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

BY THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, Wallace felt the itch to move again. Parkstone had lost its rustic appeal, with villas being erected on all available land in his vicinity; now he had to walk almost two miles to reach open country. In 1901 he had hoped to put together a group of investors to buy an estate of from one hundred to three hundred acres and build a small number of houses for people who shared his environmental concerns. The idea was to secure a healthy and picturesque tract only one or two hours from London, with part of its woods and wilder areas to be reserved as a natural park for the enjoyment of the residents. He mailed a pamphlet outlining the plan to the various scientific societies and proposed to act as agent and surveyor, but no one took him up on the offer.¹

After abandoning this fantasy of a naturalist’s version of New Lanarck, he looked for something more modest for himself and Annie. He looked at a number of estates thirty or forty miles from London and was about to give up in despair when he found a spot only four miles from Parkstone, in Broadstone, a small town on the southern coast and an ideal retreat from the world, remote enough to ensure privacy but not too far from civilization to isolate him from English intellectual life. After some tough negotiating, he acquired three acres, having surveyed the property himself with his old sextant. The most charming part of the property, he told his son, Will, was an old grassy orchard with a score of trees, including apple, pear, plum, and cherry. From the top of the orchard was a view over moor and heather to Poole Harbour, and beyond the harbor to some hills and the sea. He found the land perfectly suited for his favorite shrubs. “I expect bulbs of all kinds grow well,” he wrote, “and I mean to plant a thousand or so of snowdrops, crocuses, squills, daffodils, etc., in the orchard, where they will look lovely.”² Will, now an electrical engineer and more earthbound than his father, asked several pertinent questions, but his father had already thought of everything: connections to water mains, arrangements for electricity, and revamping the old road, among other matters.³ Wallace next hired an architect, who designed a many-gabled “very picturesque” but unpretentious two-story brick house.⁴

Wallace acted as his own contractor, estimating the cost of his new house at £1,000. By February 1902, he was visiting his property three days a week to supervise the gardeners, who were already at work preparing the loamy soil for his exotic plants. The following month, ground was broken and a basement excavated. In April he coordinated the repotting and planting of fifty young trees and shrubs that a friend had sent from Italy as a gift. To his horror, horses and cows from neighboring farms raided his property and devoured a number of them.⁵ All sorts of problems delayed completion of the house until the end of the year. Meanwhile, expenses piled up, including wages of £10 to £12 a week and various bills averaging £30 to £50 a month. In December, eight men were still hard at work, another man was painting, and still another was constructing a road and carriage driveway to the front door. By Christmas, the house he called Old Orchard was ready for occupancy.

The house had set him back financially. He was £150 in debt to the bank and verging on bankruptcy, he wrote nonchalantly to Will, despite an advance from Macmillan for the revision of three of his books. He mischievously admonished Will not to tell his mother. He was not worried, however, for he had just been commissioned to write an article on any subject he desired for the New York Independent. It did not take him long to dream up a topic. While adding four new chapters on astronomy for another edition of The Wonderful Century, presumably with the acquiescence of (and advance payment from) Swan Sonnenschein, he suddenly felt inspired. He would show that our solar system, and therefore the earth, occupied a central position in the universe. If true, this central position could be no coincidence: it was further evidence, he believed, of intentional design by some supreme Intelligence or controlling Mind. Curtis Brown, his American agent, loved the idea, and in a few days Wallace completed his article. The New York Independent had offered him £20 for 2,500 to 3,000 words, but his article came to 8,000 words and he hoped to get £60 for it, the highest amount the newspaper had ever paid to a contributor. “But what is even better,” he told Will, who was probably surprised by the subject, “Mr. Brown suggests (after reading it) that I make a book of it, of about 70,000 words, and he will arrange for its publication, and get me a good Royalty and a good sum paid in advance.”⁶ The article also appeared in the March 1, 1903, issue of the Fortnightly Review. As always, for Wallace the fragile state of his finances served as the primary source of inspiration. As he noted in his autobiography, “I feel that without the spur of necessity, I should not have done much of the work I have done.”⁷ Although no one believed him when he confessed to being constitutionally lazy, if he had had a choice and the financial resources, he undoubtedly would have enjoyed the simple country life of a gentleman farmer and the occasional excursion to the Continent to examine the volcanoes of southern Italy or the archaeological treasures of Pompeii.

For six months, Wallace immersed himself in astronomy, an entirely new discipline for this octogenarian. Every day he worked at his desk in his library, with its lovely view of nearby Poole Harbour. He enlisted Will to proofread the manuscript and make any corrections in the physics and math computations as he went along. Will objected to certain passages—especially to tangential topics like pollution. “The bit about the pure air came to me while writing and I let myself go,” Wallace replied in self-defense. “Why should I not try and do a little good and make people think a little on such matters, when I have the chance of perhaps more readers than all my other books!” Will also objected to his father’s treatment of the subject of Homo sapiens. “[Of] course that is the whole subject of the book!” Wallace exclaimed. “And I look at it differently from you, because I know facts about him you neither know nor believe yet.” The new book, which he entitled Man’s Place in the Universe as a conscious allusion to Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, was unusual by any standard. In it, Wallace combined astronomy with geology, physics, organic evolution, and a dash of spiritualism to argue powerfully against the probability that human beings existed anywhere else in the universe. “A great deal is speculative,” he told Will, “but any reply to it is equally speculative. The question is, which speculation is most in accordance with the known facts, and not with prepossessions only.”⁸

