WHEN ASKED WHY he was chosen by the president of the United States, William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, as a recipient of the 1997 National Humanities Medal, Studs Terkel, historian of the American common man and woman, replied, “If you hang around long enough, anything is possible.”1 Wallace would no doubt have agreed with Terkel’s sentiments. By 1908, when he was eighty-five years old, he had hung around long enough to become a national treasure. He had outlived most of his peers and critics. His heresies were now viewed as eccentricities, and his countrymen hailed him as a great man, awarding him the highest honors he could have received short of a knighthood. On July 1, 1908, he received the first Darwin–Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society in commemoration of the joint publication of their revolutionary papers fifty years earlier. In the first week of November, he was awarded both the Copley Medal and the Order of Merit.
The Darwin–Wallace Medal had been specially struck for the occasion. On each side of the gold medal were embossed the august bearded busts of Darwin and Wallace, the former in profile to show off the craggy brow overshadowing deeply recessed, brooding eyes; the latter in three-quarter view, with a less forbidding aspect. At the celebration, reported in the press throughout Europe, the United States, and the British Empire, silver copies were presented to Sir Joseph Hooker, Ernst Haeckel, Edouard Strasburger, August Weismann, Francis Galton, and Sir Edwin Ray Lankester—the six greatest living exponents of Darwinism in England and on the Continent. Wallace made a rare public appearance and gave an eloquent speech, typically downplaying the significance of his role in spearheading one of the greatest intellectual revolutions of all time. As he recalled:
The idea came to me, as it had come to Darwin, in a sudden flash of insight: it was thought out in a few hours—with such a sketch of its various applications and developments as occurred to me at the moment—then copied on thin letterhead and sent off to Darwin—all within one week. Such being the actual facts … I should have had no cause for complaint if the respective shares of Darwin and myself in regard to the elucidation of nature’s method of organic development had been thenceforth estimated as being, roughly, proportional to the time we had each bestowed upon it when it was thus first given to the world—that is to say, as 20 years’ work is to one week. For, had he already made it his theory, after 10 years’ work—15 years’—or even 18 years’ elaboration of it—I should have had no part in it whatever, and he would have been at once recognised, and should ever be recognised, as the sole and undisputed discoverer and patient investigator of the great law of “Natural Selection.”2
The award of the Copley Medal—”the ancient olive crown of the Royal Society,” as Sir Humphrey Davy, president of the society in the 1820s, called it—came as no surprise to anyone except Wallace, who now joined the ranks of Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, and the handful of others who had received both the Royal and Copley Medals for their distinguished contributions to science.3 But the Order of Merit was completely unexpected. King Edward VII had established the Order of Merit in 1902, one year after acceding to the throne, for exceptionally meritorious service in either the military or the arts and sciences, limiting its award to twenty-four people annually, each appointed by the sovereign himself.4 One of the first recipients of the Order of Merit was Florence Nightingale. Herbert Asquith, who became prime minister in 1908, had suggested Wallace’s name. Asquith headed a Liberal government whose most significant achievement was social reform on a scale unprecedented in English history. Although Asquith characterized himself as a moderate, others in his cabinet were more radical. When the Liberals came to power in 1905, Wallace was delighted. “The most Radical Government yet known in England... gives me a new interest in life and the hope to live a few years longer to see what comes of it,” he wrote to Raphael Mel-dola.5 Old-age pensions, workers’ compensation, unemployment and health insurance, eight-hour day for miners, greater taxation of the wealthy—in short, the enactment of several items on the socialist agenda—were among the many new laws passed during the party’s ten-year administration.6
Asquith thought the selection of Wallace would be a “graceful and generally appreciated mark of [His] Majesty’s interest in the progress of Natural Science.” If the king had any doubts, Asquith wrote, “[His] Majesty might desire to be fortified by the highest scientific opinion, in which case [I] would … communicate confidentially with Lord Rayleigh, the President of the Royal Society.”7 The king knew little of Wallace or his radical political views; otherwise, he might have had misgivings. Rayleigh’s and Asquith’s unqualified endorsements seemed to be sufficient. Although deeply moved by the plight of the impoverished, the king was content with the status quo and instinctively distrusted the socialists, despite their assurances of loyalty to the Crown. His reign was marked by the striking contrast of regal splendor and high living with the squalor and discontent of the urban and rural poor, whose clamor for social change would reach a climax in the aftermath of World War I.8 Conservatives in the government were shocked at the selection of an avowed socialist for the Order of Merit, but no one was more astonished than Wallace himself. For once the stars were aligned in Wallace’s favor, with the golden jubilee of the discovery of natural selection, the advent of a radical government, and a spiritualist sympathizer as the head of Britain’s highest scientific body. Thus Wallace came to be honored with two of his country’s most prestigious awards for private citizens.
