The New Student's Reference Work/Wallace, Alfred Russel

Wallace (wŏl'lā́ ce), Alfred Russel, a distinguished English traveler and naturalist, was born at Usk, Monmouthshire, Jan. 8, 1823, and received his education at the grammar-school at Hertford. From an early age he manifested a great love of nature, with marked scientific tastes. This bent was greatly developed in a voyage he made, in company with W. H. W. Bates, a naturalist, to South America, an account of which he has given us in his Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro, with a fund of material on the physical aspects of these great water-systems, enriched by valuable botanical and ornithological collections. Of this voyage we have further results in his Palm-Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses and Tropical Nature, dealing with the colors of bird, animal and insect life and with the geographical distribution of plants and animals, sexual selection etc. A prolonged visit to the Malay Islands (1854-62) is the source of his work on The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869. This and a volume entitled Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection give him place alongside Darwin as an exponent of evolution—his views on natural selection and variation being, like Darwin's, an explanation of the mode of origin of existing species of animals and plants. A little volume (issued in 1889), explains his theories in regard to evolution and Darwin's work: the volume is entitled Darwinism. Two other works from his pen also throw valuable light on the evolutionary theory, viz., Natural Selection (1870) and The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876). For these labors, Doctor Wallace received the founder's gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the gold medal of the Linnaean Society and the first Darwin medal of the Royal Society. Among his other published works are a volume on Australasia, contributed to Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel; The Wonderful Century, Its Successes and Its Failures (1898); Island Life (1880); Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874); Bad Times (1835); and Land Nationalization (1882). He died in London, Nov. 7, 1913. See Autobiography (1905).