Wallace challenged an idea then raging throughout Europe and the United States that intelligent life existed on other planets in the solar system, most especially Mars. In the late 1870s, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed lines on Mars that he called canali (channels), which the American astronomer Percival Lowell interpreted as a sign of intelligent life. In 1898 H. G. Wells had captured the public’s imagination with his story The War of the Worlds, which depicted the invasion of earth by the technologically superior Martians. Wallace was unimpressed. Based on his readings and his correspondence with some of the foremost English astronomers and physicists of the day—including Joseph Norman Lockyer, George Darwin, Lord Kelvin, and Sir John Herschel—he had reduced current astronomical lore to six propositions. First, the stellar universe, though of enormous extent, was finite, with determinable limits, bounded in its extremity by the circular Milky Way. Second, the solar system was situated in the plane of the Milky Way and not far removed from its center; therefore, our planet was nearly at the center of the universe. Third, the universe consisted of the same matter and chemical elements throughout and was subject to the same physical and chemical laws; conditions similar, if not identical, to those on earth had to obtain on a planet if organic life was to develop there. Fourth, no other planet in the solar system, Mars included, had the properties or conditions that would permit the development of anything but the most primitive form of life. Fifth, the probability of there being any other sun with inhabited or habitable planets was inconceivably small. Sixth, the nearly central position of our sun was probably a permanent one, and had been specially favorable—perhaps absolutely essential—to the development of life on earth.⁹

One of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century was spectrum analysis, which for the first time enabled scientists to analyze the composition of the sun, planets, and stars. Wallace stated that, broadly speaking, the entire stellar universe was constructed of the same series of elementary substances as those found on our planet. The whole material universe was essentially one. If the elements were the same, then the laws that governed these elements must also be the same. If any organized beings existed elsewhere in the universe, then they must also be the same. Although he admitted that life could exist under altogether diverse conditions in universes differently constructed, life in our universe would have had to arise under the same conditions as those existing on our planet. The conditions on Mars, Mercury, or any other planet in the solar system could not support the development of higher forms of life. If life existed in those places at all, it would be of the lowest type. The adaptability of a planet for the full development of life depended primarily on its size and, more directly, its mass. For example, Mars was not massive enough to retain water vapor; moreover, given the narrow temperature ranges in which life could survive on earth, Mars was too cold to sustain life.

Wallace portrayed the universe as a vast, integrated system, from the tiniest molecules to the largest stars. No one of its constituents could exist without the other. The existence of the earth was as important to the existence of the universe as the existence of the universe was to the existence of the earth. In short, the universe was a single organism composed of infinite and complex substructures. The most controversial aspect of the book was, of course, its conclusion. Contrary to the reigning dogma of the time, Wallace abandoned the materialist explanation of the origin of life in favor of the spiritualist one. He believed that his interconnected argument, founded wholly on facts and principles enunciated by modern science, led by deduction to one “great and definite” conclusion: that human beings, the culmination of conscious organic life, had arisen on our planet alone in the whole vast material universe. If human beings were the unique and supreme product of this vast universe, then some controlling Mind or Intelligence had conceived us for this very purpose. The immensity of the stellar universe, the long and slow and complex progress of nature, and the vast aeons of time that had passed before our development served as the raw materials and the spacious workshop for a Mind that “produced” the planet that eventually resulted in humankind. As Wallace wrote:

The conception of the universe during Wallace’s time neatly fit into his theory of man’s place in the cosmos. In fact, one of his critics, Herbert Hall Turner, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, acknowledged that Wallace drew his facts from the best sources of information available to him. But Turner was quick to point out that much of astronomical knowledge in the first years of the twentieth century was already “ancient history”; data from astronomers were pouring in at a logarithmic rate. The discovery in 1901 of “dark nebulae” that both reflected light and partly obscured it suggested to Turner that there probably were more stars than could be seen with the telescopes of the era. Moreover, he called Wallace’s belief in the sun’s central position in the universe irrelevant. In his critique of Wallace in the Fortnightly Review, Turner asked:

To his fellow scientists, Wallace’s theory may have looked like anthropocentrism dressed up in evolutionary clothing, but to those dissatisfied with cold scientific reductionism it offered solace. Likewise for Wallace, who refused to believe that humanity, with its faculties, aspirations, and powers for good and evil, was a simple by-product of random forces—that human beings were merely animals of no importance to the universe and requiring no great preparation for their advent.¹¹

In 1904 Francis Darwin suggested to his friend the artist William Rothenstein that he make a portrait of Wallace. Rothenstein, Oxford educated and a young portraitist of note, enjoyed painting unpopular eminent men or eminent men espousing unpopular ideas. In the late 1890s, he had published a four-volume series entitled English Portraits that included portraits of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw—though not everyone was a celebrity. As the caricaturist Max Beerbohm noted in his introduction to a volume of the painter’s portraits and drawings, distinction was what Rothenstein liked, even if coupled with obscurity. Celebrities generally left Rothenstein cold unless they were something more than celebrated. Wallace was therefore the perfect choice.¹² Upon Darwin’s recommendation, Wallace readily consented and invited the artist to spend a weekend with him. Rothenstein traveled to the village of Broadstone in late January, arriving by train in the evening. A cab took him along the main road past several houses, and then down a hill to Wallace’s home, marked by a lantern hung specially for him on the gate. As instructed, he brought the lantern with him to the front door, where Wallace politely waited.