Lord Knolly, the king’s private secretary, requested Wallace’s presence for investiture at Buckingham Palace on December 14, but Wallace dreaded the pomp and circumstance of such a formal ceremony. At the time, he was conveniently suffering from some sort of illness, which made him hesitant to leave home for any reason—even to meet the king. He composed a polite letter of thanks, but begged to be excused from attending the ceremony on the grounds of age and delicacy of health. Privately he confided to Fred Birch that he was deterred by the expense of the court dress, a “kind of very costly livery,” which was obligatory for the occasion.9 To his great relief, after a few anxious weeks the king granted his request and sent one of his equerries, a Colonel Legge, to Broadstone with the Order of Merit in hand. Wallace was pleased with the medallion, which he described to Birch glowingly as “a very handsome cross in red and blue enamel and gold—rich colours—with a crown above, and a rich ribbed-silk blue and crimson riband to hang around the neck.” The personable colonel, who regaled the elderly couple with royal gossip, was treated to tea and showed Wallace how to wear the medal on public occasions. He also presented Wallace with two official documents signed by the king, the first appointing him a member of the Order of Merit, and the second certifying by royal decree that he had a right to the order though not personally invested by the king. Not long afterward, a letter from Windsor Castle informed him that a chalk portrait was to be taken for the library’s collections. William Strang, the artist, who was also a renowned etcher, engraver, and illustrator, spent the night at Wallace’s house and within four hours completed “a very good” life-size head in colored chalk.10 Despite his usual dislike of attention, Wallace could not completely suppress his pride; he allowed Macmillan to append “O.M.” before the other titles after his name on the frontispiece of his latest book.11
Wallace received congratulatory letters from around the world. In distant Singapore, the awards did not escape the notice of Mrs. A. J. Bidwell, a daughter of Charles Allen, his assistant in the Malay Archipelago, who had died in 1899 or 1900. “Although not personally known to you,” Bidwell’s husband wrote, “my wife feels that she knows you, as her father was never tired of telling his children of the happy times he spent with you. There is a feeling in the Straits that you do to a certain extent belong to us from the long time you spent here and your writings.”12
In late October, Wallace received a letter from Sir William Crookes inviting him to give a lecture at the Royal Institution in January 1909 to celebrate the golden jubilee of the publication of The Origin of Species. Located at 21 Albemarle Street, in a town house that had been converted in 1799 into a scientific institute with ample lab space, a lecture hall, libraries, and offices, the Royal Institution had quickly become one of the world’s premier research organizations and scientific think tanks. It was there that Sir Humphry Davy isolated chlorine and iodine and invented his famous miner’s lamp (Davy lamp), Michael Faraday carried out his groundbreaking experiments in chemistry and physics, and Lord Rayleigh discovered argon. The Friday Evening Discourses, consisting of formal lectures given to members and their guests on the latest practical or theoretical scientific discoveries, attracted serious scientists and fashionable socialites alike, owing to the high quality of the lecturers and the novelty of the subject matter. It was a great honor to be invited to speak, yet Wallace’s first inclination was to decline, having nothing new to add to this well-worn subject. But an idea suddenly came to him, containing new arguments to quash the Mendelians. “I think I can put Darwinism in a new light, so as to leave ‘Mutationism’ etc etc nowhere!” he boasted to Meldola. “Not a line written yet but subject sketched out.”13 Wallace replied to Crookes with his provisional idea, to which Crookes immediately consented. He also offered to read all or part of the lecture if Wallace did not feel that his voice would hold up under the strain. By mid-January, however, Wallace had regained most of his strength and was able to read his own text himself. His discourse, which he entitled “The World of Life: As Visualised and Interpreted by Darwinism,” was held on January 22.
