Alfred Wallace was a young naturalist from a working-class
background, who made his living as a collector in the New and Old
World tropics. His travel and natural history writings were well-know to
Darwin. In February 1858,
while working in the Moluccas (now
the Maluku Islands) of the Malay Peninsula, and in the grip of a
malaria-induced fever, the central features of the concept of
Natural Selection as Darwin had
already conceived them occurred to him. He drafted an
abstract of his theory and sent it to Darwin by mail. The day
after receipt of the essay, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell, "I never saw a more
striking coincidence... If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in
1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! ... Even
his terms now stand as heads of my chapters..."
Lyell and
and Sir Joseph Hooker
transmitted Wallace's essay "On the Tendency of Varieties
to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" along with an
abstract of Darwin's writings to the Linnean Society [not to be confused
with the Athenæum Club],
where they were read together on
01 July 1858. The minutes show that no questions were asked.
Darwin began intensive work on his "big
book": Origin of Species was published 15 months later in November 1859.
Wallace
subsequently worked on the biogeography of animal life in the
East Indies, and is remembered for the Wallace
Line that separates Asian from Australian faunas. His work
in the East Indies was subsequently published in 1869 as "The
Malay Archipelago," a magnificently
illustrated volume that remains one of the most popular and
readable 19th century travel books.
Wallace and Darwin
remained close friends: Darwin always spoke of Natural Selection to Wallace as "Our little
theory". Wallace suggested the phrase "Survival of the
Fittest," which Darwin rather reluctantly introduced into
the 5th edition of the "Origin:" "It lacks a
substantive that can take a verb." Wallace was one
of the pallbearers at Darwin's funeral at Westminster Abbey in
1881.