Wallace apparently was a disappointment to his portraitist. Having read his political and social writings, Rothenstein expected to find an expansive and warmhearted humanitarian but instead encountered someone rather distant and cold. (“Perhaps age had dulled him, and the years had damped down a once brightly burning fire,” Rothenstein would later note in his memoirs.) Wallace’s appearance reminded him of a Nonconformist preacher, not a scientist—whatever such a person was supposed to look like. He may have had in mind someone like Sir Joseph Hooker, who had charmed him more. “How handsome he must have been as a young man I saw from … photographs in the Darwin’s [sic] house,” he recalled of Hooker. “In the Hooker’s [sic] house hung an entertaining picture of a very Victorian young Hooker, with side whiskers and sun helmet, receiving, in a tropical landscape, the fruits of the earth from kneeling savages.” Old Orchard disappointed Rothenstein as much as Wallace’s appearance did: no menagerie of glorious specimens from the tropics; no striking artifacts from Brazil or the Dutch East Indies to fill out the image of a great explorer. He was amused to note that an old faded photograph of Darwin in a cheap frame served as Wallace’s only memento of their long and historic association. The young artist’s eye discovered nothing of beauty even in the wild Dorset landscape. Old Orchard was the home of a “schoolmaster,” he remarked, someone with plebeian tastes. His portrait, a simple pencil drawing like his other English portraits, reflects this impression. “The face. … seems to me rather too delicate in feature, too small in mouth, too young-looking! and with that very bored expression,” Wallace wrote in alarm to Rothenstein when he received the proof of the portrait a few weeks later. He attributed his dull countenance to having felt unwell that day and invited Rothenstein back in the spring, when the fresh air would enliven his complexion. Rothenstein declined the offer.¹³ If Wallace had failed to impress Rothenstein, Rothenstein had failed to impress Wallace. The encounter was not mentioned in his later writings. Shy and reserved around strangers, Wallace was best seen when “brought out” by a sympathetic companion. The young artist evidently had found nothing with which to sympathize in the old philosophical naturalist.

Man’s Place in the Universe, published at the end of 1903 in London (Chapman & Hall) and New York (McClure, Phillips), was a notable success (it quickly went through seven editions), prompting Curtis Brown to commission an autobiography with Chapman & Hall and Dodd, Mead in New York, the American publisher of The Wonderful Century. The publication of two new books by other publishing houses sent Macmillan into a panic. Wallace defended his decision by stating that he had been approached to write both books; had he originated the ideas himself, he would have offered Macmillan the option to publish them; at the same time, he did not lose the opportunity to point out Brown’s help in easing every step along the way. Not only had Brown conceived ideas for the two books and all but promised publication in both England and the United States on “very liberal terms,” but he had arranged for translations into several languages, which saved Wallace much trouble and correspondence. As a type of consolation, Wallace noted in a postscript that if his autobiography attracted attention, the sale of his books with Macmillan undoubtedly would increase.¹⁴

My Life; A Record of Events and Opinions, which Chapman & Hall brought out in October 1905, is Wallace’s surprisingly candid account of his own successes and failures. Like a number of his later works, it intermixes facts with sermons from the bully pulpit—especially on those two bêtes noires: spiritualism and land nationalization. In it, Wallace looks back at his later life and recent literary output from a spiritualist perspective: “Now it seems to me a very suggestive fact that my literary work during the last ten years should have been so completely determined by two circumstances which must be considered, in the ordinary sense of the term, and in relation to my volition, matters of chance.” If Henry Simpson Lunn had not invited him to Davos and suggested the subject of science in the nineteenth century, he would not have written The Wonderful Century. If he had not written The Wonderful Century, he would never have been directed to great astronomical problems, never have chosen as the subject of an article the sun’s central position in the universe, never have undertaken the laborious task of researching and writing Man’s Place in the Universe, and thus never have been asked to write his autobiography. If he had not met the sculptor Albert Bruce-Joy, who had recommended a diet that miraculously cured his asthma, he would not have had the stamina to embark on any of these demanding projects.¹⁵ The spirit Sunshine’s prophecy of a third chapter in his life, characterized by “satisfaction, retrospection, and work,” had been fulfilled. The wholesome activity of mind and body, the beauty of Old Orchard, with its pure air and splendid views—this was satisfaction. The writing of his autobiography, which covered a period spanning three-quarters of a century—this was retrospection. The entire past ten years—this was work.

Wallace’s autobiography sprawled over two volumes, each more than four hundred pages long. It contained numerous illustrations and two foldout maps (one a reproduction of his original map of the Rio Negro and Upper Uaupés, and the other depicting the Malay Archipelago). It went through a second printing in 1906—including a version for Bell’s Indian and Colonial Library, which printed books for circulation in India and the other British colonies—and was condensed and revised in 1908 with help from his son, Will. In the preface, Wallace stated that it was difficult to write a record of a life that spanned some eighty years without subjecting himself to the charge of “diffuseness or egotism.” And from this charge, he admittedly could not altogether escape. But his experiences had been varied, “if not exciting,” and he hoped that the frequent change of scene and occupation, as well as the diversity of his interests and of the persons with whom he had associated, would render his story “less tedious than might have been anticipated.” The book is marked by its author’s renowned eccentricities. For example, he analyzed himself phrenologically, shunning even the slightest reference to the new theory of the unconscious. He had dismissed the possibility of an unconscious mental life as early as 1896: in the preface to the third edition of Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, he had stated that “the ‘second’ or ‘subconscious’ self, with its wide stores of knowledge, how gained no one knows, its distinct character, its low morality, its constant lies is as purely a theoretical cause as is the spirit of a deceased person or any other spirit.” Moreover, he believed that the course of his life proved the thesis of his idol, Robert Owen, that the development of one’s character was due less to heredity than to the influences of one’s environment.