The Royal Institution was “packed to the roof,” the mathematician Karl Pearson, a protégé (and, later, first biographer) of Francis Galton, wrote to his mentor, who could not attend the lecture. Wallace was quite audible “but not very original,” Pearson noted, lacking the vivacity necessary to hold the attention of his audience. Nevertheless, it was “really worth” being present to hear Wallace speak.14
The natural world, not the artificial one of the laboratory, was Wallace’s great subject. Darwinism was misconstrued because non-naturalists failed to appreciate the vast numbers, the great variety, and the incessant intermingling of earth’s “life-forms.” From measurements of hundreds of specimens, it could be shown that the individuals of a species varied around a mean, which meant there was plenty of material for natural selection to act on. If it were not for the power of natural selection, the planet would be overrun by a handful of species. “It is the fact of the adaptation of almost all existing species to a continually fluctuating environment—fluctuating between periodical extremes of great severity—that has produced an amount of adaptation that in ordinary seasons is superficially complete,” he said. Mutationism was a minor force in his conception of evolution. Summing up, he declared,
It is only by continually keeping in our minds all the facts of nature which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to set before you that we can possibly realise and comprehend the great problems presented by the “World of Life”—its persistence in ever-changing but unchecked development throughout the geological ages, the exact adaptations of every species to its actual environment both inorganic and organic, and the exquisite forms of beauty and harmony in flower and fruit, in mammal and bird, in mollusk and in the infinitude of the insect-tribes; all of which have been brought into existence through the unknown but supremely marvelous powers of Life, in strict relation to that great law of Usefulness, which constitutes the fundamental principle of Darwinism.15
The success of Wallace’s lecture prompted him to contemplate another book, which he would call The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind, and Ultimate Purpose. While researching the lecture, he had come on Lord Salisbury’s 1894 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Although disagreeing with Salisbury’s remarks on natural selection, he was intrigued by the overarching teleological theme. He had avoided teleology in his own lecture, but to Arabella Fisher he confided, “I am becoming more and more impressed with … a teleology of fundamental laws and forces rendering development of the infinity of life-forms possible (and certain) in place of the old teleology applied to the production of each species.”16
As he approached his ninetieth year, Wallace was also becoming more mystical. This mysticism had crept into most of his later writings and finally was expressed as a grand philosophy in The World of Life, which was published by Chapman & Hall in December 1910 and went through five editions. Just as he now viewed earth as a single living organism, with its infinite variety of species adapting to an ever-changing climate and geography, so he viewed the universe as a single organism, with its infinity of stars surrounding a unique planet revolving around its unique sun, each of these elements inseparable from the others. What he once speculated about he now firmly believed: Homo sapiens was placed on earth for a reason. Wallace’s thinking was undoubtedly influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose life and works were intimately connected with the spiritualist movement. Wallace’s spiritualist library, bequeathed originally to Oxford University but since transferred to the University of Edinburgh, contains several works by Swedenborg. Wallace never publicly acknowledged this influence, but the concluding chapter of The World of Life is almost incomprehensible without some knowledge of Swedenborg’s mystical, intellectual, and Utopian writings.
