at such a high and exposed site the flowering season was short, pollinating insects were scarce, and the combined simultaneous display was advantageous to both species. Their mutual conspicuousness would attract whatever insects might visit at this great altitude, ensuring the survival and proliferation of both species in the struggle for life.⁴⁷

In an 1891 two-part article published in the Fortnightly Review, “English and American Flowers,” Wallace summarized his conclusions about the relationship of North American and European alpine plants. During his excursion with Eastwood, he found ninety-five species either identical to or allied to species in the high alpine or arctic regions of Europe, whereas only thirty were strictly American species. To understand how this came about, he said, it was necessary to go back to the glacial epoch, when a milder climate prevailed in what is now the arctic region. The present arctic flora, or its immediate ancestors, was then confined to the highest latitudes around the North Pole and its ring of mountains in northern Europe, Greenland, North America, and northeastern Asia. At that time, the Rockies, the Alps, and some of the Scandinavian mountains supported only alpine forms of plants in the surrounding lowlands. As the climate became colder and the ice sheet crept farther south across the two continents, the true arctic plants were driven southward, displacing the indigenous flora and occupying all the great mountain ranges south of the glaciers as well as the peaks that rose above them. Later, as the ice sheet retreated, these hardy plants kept close to the gradually retreating ice, moving up into the higher peaks of many mountains from which the ice had disappeared. Thus, he concluded, there were now many species common to the Rockies and the mountains of Wales, Scotland, and northern Europe. What made the flora appear different to the casual visitor were the proportions of plants of the endemic species to European-allied species. The showiest flowers were not those seen in Europe—like the white, purple, and yellow anemones; the rosy and purple primulas; or the white and yellow buttercups—but the blue and white columbines, the scarlet or crimson-bracted castilleias, and a host of purple or yellow composites.⁴⁸

On July 26, he left Eastwood and his alpine paradise for Chicago, happy to have his own private sleeping car, and arrived two days later. The city, enveloped in a cold lake mist and formidable pollution, was still recovering from its devastating fire seventeen years earlier. The “irregularity” of its architecture—massive granite buildings towering above rotting wooden hovels—and the appalling spectacle of its lakefront, which was hideously disfigured by eight parallel lines of rails on which trains belched black smoke, distressed him during the few hours he wandered about. Soot killed the grass and blackened the moribund trees. Following an abysmal meal in the shabby railroad restaurant, he recalled the words of an American writer who had wryly observed of his homeland that “a whole huge continent has been so touched by human hands that over a large part of its surface it has been reduced to a state of unkempt, sordid ugliness.”⁴⁹

Wallace gave two lectures on animal coloration and Darwinism in Trowbridge, Michigan, following which he hurried on to Kingston, Ontario, to spend several days with Grant Allen’s parents. From Kingston, he boarded the steamer Vancouver and sailed up the Saint Lawrence River, stopping at Montreal and Quebec before proceeding across the Atlantic to Liverpool. While at sea, he developed an upper-respiratory infection that conspired with his general state of dizziness and nausea to make for a terrible voyage. A thoughtful passenger sent him some grapes, which rats devoured during the night. On August 20, 1887, after an odyssey often months and ten days, he was finally reunited with Annie and the children in Godalming.⁵⁰ He had kept a meticulous account of his finances on the trip and estimated that his living expenses had been $3 a day. Thirty-eight lectures and two articles had earned him $3, 167. His total outlay was $2, 140, leaving him a net profit, after a few miscellaneous expenses, of $780, or £160.⁵¹ From an economic standpoint, his trip had been a modest success, though it did little to augment his position in the annals of science. However, he derived more from the tour than he had expected. He had spent nearly a year indulging his two great passions, natural history and spiritualism, and he had had ample time to reflect on humanity’s place in the universe, the conundrum that had occupied and would continue to occupy a large part of his intellectual life.