He admitted to Arabella Buckley Fisher that the reviews of his autobiography were generally fair in their assessment of his so-called fads. Because of his frequent heterodoxy, one reporter called him an “anti-body.” Another gave him a backhanded compliment, stating that he was the only man who believed in spiritualism, phrenology, anti-vaccination, and the centrality of the earth in the universe whose life was worth writing. “Then it points out a few things I am capable of believing but which everybody else knows to be fallacies, and compares me to Sir I Newton writing on the prophets!” he complained of this review. “Yet of course he praises my biology up to the stars—there I am wise—everywhere else I am a kind of weak, babyish idiot!”¹⁶ The reviewer for Nature, J.A.T. (probably J. Arthur Thomson, professor of natural history at the University of Aberdeen), focused on Wallace’s wisdom in natural history, having been urged by Joseph Norman Lockyer to confine his “attention … to what he tells us of his work as naturalist and biologist, though it is difficult, if not altogether legitimate perhaps, to abstract off one aspect of a life in this fashion.” The review glowed with admiration and affection for its subject, referring to Wallace as the “Nestor of the evolutionist camp,” a man whose long life had been “full of work, rich in achievement, and starred with high ideals.”¹⁷ The anonymous reviewer in the Lancet was equally reverential, though he could not help ending the review with the remark that “possibly some readers will find the lengthy disquisition upon spiritualism the most interesting part of Dr. Wallace’s autobiography, not because the rest of these numerous pages pale in interest by contrast but because of the, to many of us, astounding fact that a man of Dr. Wallace’s undoubted achievements in science and clearness in argument should have been convinced by what is unquestionably … said to be … largely imposture.”¹⁸

For the next year, Wallace took a break from large literary projects and made only a handful of contributions to various publications, mainly on political, social, or spiritual issues: he continued to criticize government policy on smallpox vaccination; he lent his support to the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment; he gave practical advice on how to nationalize the railroads and socialize the government; and he urged South Africa to embrace racial equality.¹⁹ Every morning, he spent two hours or so reading or writing in his study, surrounded by shelves filled with books, magazines, and journals. He responded to the many letters he received, including requests to write on any subject—even those he knew nothing about. Next he might wander into the adjoining conservatory. Having bought or received as gifts plants and seeds from Australia, New Zealand, the Himalayas, the mountains of Ceylon, the South African veld—including the far reaches of the vast British Empire—more than two hundred subtropical shrubs flourished on his premises. Every day he went outdoors into his garden, donning the massive pair of boots with inch-thick wooden soles in which he used to tramp through Wales or the mountains of Switzerland.

While his various occupations distracted her husband, Annie preoccupied herself with some domestic chore or worked in her part of the garden. She was fond of roses and primroses, which she nurtured as assiduously as her husband did his orchids, and she succeeded at the difficult art of hybridization. Her memory for botanical names was excellent; often when Wallace had difficulty recalling the name of a plant for a visitor, she would rescue him. At lunch they joined each other again, perhaps with Violet. In 1903, Violet, now thirty-four years old and unmarried, had returned from her schoolteacher’s job in Liverpool to live with her parents for reasons that are unclear. She supported herself by tutoring three or four children in the neighborhood, which delighted her father, who treated her pupils as if they were his grandchildren.

In the afternoon, Wallace took a nap or interrupted his studies and writing to contemplate the beautiful view from his study window. In the evening, after supper, he read or wrote for a few more hours before going to bed. His reading was as eclectic as ever: Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Pyotr Kropotkin. He loved novels, both contemporary works and the older classics, having a special affection for Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. But his favorite form of literature was poetry; over the decades, he had collected more than fifty volumes. One of his more recent discoveries was the great Hindu epic Mahabharata, which he placed in the same exalted league as Homer and the Psalms of the Old Testament. Quotations from some of his favorite authors are sprinkled throughout his later works—in part because he hated to see a blank page in any book.²⁰ He spent months investigating and debating the origin of a four-stanza poem called “Leonanie,” which he attributed to Edgar Allan Poe or a spirit in his name:

The American poet James Whitcomb Riley, famous as the originator of “Little Orphan Annie,” claimed to have concocted this poem as a youthful prank in 1877. At that time, Riley had been a struggling poet whom no one would publish; he wished to show the world that “the critics of verse would praise from a notable source what they did not hesitate to condemn from an emanation opposite,” and, indeed, the poem had been praised as genuine by the highest authorities. Wallace was aware of the stunt but did not think that Riley had completely cleared up the mystery of the poem’s origin; in his opinion, Riley was incapable of producing anything “with the same exquisite musical rhythm” as “Leonanie.” Two versions of the poem were extant, Wallace argued, and his brother John had sent him the “better” version before his death in 1895: “The one issued by the alleged composer is not only inferior to the other, but contains such incongruities and verbal errors, as to seem to show that he did not realise the meaning of the poem, or appreciate its musical rhythm, as a whole, unless Riley wrote the poem under the spiritual influence of Poe—in an access oí inspiration which has never recurred—(which I think quite possible) and then in his normal state altered and spoilt it.”²¹