Born in Sweden in 1688, Swedenborg achieved fame as a mining engineer, astronomer, physicist, zoologist, and anatomist. In midlife, after a transforming visionary experience, he abandoned his scientific pursuits and cultivated his psychic powers, devoting himself to theology and philosophy. Spiritualists considered him the first modern medium, antedating by nearly a century Katie Fox, the American girl whose sensational trances in the late 1840s precipitated the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement.17 Philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson cited him as a classic example of the mystic; Swedenborg’s ideas inspired the transcendental movement in the United States.18 Swedenborg’s most extraordinary claim was traveling clairvoyance, the ability of the spirit to leave the body temporarily and witness events or phenomena before they occur, a power that first erupted in his youth but did not fully blossom until middle age. For twenty-seven years, from 1744 until his death in London in 1772, he was in constant touch with the otherworld. This world was inhabited by spirits of the dead with whom he claimed he could converse, and he made it his mission to reveal heaven and hell as he saw them during his extracorporeal journeys. However, his journeys were as much an exploration of the inner world as of the spiritual world. They formed the centerpiece of his philosophical writings, which have appealed to writers as diverse as the English poet William Blake, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the master Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki.19 In his travels, Swedenborg found limitless diversity in heaven, full of angels and spirits in infinite gradations, whose relative positions in the universe were determined by the degree of goodness, love, and wisdom they had exhibited during life on earth. Invisible to humans through the ordinary senses, angels were seen only through the eyes of the spirit within. When a person’s “spirit sight” was opened, Swedenborg said, the angels and the countless communities they lived in materialized. Journeys in the “World of Spirit,” as he termed it, were simply changes in state, not governed by time and space as normally conceived.20 Living in the antiecclesiastical times of the Enlightenment, Swedenborg believed that Christ, the one true God, had entrusted him to bring fallen Christians back into the fold with a new, all-embracing (but nondogmatic) religion that claimed direct mystical communications between the material and the spiritual world.
It was perhaps Swedenborg’s explorations of the spirit world rather than the specifics of his theology that appealed to Wallace. Intellectually Wallace had come full circle: from the mechanistic to the teleologie. But his teleology was like that of no other previous scientist or philosopher: all things on earth—animal, plant, and mineral—all things in the stellar universe, were co-adapted. An unknowable Mind or controlling Intelligence guided that co-adaptation. With sudden insight, Wallace grasped the nature of the First Cause. This vision, elaborately expressed in The World of Life, was a union of Swedenborgian mysticism and modern science: the vast whole of the universe reflected the Supreme Being, but the mechanics were executed by descending grades of intelligences and powers. He imagined an infinite number of angels working on every level: some guided the creation of the stars; some guided the formation of the earth and the other planets; some guided the development of life on earth; some guided the workings of the cell. Their tools were the forces that scientists were only just beginning to understand: gravitation; the velocity of light; the molecular behavior of gases; variation; heredity; the survival of the fittest; and the orderly process of cell division, differentiation, and growth. These “angels”—for want of a better term—provided the initial impetus, making certain that the universe developed along certain lines while adhering to strict laws. But that was not all. The production of the infinity of life-forms was beautifully coordinated for the ultimate development and education of an equally varied humanity. All gradations of human beings on the spectrum of good and evil had had a chance to survive and produce offspring. In the spirit world, death did not cut short the period of educational advancement; after death, in fact, individuals encountered the best conditions and opportunities to improve their spirit and thus their heavenly status.21
Wallace’s philosophy was positivistic. Is nature cruel, he asked. No, but many of the leading philosophers of present and past generations had proclaimed the cruelty of life on earth. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Wallace noted:
Huxley … spoke of the myriads of generations of herbivorous animals which “have been tormented and devoured by carnivores”; of the carnivores and herbivores alike as being “subject to all the miseries incidental to old age, disease, and over-multiplication”; and of the “more or less enduring suffering” which is the meed of both vanquished and victor; and he concludes that since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by benevolence.
