![]() ![]() The end of Charles Darwin’s paper on varieties and species, and the beginning of the paper by Alfred Russel Wallace, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology, (Linda Hall Library) ![]() Work proceeded slowly, because Darwin was being very thorough, and he had hardly gotten beyond the subject of artificial selection when he heard from Wallace again, on June 18, 1858. With another runner now in the race, Darwin decided it was time to get his ideas into print, and he began work on a massive treatise on evolution by natural selection that we call “The Big Book,” since it was never published with a title of its own. Wallace had been in Indonesia for two years (the beginning of an eight-year sojourn), and in his paper, he claimed to have discovered a fundamental law of nature, namely that "every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species," in effect observing that there is a succession of types in the animal and plant world – that species are connected, chronologically and geographically.ĭarwin read the article and realized that Wallace had observed what Darwin himself had first noticed in 1837, and he further understood that Wallace was close to stumbling on natural selection, which Darwin had been sitting on since 1838. Wallace entered Darwin’s world in 1855, when he published an article in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. We also need to say something about Wallace’s work in biogeography and his discovery of “Wallace’s line.”įirst paragraph of “On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species,” by Alfred Russel Wallace, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, vol. We are going to tell this story today, and on a later occasion, we will come back to look at Wallace the evolutionist of the 1860s and 1870s, since he went off in quite a different direction from Darwin, believing that natural selection could never account for the human species. The Origin of Species might not have been written at all, without the stimulus provided by Wallace. But we said nothing about the events of the 1850s, when Wallace inadvertently prodded Darwin into action, twice. Our post was illustrated with four lovely plates from Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869), a book almost as popular as Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, as Darwin’s narrative would later be called. ![]() We did make the point that Wallace was the co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of evolution by natural selection, and that, unlike the well-heeled Darwin, he earned his living as a naturalist, selling exotica to dealers that in turn sold Wallace’s goods to stay-at-home collectors. We wrote a post on Wallace almost 8 years ago, when this series was just getting started, and it was a decent post, but it was overly brief, as those early pieces tended to be. 11, 1877 (Linda Hall Library)Īlfred Russel Wallace, a Welsh naturalist, died Nov. Portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace, wood engraving, Popular Science Monthly, vol. ![]()
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