Wallace had not altogether abandoned his efforts on behalf of natural selection. Attacks on the Darwin–Wallace theory never failed to raise his hackles. “What a miserable abortion of a theory is ‘Mutation,’ which the Americans now seem to be taking up in place of Lamarckism,” he wrote to his friend Edward Poulton.²² The rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s work by three European botanists and its promulgation in Great Britain by William Bateson seemed to divide evolutionists into two ideological camps: the naturalists and the experimentalists. Bateson, an experimental biologist with little experience in field biology, had seized on Mendel’s rules of inheritance as proof of his belief in discontinuous variation; that is, every change in evolution was due to a major mutation. Although Mendel’s laws explained only heredity, they were appropriated by Bateson to explain speciation. To a naturalist like Wallace, who had experienced firsthand the vast diversity of life, with its infinite gradations and variations, “mutationism” was special creation under another name.²³ Wallace appreciated the novelty of Mendel’s work, but he did not grasp its full implications for his own theory. (Few at the time did.) The debate between the two opposing camps clouded the picture. Another three decades would pass before Mendelism and the theory of natural selection were synthesized into a single grand theory and no longer perceived as mutually exclusive. But Wallace placed Mendel’s discoveries in the proper perspective. As he wrote to Poulton in July 1907, “‘Mutation’ as a theory is absolutely nothing new—only the assertion that new species originate always in sports, for which the evidence adduced is the most meagre and inconclusive of any ever set forth with such pretentious claims! ‘Mendelism’ is something new, and within its very limited range, important, as leading to conceptions as to the causes and laws of heredity, but only misleading when adduced as the true origin of species in nature, as to which it seems to me to have no part.”²⁴

Wallace could never remain idle for long. Without some great project, his life had no purpose. Perhaps perceiving that his time was running out, in March 1906 he wrote a letter to Matthew B. Slater, the executor of Richard Spruce’s estate, resurrecting the idea of editing Spruce’s notes and journals for publication. Hooker, now eighty-nine, and Sir Clements R. Markham, a distinguished geographer and former president of the Royal Geographical Society, enthusiastically supported the project. Slater sent Wallace one of Spruce’s journals. Although it brought back vivid memories of events long past, Wallace feared that it was too small a part of his journey to interest a publisher. In the nine years that had elapsed since Wallace had casually suggested publishing Spruce’s papers, Slater had examined hardly anything in his possession. There must be much more, Wallace thought. He was certain that Spruce had kept a continuous journal of his fifteen years of travel in South America and copious notes on the various botanical questions that interested him from time to time. If he could see all of Spruce’s notes and the entire journal, he would then be able to put together a book that would be of considerable interest to botanists, naturalists, and the educated reader alike. It was the voyages to the Orinoco and the Andes that were the most novel and most interesting, in his opinion. He asked Slater for a list of Spruce’s papers first, fearing that Slater would send him boxes of unorganized material.²⁵

Slater sent Wallace a list of papers and manuscripts, but none that made any reference to Spruce’s journeys, extending over a two- or three-year period, up the Rio Negro and the Uaupés, Casiquiare, and Orinoco Rivers—regions that had not been explored botanically since Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland had visited them. Surely there must be some journals and notebooks describing this extensive exploration. Slater suggested that Wallace come to York to examine the papers himself, but Wallace did not feel that he could leave Broadstone without endangering his health. “Though very well on the whole,” he wrote, “I can only keep so by strict attention to diet, regularity of habits, and by means of those conveniences and remedies I can only have at home. For the last three years I have not been a night away and feel it is best for me not to leave home, as I feel many of the disabilities of old age.” Wallace extended an invitation to Slater to visit his home to discuss the matter further. Spruce had been a meticulous worker, and Wallace wanted the botanical names of plants and all Indian or Portuguese terms written out very distinctly, exactly reproducing Spruce’s spelling, to prevent publishing errors. Wallace was also fussy about the kind of manuscript paper onto which transcriptions were to be made, and he sent along a sample to Slater, who apparently accepted Wallace’s imperious demands without resentment and agreed to do what he could to ensure the successful publication of such an important work.²⁶

Slater visited Wallace in late June or early July; in August, he informed Wallace that he had found the missing journal. Relieved, Wallace declared himself ready to make a proposal to Macmillan, with which he had had a rapprochement. He was appalled, however, when the “journal” arrived a few days later, and he demanded to know how Slater could have thought “that the copies of letters to Mr. John Teasdale [one of Spruce’s “botanizing” friends] are the missing ‘Journal.’” The offending letters, which were long and gossipy, merely alluded to the journal, which Wallace insisted must therefore exist somewhere. Moreover, Spruce had drawn up an index of all nonbotanical subjects referred to in the “Journal” and in a “Little Square Book,” the former index comprising 194 pages and the latter 187, indicating that both were substantial volumes. He urged Slater to carry on the search. “Until these two important books are found,” he informed Slater, “nothing can be done in regard to making arrangements for publication.” After once more looking through the material Slater sent him, Wallace could find nothing describing Spruce’s eighteen-month residence in the town of Tarapoto, in Peru, or any references to the period from July 1857 until his departure for England in May 1864. “It is evident therefore that you must still have a large quantity of ‘Journals’—either in separate small books, or bound together,” he wrote to Slater on August 26. “As it is these ‘Journals’ alone that are of any use for giving an account of his whole Travels, please make another search for them.”²⁷