Thomas Huxley’s conception was one of the strangest phenomena of the human mind, he said. He could not understand why so many intelligent people were more attracted to the belief in eternal suffering as promulgated by revealed religions than to the belief in a limited period of suffering on earth, to be replaced by the development of a race of spiritual beings who lived in eternity, free of the miseries of a mortal existence.22
Wallace believed that the vision of a world of tortured millions was nothing more than the projection of human sensations of pain onto the animal world: “The probability is, that there is as great a gap between man and the lower animals in sensitiveness to pain as there is in their intellectual and moral faculties.” Most animals, from the lowest paramecia to the schools of fish and the herds of wildebeest, existed to be devoured. The vicious teeth and daggerlike claws of the cat family had evolved for the purpose of preventing the escape of captured food, not for the shedding of blood or the infliction of pain. The evidence that an animal devoured by a lion or puma suffered very little was conclusive: “The suddenness and violence of the seizure, the blow of the paw, the simultaneous deep wounds by teeth and claws, either cause death at once, or so paralyse the nervous system that no pain is felt till death very rapidly follows.”23 In a state of nature, the Carnívora hunt and kill to satisfy hunger, not for amusement; and “all conclusions derived from the house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious.” If every evolutionist considered the utility of pain, he would see that animals had only as much sensitivity as was necessary for preserving the young from common dangers to life and limb before reaching maturity. Beyond that, animals were spared unnecessary suffering. Their relative lack of sensitivity, however, did not justify vivisection:
The bad effect on the operator and on the students and spectators remains; the undoubted fact that the practice tends to produce a callousness and a passion for experiment, which leads to unauthorised experiments in hospitals on unprotected patients, remains; the horrible callousness of binding sufferers in the operating trough, after the experiment, by careless attendants, brutalised by custom, remains; the argument of the uselessness of a large proportion of the experiments, repeated again and again on scores and hundreds of animals, to confirm or refute the work of other vivisectors, remains; and, finally, the iniquity of its use to demonstrate already-established facts to physiological students in hundreds of colleges and schools all over the world, remains.24
Human beings were much more sensitive to pain, because of their bare skin; they had no protective armor or thick coat of hair with which to ward off blows. “And here I think I see the solution of a problem which has long puzzled me,” Wallace said.” [W] hy man lost his hairy covering, especially from his back, where it would be so useful in carrying off rain. He may have lost it, gradually, from the time when he first became Man—the spiritual being, the ‘living soul’ in corporeal body, in order to render him more sensitive.” After the invention of fire, he noted, our species exposed itself to thousands of self-made dangers. Those less sensitive to these dangers perished; those more sensitive survived. Hence sensitivity to pain developed through the agency of natural selection, but under the direction of a higher intelligence.25
To no one’s surprise—including Wallace’s—the concluding portion of his book elicited the most grumbles from the scientific community. “[It] is unfortunate that the author is never able to avoid the pitfalls of teleological speculation,” the anonymous critic for Nature wrote.
This tendency is still more strikingly manifested when the author proceeds to discuss such questions as the existence of pain in the lower animals, of the non-justifiability of vivisection. … On all these and similar questions Dr. Wallace writes confidently, sometimes intruding his speculative opinions in the midst of the treatment of purely scientific questions. … We are all familiar with the author’s peculiar views on extra-scientific, social and political questions. Some of these tendencies to unbridled speculation seem to have reached an extreme limit in the twilight of a noble life. … But however much we may regret the intrusions by the author of these wild speculations … we recognise that they are inspired by the author’s love of humanity and all living things, by a desire to ameliorate the sorrows and sufferings he sees around him, and by a hope—ill-founded though it may be—that such teachings may be of service to his fellow-men.26
Wallace complained to his friend William Thistleton-Dyer about being misunderstood. He recognized the action of natural selection as universal and capable of explaining “all the facts” of evolution from “amoeba to man.” But natural selection had nothing to do with the basic mysteries of life. From the few simple elements available in air, earth, and water, innumerable structures, like bone, hair, and blood—”mere lumps of dead matter”—all organized to serve a definite purpose, were built up somehow to create life within every organism. No biologist or physiologist dared to grapple with the mysteries of the origins of life. “One and all they shirk it,” Wallace said, “or simply state it to be insoluble. It is here that I state guidance and organising power are essential.”27 Thistleton-Dyer tried in vain to point out Wallace’s philosophical inconsistencies. “[If] we admit that [Darwinism] is scientific,” he replied, “then we are precluded from admitting a ‘directive power.’” Science could explain nature only as it revealed itself to our consciousness. Thistleton-Dyer sympathized with anyone who sought an answer for these conundrums from nonscientific sources, but in his opinion scientific explanations and spiritual “craving” were wholly distinct and should be left that way. Alluding to the remarks of the great nineteenth-century German naturalist and embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, he suggested that “the naturalist is not precluded from asking ‘whether the totality of details leads him to a general and final basis of intentional design.’ I have no objection to this, and offer it as an olive-branch which you can throw to your howling and sneering critics.”28
But there were others, mainly nonscientists, who needed no olive branch, for they were neither howling nor sneering. Theodore Roosevelt, the new contributing editor to the Outlook, praised The World of Life and its author in an article published in the December 1911 issue, in which the former president examined the writings of several philosophers, including William James and Henri Bergson. “No one has criticized with greater incisiveness what [Wallace] properly calls ‘the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.’ He shows his scientific superiority to those men by his entire realization of the limitations of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when we use such words as ‘infinity of time’ and ‘infinity of space’ to cover our ignorance.” Roosevelt claimed (perhaps incorrectly) that Wallace, despite his advanced age, came nearer to the younger generation of scientific investigators, who were more ready to acknowledge that purely mechanistic explanations of evolution had broken down. Indeed, Roosevelt concluded, science furnished “an overwhelming argument for ‘creative power, directional mind, and ultimate purpose’ in the process of evolution.”29
Wallace was a creature of habit until the very end of his life. At 6:00 A.M. he made a cup of tea on a gas stove in his bedroom, the exact quantity of tea and water having been measured out the night before and boiled for just the right amount of time the next morning. He then slept for another two hours, before calling in his gardener, who acted as valet, to help him dress. After preparing a cup of hot cocoa, he went into the study to read the newspaper or recently arrived letters. When his strength permitted, he strolled about his garden, supervising the planting of new beds of flowers; at other times, his gardener wheeled him about in a bath chair. He remained in touch with his favorite correspondents: Edward Poulton, Meldola, William Barrett, Thistleton-Dyer, and Arabella Fisher. He continued to read newspapers and fire off letters on issues that struck a nerve. When no protests were made against the development of “flying machines” and dirigibles for dropping bombs, he expressed his moral outrage to the Daily News. “If there ever was a time to call upon the Liberal government to dissociate itself from this proposed crime against humanity, it is now,” he insisted. He also advocated open negotiations with other “civilized” nations to sign a treaty against the use of airplanes for the purposes of mass destruction, despite the assurances of military leaders that such a treaty was unnecessary.30 When a railway strike threatened to paralyze the nation in 1911, he told Will that he had written to the two “strongmen” of the Liberal government, Asquith and David Lloyd George, recommending the immediate nationalization of the railways by royal proclamation, “on the ground of mismanagement for seventy years, and having brought the country to the verge of starvation and civil war.”31 The discovery in 1912 at Piltdown Common in Sussex of a skull said to be the long-sought missing link between man and ape caused a sensation but did not impress Wallace, though Lankester was completely taken in by the hoax. “The Piltdown skull does not prove much, if anything!” Wallace told Will.32 He had never believed in a single missing link. In The World of Life, he had written that there was not, “as often assumed, one ‘missing link’ to be discovered but at least a score such links, adequately to fill the gap between man and apes; and their non-discovery is now one of the strongest proofs of the imperfection of the geological record.”33
Even in his waning years, Wallace entertained visitors at Old Orchard. Scientists, writers, and politicians came to see him. Scientific travelers sought his advice, which he generously dispensed, or regaled him with tales of their exploits. He was accessible to anyone who might have something interesting to say, including “cranks” and “faddists” who wished to enlist his support for their causes—but he had little tolerance for “preposterous ideas” and politely pointed out the fallacies of those he disagreed with.34