Two weeks later, Slater finally sent what appeared to be a missing journal, but he was once again mistaken. Wallace told him to keep looking. “It is most unfortunate you did not, at the time of Spruce’s death, put all his MSS into boxes by themselves, so that they could be had when wanted,” he complained. He had only half of what he needed to complete the project, and he fairly exploded into italics: “It is now six months since I offered to do what I could to get them published, and the essential portions, without which all the rest are useless, are still not forthcoming! Cannot you get a strong woman to help your daughter make a thorough search from attic to cellar, in cupboards, boxes and bundles, and everywhere else, till they are found?”²⁸

Slater was ready to give up, though Wallace was not. He held out hope that Slater would eventually find the crucial journals. After another futile search, Slater told Wallace that the essential material was nowhere to be found. As a last resort, Wallace wrote to Markham to ask if he knew anything about the mislaid papers. Markham knew nothing and said that their loss was “most deplorable.” Slater apologized to Wallace, insisting that these papers had never been in his possession.²⁹ Disappointed, Wallace nevertheless sent an outline of his proposed book to Macmillan, along with endorsements from Hooker and Markham. The outline promised an 80,000-word manuscript covering Spruce’s explorations of the Lower Amazon, with a “very interesting” chapter on botany and geology and a discussion of the warlike women of the Amazon. There was also to be an account of Spruce’s voyages on the Rio Negro and the Uaupés, Casiquiare, and Orinoco Rivers, some 120,000 words in length. For the years 1855 to 1857, he had a large number of Spruce’s notes and letters to Sir William Hooker and George Bentham at Kew, as well as an 8,000-word narrative of Spruce’s travels from Tarapoto to the town of Baños in Ecuador. Unfortunately, for the final five years of Spruce’s South American travels, Wallace had only thirty four-page letters to Hooker and Bentham. Wallace advised Macmillan that Spruce was a naturalist of the highest rank and that as one of Spruce’s most intimate friends he was willing to act as editor of the work, though it would involve much labor and some expense in the copying and typesetting of letters and journals. Slater would also require some share in the work, he said. He asked Macmillan for the same royalty arrangement as for the other books he had published with the firm.³⁰

Although expecting little profit, Macmillan agreed at once to Wallace’s conditions and generously offered to advance him £50, nearly half of which Wallace proposed to split with Slater, reserving for himself whatever might be earned from royalties—or, if Slater preferred, Wallace would agree to give him one-fifth of the royalties and £5 from the advance payment. “Even at the best I do not expect [the advance] to pay me for the time and work I must give to [the book],” he told Slater “but I greatly wish that Spruce’s work should be made public.”³¹ In the same letter, he wrote excitedly about a new clue to the whereabouts of the missing journals. A close friend had consulted a clairvoyant who, after examining a sample of Spruce’s handwriting, described a house with a Gothic porch and circular drive standing in wooded grounds. On the lower floor, entered by way of a stone corridor, he saw a large cupboard filled with bundles of old manuscripts and newspapers; but he could determine if the papers bore any connection to Spruce only if he had a lock of Spruce’s hair. Wallace wished to know whether Slater recognized the house. Did it perhaps belong to one of Spruce’s close friends, like Teasdale? “As a matter of curiosity I shall be glad to know if that house in any way corresponds to the description I sent you. I suppose you do not happen to have kept a lock of Spruce’s hair? If so please send me a fragment.”³² Slater’s response has not been preserved, but the answer was apparently “no” on all counts.

Wallace continued the laborious task of compiling the book, which involved copying out by hand Spruce’s journal and the various notes and letters; some of this he did himself, and others were transcribed by Slater and his daughter. Wallace could have saved himself trouble by visiting Slater and personally selecting the material he needed, as Slater had first suggested, but he opted for the more cumbersome procedure of having Slater send items one at a time, a request with which Slater dutifully complied. By February 1907, Wallace had gathered and arranged enough material to fill two volumes, bridging gaps in the narrative with his own editorial comments.³³ He also had obtained from Teasdale a series of crude paintings by a native artist, which Spruce had collected and saved. After consulting Annie and his children, Wallace decided that these paintings were highly characteristic works of primitive art and worth printing in the text, but Macmillan refused on the grounds of expense. Wallace wrote to Teasdale to ask if any of Spruce’s friends in York might be willing to bear the cost of the reproduction of the paintings “as a kind of tribute to the memory of one they highly esteemed.”³⁴ The request annoyed Teasdale, who was prompted to complain to Slater, “You will see he throws out a suggestion as to money being raised.... I may say at once that the matter is not of sufficient interest to me to induce me to contribute more than a trifle to such an object.”³⁵