Neither of his children had married, and both had returned to live with their parents. Violet would never marry. A chronic lung condition hindered Will from keeping a regular job, and he seems to have moved back sometime after 1911. Wallace worried about their future welfare, given that he possessed little of value beyond his house and property. The civil pension would be paid to Annie after his death; he counted on royalties to help sustain his son and daughter.35 He therefore continued to write. By early 1913, he had finished two more books: Social Environment and Moral Progress, commissioned by his friend and future biographer the Reverend James Marchant, and The Revolt of Democracy, inspired by the recent strikes of the railway and other transport unions, miners, and London dock workers. “The condition of the workers as a whole is absolutely unbearable, is a disgrace to civilisation,” he wrote in The Revolt of Democracy, “and fully justifies [their] most extreme demands. … Among the whole of the writers—whether statesmen or thinkers, capitalists or workmen—there is not one who has proposed any definite and workable plan by which the desired change of conditions will be brought about.” And what demands were these workers making, he asked. All they wanted from their government were guarantees of a reasonably comfortable and civilized livelihood, a decent minimum of food and clothing, leisure and recreation, and houses fit for human beings.36
But that summer, a few months after completing The Revolt of Democracy, Wallace was convinced that he would never write another book. Severe eczema of his legs had plagued him all winter and now prevented him from walking or even standing up for any length of time. He also had developed a problem with his balance and fell down on several occasions. “Even moving about the room after books, etc., dressing and undressing, make me want to lie down and rest,” he told an acquaintance.37 Against the advice of his family, his gardener took him to a small cottage he recently had acquired, located a few miles southwest of Poole Harbour near the sea. The trip of two nights did him some good, temporarily counteracting his debilitating weakness. His mind remained lucid, and he did not lose interest in the social, spiritual, and scientific issues that had engaged him for much of his life. In October, he read W. L. Webb’s Brief Biography and Popular Account of the Unparalleled Discoveries of T. J. J. See, which reprinted the astronomer’s lectures on the origin of the universe.38 He also was involved in a project with Marchant, who was planning a small book that would provide a popular account of Wallace’s and Darwin’s lives and works. Wallace believed that Marchant was the best person for the project, since he possessed “the whole of my books, and has read my Darwinism seven times!” And, indeed, the publisher John Murray already had commissioned Marchant to write the book. But Wallace sought advice from Macmillan about the issue of royalties. His contacts at Macmillan must have cringed at yet another lost opportunity; moreover, the house had not published his latest two books. Such a book as Marchant envisioned would involve a good deal of correspondence and proofreading, which at Wallace’s age would place a great strain on him. “I wish to ask you … whether I could consistently with fairness and custom ask Mr. Murray to give me some share in the profits … for the sake of my family,” he wrote to Macmillan in March 1913.39 Macmillan seems not to have given an answer, for the project was eventually abandoned and never undertaken.
On Saturday, November 1, Wallace had a little burst of energy and walked around his garden unassisted. The following day, his appetite was hearty, but at 9:00 P.M., while he was at his desk reading or writing, he suddenly felt faint and shivered violently. Will sent for a Dr. Norman, who arrived an hour later and talked with Wallace for a long time in his study. Laughter could be heard at one point. “Wonderful man!” the doctor exclaimed, as he emerged from his elderly patient’s office. His prognosis was grim, however: “I can do nothing for him.” The next day, Wallace did not get up at the usual hour—lethargy compelled him to remain in bed. He sank into a near-comatose state, and on Friday, November 7, he passed away quietly at 9:25 A.M. without having regained consciousness.40
Friends suggested that Wallace be buried in Westminster Abbey beside Charles Darwin, but Annie, following her husband’s wishes, preferred to bury him at the little cemetery in Broadstone, on a hill shaded by pines and cooled by breezes from the nearby sea. A monument consisting of a fossilized tree trunk from a local ancient geologic stratum and set on a base of Purbeck stone bore a modest epitaph that mirrored his modest life: “Alfred Russel Wallace, O. M. Born Jan. 8th, 1823. Died Nov 7th, 1913.”
The bishop of Salisbury, Frederick Edward Ridgeway, conducted the funeral at the Dorset parish church on Monday, November 10. Compared with Darwin’s funeral, Wallace’s was a simple affair. Will, Violet, and some of Wallace’s closest friends—including Raphael Meldola and Edward Poulton, representing the Royal Society; Henry Dukinfield Scott, representing the Linnean Society; and Joseph Hyder, representing the Land Nationalisation Society—attended the unpretentious ceremony. There were no more than a dozen formal wreaths, and only one from an organization (the Spiritualists’ Society of Bournemouth sent a wreath of Madonna lilies and white chrysanthemums). The Bournemouth spiritualists also sent a spray of white roses given “in token of love for a very dear friend, whose passing is a loss to the cause of humanity, to which he gave his brilliant talents.”41 Annie, who was ill, remained at home; she would die a year later, in December 1914.