Wallace took a break from this tedious work to testify in London at the trial of the famous magician John Neville Maskelyne, who had been sued for libel by the Reverend Thomas Colley. Colley, an Anglican minister and an outspoken proponent of spiritualism, had offered £1,000 to anyone who could prove that a certain phenomenon he had witnessed at a séance thirty years earlier, in 1876, was the result of trickery. The phenomenon, described in a pamphlet he distributed, consisted of the materialization of a figure from the body of a medium and Nonconformist minister named Francis Ward Monck during a trance state. Wallace had mentioned Monck and this phenomenon in My Life. In the late 1870s, in order to study Monck’s production carefully and preserve him from harm related to repeated séances, four men, including Darwin’s cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood, had secured the medium’s exclusive services for an entire year. Wedgwood had invited Wallace to see the phenomena associated with Monck, and one bright Sunday afternoon, in full daylight, Wallace witnessed what was certainly one of the most spectacular sights he had ever seen. After Monck, who was dressed in clerical black, went into a trance, he suddenly stood up and pointed to his left breast. From the left side of Monck’s coat emanated a faint white patch, which brightened, seemed to flicker, and extended upward and downward in a “vaporous filament” until it formed a cloudy pillar from Monck’s shoulder to his feet while remaining attached to his body. Monck then moved to one side and passed his hand through the connecting band, severing the apparition from his body. A thickly draped female figure gradually emerged. Monck turned toward the figure, said “Look,” and clapped his hands. The figure clapped her hands in response, producing a faintly audible clapping sound. She then moved slowly back to him, grew fainter and shorter, and was apparently absorbed into his body at the same point from which she had emerged.³⁶ Colley, for his part, allegedly had seen an Egyptian “mahedi” who walked around the room, wrote messages, levitated Colley, and then was reabsorbed into Monck’s body just as Colley attempted to embrace it and found Monck in his arms instead. The psychic researcher Edmund Pod-more, coeditor of Phantasms of the Living, a ten-volume series documenting all forms of psychic phenomena, called Colley’s impressions a hallucination, a charge that Colley emphatically denied.³⁷

Monck was later imprisoned for three months as a “rogue and vagabond” after authorities found a “conjuring apparatus”—consisting of nothing more than a pair of “stuffed gloves”—in his room. This was not the first time that Monck’s honesty had been questioned. William Barrett caught Monck engaging in a gross bit of fraud during a séance when he discovered that the medium had draped a piece of white muslin on a wire frame with a black thread attached to it, which he used to simulate a materialized spirit.³⁸ Having attended numerous séances with Monck under conditions that convinced him that imposture was unlikely, Colley proclaimed Monck’s innocence, most recently at the Anglican Church’s 1905 congress.³⁹ When Maskelyne read Colley’s pamphlet, he jumped at the opportunity to prove fraud. For forty years, he had remained an unflinching critic of spiritualists, believing them all to be fools preyed on by rascals. He continued to pack his performance hall with spectators eager to see his unrelenting exposures of mediumistic tricks. He accepted Colley’s challenge, and on October 1, 1906, he undertook to reproduce the “psychic parturition,” as he called it, having advertised his intention in a pamphlet of his own. Colley, who was offered a front seat at the performance, chose to remain outdoors in the rain, distributing more copies of his own pamphlet. Onstage, Maskelyne reenacted the materialization to a remarkably successful degree, though he did not attempt reabsorption; as he would later explain to the court, “[T]he public would not [have been able to] stand the whole thing.”⁴⁰

Colley’s charge of libel was based on three or four sentences in Maskelyne’s pamphlet that accused him of having misrepresented himself as an archdeacon when he went to South Africa in the late 1870s to work with John William Colenso, the bishop of Natal. According to Maskelyne, Colley had had no right to call himself an archdeacon, not having received a degree from a legitimate institution, and had represented himself falsely without his archbishop’s approval. Colley vehemently denied the accusations and sought to set the record straight, whereas Maskelyne’s lawyers sensationalized the case as one more rebuttal to the spiritualists.⁴¹

At the trial, which lasted less than a week, Wallace volunteered as a witness and, in a curious case of déjà vu, came face to face with his unrepentant nemesis Maskelyne. Introduced as “Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S., D.C.L., L.L.D.,” he had come to London not to defend Colley’s reputation but those of Monck and spiritualism. Although he said that he had never met Colley until the day of the trial, he had met Monck in 1877 or 1878. At séances in a small house in Bloomsbury, he had observed exactly the same phenomena described by Colley and was as convinced as Colley of their genuineness. He had also attended Maskelyne’s recent performance, and he pronounced the legerdemain “perfectly ludicrous.” The conditions were entirely different, he said, the one on a lighted stage, the other in a small room in broad daylight. Maskelyne had failed to reproduce the phenomenon in its entirety. No white patch had emerged from Maskelyne’s breast and grown before the audience’s eyes, and at the end the “materialized” young lady walked off the stage instead of being gradually reabsorbed into Maskelyne’s body. “It was an absurd travesty,” Wallace testified, “while the other was a most marvelous sight to see.” During cross-examination, Wallace denied that all mediums were eventually exposed as charlatans. He had rarely heard of true exposures and, contrary to Maskelyne’s testimony, had never personally met a medium who was a scoundrel. Indeed, the magician’s panoply of tricks failed to impress the jury. Nor were they amused by a frivolous attack on a member of the clergy—even if he was a spiritualist. They ruled in Colley’s favor, fining Maskelyne £75 for libel and denying him the £1,000 reward. Thus ended Wallace’s last major public contribution to the spiritualist cause.⁴²

Wallace also interrupted his work on Spruce’s papers to write a short book called Is Mars Habitable?—a response to Percival Lowell’s 1906 book Mars and Its Canals. As a result of observations through his telescope at his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Lowell, an amateur astronomer, had become convinced that the intricate lines on the surface of Mars were the artifacts of intelligent beings. The receding and advancing of the Martian polar caps led Lowell to affirm the presence of water, which was channeled in summer to irrigate the equatorial regions and was sufficient to supply the needs of a complex civilization. His book caused a minor sensation, attracting the attention of almost every magazine and newspaper in the United States and Great Britain. Since no reputable astronomer or physicist refuted Lowell’s thesis, Wallace took it upon himself to give a careful, thorough, and “popular” exposition of the facts disproving Mars’s capability of supporting advanced life, expanding on his arguments in Man’s Place in the Universe. Macmillan agreed to publish the work—a somewhat unusual decision, since the firm had published Lowell’s book in Great Britain, but perhaps it was eager to keep Wallace from straying to other publishing houses. It bowed to his request (“the one thing I ask”) to publish this brief manuscript in a volume of the same size as his other books, and left the terms of his royalties unchanged.⁴³

Although paying homage to Lowell’s “admirable work,” which had earned him the just praise of the scientific community, Wallace disagreed with his interpretation of his observations. Contrary to Lowell’s assertions, he said, spectroscopie analysis did not confirm the presence of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere. It also had been proved that aqueous vapor could not exist on a planet whose mass was less than one-quarter that of earth. Stymied by Lowell’s complex mathematical formulas demonstrating that Mars was as warm and habitable as earth even though it received less than half as much of the sun’s heat as earth did, Wallace still believed that Lowell was wrong. For three months, he puzzled out a response. He consulted a number of physicists and mathematicians, including George Darwin, but no one agreed to search for errors and fallacies in Lowell’s mathematics. “However I think I have done it myself by the rules of common sense,” Wallace wrote confidently to his friend Fred Birch, a young naturalist preparing for an entomological exploration of South America whom Wallace was mentoring at the time.⁴⁴ In the latter half of the book, Wallace proposed his own theory of the formation of Mars from the aggregation of meteorites into a “cold mass,” whose surface had been heated and liquefied by the further impact of more meteorites and then had cracked during the cooling process between impacts. Further cracking and crumbling of these fissures over long periods of time had led to what appeared to be canals and oases.⁴⁵ Although his theory could not be proved at the time, he attempted to replace speculation with an explanation based on known scientific principles. Underlying Wallace’s philosophical premise was an idiosyncratic view of the origin of the universe—one might call it teleological evolution, the belief that a controlling Mind or Intelligence manipulated natural laws for distinct ends. It was this belief, more than anything else, that had made so many of his scientific contemporaries uncomfortable. Essential to his theory was his anthropocentrism—a belief in humanity’s unique position in the universe. Nothing, barring the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, could change his mind on that issue.

With Mars out of his system, Wallace returned to the Spruce book. By the end of 1907, he had nearly finished his manuscript. He was fastidious about every aspect of the book: he knew what he wanted, showed no hesitation in imposing his wishes on others, and was quick to express displeasure when his orders were not followed. In his obsession for perfection, he was tyrannical. His endless lists must have tried the patience of Slater and his editors alike. Age had made him more rigid and entitled but had not weakened the drive and determination of his youth. Wallace acted as his own ruthless editor, cutting his manuscript in half after having pored over it four or five times—and still the book came to two volumes. But when it was finished, he felt confident that it would appeal to “any intelligent person” and be of lasting interest to botanists and lovers of nature. He sent Macmillan a list of picturesque and highly descriptive chapter headings. He also included every one of Spruce’s drawings that he felt was worth reproducing and old photographs of Ecuadorian and Amazonian scenery that, “if reduced to page size, will add greatly to the value of the book—which will be one oí permanent interest.” He had an additional recommendation: “May I suggest that in deciding on the size and form of the book, you keep in view the possibility of a cheap one vol edition—which I am inclined to think would have a permanent sale as a prize and gift book among ‘classical’ travels [sz’c].”⁴⁶ Wallace left no doubt that he managed the orchestra: he was composer, performer, and conductor. Macmillan was left to underwrite the concert.

The mapmaker, who displayed special incompetence by ignoring all of Wallace’s detailed notes, drove him to the point of madness. Important towns or landmarks were omitted; roads were erased; imaginary rivers traversed imaginary valleys; cities and mountains were put in the wrong places; fictitious rivers drained into the Pacific. Arbitrarily, the cartographer put in the longitude of Quito as “0.” “What possible use, but to confuse, is this on an English map?” Wallace complained. Consulting atlases and references that should have been at the fingertips of any professional cartographer, he missed nothing. Time and time again, he returned his most important map for revisions. “I have been more worried by this map than by all the rest of the book,” he confessed. “Any fourth form schoolboy would be ashamed to send in such a map—and it is sent to me by a Map-maker with a well-known name for my approval]”⁴⁷

There were other, more minor problems. Dissatisfied with the weight of the paper that Macmillan was using, Wallace wanted something lighter that would feel more pleasant to the touch. He also asked that the botanical passages, of interest only to the specialist, be offset from the rest of the text by smaller print.⁴⁸ Will, who worried about the stress of all this exasperating work, advised his father to draw up a statement detailing the financial arrangements of the book following publication in order to save the respective families time and trouble in the event of his death. It was a request that Wallace did not find strange or self-serving and to which he readily agreed.⁴⁹

It is easy to forget that the person who edited Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes, which Macmillan published in 1908, was an octogenarian. Despite physical infirmities, he still possessed the energy and intellect to condense, organize, and critically assess a great mass of disparate material. What he produced is of enduring importance to botanists and to the history of science, and it remains a remarkable homage to the memory of a man whose extraordinary work might otherwise have been forgotten. As Mark R. D. Seaward, a noted British botanist, observed some ninety years later (partly in gratitude to Wallace’s herculean efforts), “[N]o botanist studying tropical plants and their use can afford not to consult Spruce’s specimens and detailed notes. Their value for those working in the fields of phytochemistry, ethnotoxicity, hallucinogens, narcotics and economic botany is immense.”⁵⁰