Numerous obituaries appeared in prominent publications. The Lancet, long a foe, stated that while some of his writings “were not marked by the discrimination that might have been expected from so famous a man, and his attitude towards one phase of scientific medicine was unfortunate … it would be wrong to be blind to the value of grand receptive intelligences like his, because in one or two points the conclusion which Wallace came to appears to us to be hasty. Medicine combines with the scientific world in deploring the loss of a leader, and in acknowledging the debt of the world to a pioneer in the interpretation of the universe.”42 The New York Times called him “the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century.” Another commentator for the same newspaper added, “No apology need be made for the few literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on ‘The Malay Archipelago.’”43 The Times of London praised his “restless, always creative, and original intelligence.” Through everything he did, its reporter said, there “ran a thread of continuity; there was to the end the same earnest search for truth, the same wonderful industry garnering facts, the same wide outlook, and the same indifference to anything which might turn him aside from that quest to meaner things.”44
The editors of Light, a spiritualist newspaper, passed over his scientific achievements because “these points are fully dealt with in the various newspapers,” while spiritualism, which concerned Wallace for nearly sixty years, “receives but scanty notice at the hands of the Press.” “Dr. Wallace,” they wrote on the eve of World War I, “was not only a scientist, he was a humanitarian. His great heart was moved with compassion because of the struggles and sufferings of the people; his sympathy was ever with reformatory enterprises, and he never feared to use his pen and his influence on behalf of unpopular causes.” Although Wallace was not a medium, “he was a prophetic seer in the best sense—for with forward-looking vision he saw the coming of the day of cooperation, of brotherhood, of altruism, and of spiritual emancipation.” Wallace, they noted, had declared that spiritualism had made him a better human being and had given him the key to all that seemed dark and hopeless in human life. It made him more tolerant of the weaknesses of others and greatly improved his character. “We obtain the greatest happiness ourselves by doing all we can to make those around us happy,” they remarked, quoting from one of Wallace’s writings on the subject of spiritualism.45
Not long before Wallace’s death, a movement had been under way to commission his portrait for the Royal Society. Meldola, Poulton, and the manager of Union of London and Smith Bank had begun to receive subscriptions. The effort would continue after the hiring of the artist J. Seymour Lucas to paint a posthumous portrait based on old photographs. Contributors included Sir William Crookes, the geologist Sir Archibald Geikie, the physician Sir William Osier, and William E. Darwin, one of Darwin’s surviving sons.46
Soon after his death, a committee was formed, headed by Poulton and Meldola, to have a medallion placed in Westminster Abbey to honor Wallace’s memory. Among those who agreed to underwrite the cost, which came to £200, were Geikie, Crookes, Lankester, Dukinfield Scott, and the astronomer Herbert Hall Turner. The dean of Westminister Abbey, Herbert E. Ryle, granted the request, and Albert Bruce-Joy, the sculptor whom Wallace had credited with changing the course of his life by recommending a radical alteration in diet, was commissioned to create the medallion. On November 1,1915 (All Souls’ Day), at the height of World War I, it was unveiled, along with medallions honoring the memories of two other great and recently deceased English scientists: Sir Joseph Hooker and Lord Joseph Lister. At the dedication ceremony, Ryle remarked:
Alfred Russel Wallace was a most famous naturalist and zoologist. He arrived by a flash of genius at the same conclusions which Darwin had reached after sixteen years of most minute toil and careful observation. … It was a unique example of the almost exact concurrence of two great minds working upon the same subject, though in different parts of the world, without collusion and without rivalry. … Between Darwin and Wallace goodwill and friendship were never interrupted. Wallace’s life was spent in the pursuit of various objects of intellectual and philosophical interest. … All will agree that it is fitting his medallion should be placed next to that of Darwin, with whose great name his own will ever be linked to the worlds of thought and science. … These are … men whose life work it was to utilise and promote scientific discovery for the preservation and betterment of mankind.47
The ceremony at Westminster Abbey was indeed a fitting tribute to Alfred Russel Wallace. In the worlds of thought and science, his ideas continue to live on; but in the popular imagination, his name is no longer linked as intimately with that of Charles Darwin. Although occasionally he assumed the role of heretic rather than that of an unswerving believer in the scientific revolution he helped to initiate, it was to restrain the excesses of science, not its progress. Even if his cautionary words do not always convince us, even if his vision strikes us as too Utopian in these more cynical times, his accomplishments in evolutionary biology and his tireless crusade to improve the lot of his fellow human beings deserve our attention and admiration. As his friend Edward Bagnall Poulton eulogized his memory on the centenary of his birth in 1923, “there remains enough of mighty achievement to make sure for him a high place in the temple of fame.”48
