Alfred Russel Wallace Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alfred Russel Wallace was born in 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire, in what is now Wales, into a family of modest means. Financial pressures cut short his formal schooling in his early teens. He apprenticed with his older brother as a surveyor and civil engineer, tramping across the English and Welsh countryside on railway and land surveys. The work sharpened his powers of observation and fostered a deep interest in natural history. In leisure hours he educated himself, reading voraciously in mechanics, geography, and the emerging literature on the natural world.

Formative Influences and Amazon Expedition
In the 1840s Wallace worked in Leicester, where he met the young naturalist Henry Walter Bates at a mechanics institute. Their discussions and shared field collecting convinced Wallace that he could make a living by obtaining specimens for museums and private collectors while studying biodiversity firsthand. Inspired by travel narratives and by evolutionary speculation in Robert Chamberss Vestiges, he and Bates sailed to the Amazon in 1848. Wallace explored the Rio Negro and other tributaries, collecting birds, insects, and plants. He struck up a collegial correspondence with the botanist Richard Spruce, who was also in northern South America. After four years of work, disaster struck: his homeward ship caught fire in the Atlantic and sank, taking nearly all of his specimens and notes. Rescued after days at sea, Wallace returned to Britain with only a few belongings and his life, but he immediately set about publishing what he could recall, including Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.

Malay Archipelago and the Road to Natural Selection
Undeterred, Wallace departed for the Malay Archipelago in 1854, beginning an eight-year odyssey through what are now Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Timor. He collected prodigiously, eventually amassing tens of thousands of insects and other animals, including the famed birds of paradise. While traversing islands from Borneo to New Guinea, he discerned a deep faunal divide that later bore his name: the Wallace Line, separating Asian from Australasian animal assemblages. In 1855 he published his Sarawak Law paper, arguing that species arise and are replaced in space and time by related forms. In early 1858, while in Ternate and ill with fever, he synthesized a fuller explanation: natural selection acting on heritable variation. He set out his argument in an essay and mailed it to Charles Darwin, whose own long-developing ideas were known to a small circle including Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker.

Joint Presentation and Aftermath
Lyell and Hooker, recognizing the priority and significance of Wallaces essay, arranged a joint presentation at the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, where excerpts from Darwins unpublished writings and Wallaces Ternate manuscript were read together. Wallace, still in the field, took no part in the proceedings, but received the news with characteristic generosity. The episode spurred Darwin to complete On the Origin of Species in 1859, which prominently acknowledged Wallace. The two maintained a cordial correspondence for years, discussing topics from variation and geographical distribution to sexual selection. Wallace agreed with the centrality of natural selection but questioned some aspects of Darwins sexual selection theory, especially in explaining human mental faculties and elaborate coloration.

Pioneering Biogeography and Scientific Writing
Back in Britain by 1862, Wallace became one of the founders of biogeography. Drawing on work by contemporaries such as Philip Lutley Sclater, he synthesized global patterns of animal distribution. His books The Malay Archipelago (1869), Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), Island Life (1880), and Darwinism (1889) blended travel narrative with rigorous analysis. He clarified ideas on mimicry and warning coloration, building on insights shared with Bates and others, and articulated what later came to be called the Wallace effect, emphasizing how natural selection can reinforce reproductive isolation.

Personal Life
In 1866 Wallace married Annie Mitten, daughter of the bryologist William Mitten, whose botanical collections and household offered an intellectually lively setting. The couple had three children; one son died young, and their surviving children, Violet and William, remained close to their parents. Family life, scientific work, and steady lecturing and writing formed the core of his routine after his return from the East.

Public Causes, Debates, and Friends
Wallace championed an array of social reforms, arguing for fairer land tenure and supporting ideas associated with land nationalization. He favored expanding educational opportunities and endorsed womens suffrage. He also became convinced of the reality of spiritualist phenomena and argued that some aspects of the human mind and morality might not be fully explained by natural selection alone. These views put him at odds with some friends, including Thomas Henry Huxley, even as he continued to correspond amicably with Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker. Darwin, Hooker, and others helped secure a modest civil list pension for Wallace, recognizing both his scientific contributions and his limited finances.

Honors and Later Years
Though often living frugally, Wallace gained broad esteem. The Linnean Society awarded him the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908 on the fiftieth anniversary of the joint presentation. That same year he received the Order of Merit, a high civilian distinction recognizing significant contributions to the arts and sciences. He continued to publish well into old age, offering reflections on evolution, island biogeography, and social policy. Visitors and correspondents sought his views, and he remained generous in crediting colleagues and younger naturalists.

Final Years and Legacy
Wallace died in 1913 at his home in Broadstone, Dorset. Across a long life he helped set the foundations of evolutionary biology and modern biogeography, and he embodied the curiosity and adaptability of the Victorian naturalist. As a field explorer, he documented the living diversity of two great tropical regions; as a theorist, he independently conceived natural selection; as a synthesizer, he mapped the distributions of animals in ways that continue to inform ecology and conservation. The friendships and debates he shared with Darwin, Bates, Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and many others shaped a scientific revolution, and his name endures in the line that marks a deep boundary in the worlds fauna and in the shared authorship of one of the great ideas in science.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by Alfred, under the main topics: Truth - Justice - Meaning of Life - Deep - Nature.

Other people realated to Alfred: Thomas Malthus (Economist), Henry George (Economist), Loren Eiseley (Scientist), Henry Walter Bates (Environmentalist)

• 1889 Darwinism
• 1880 Island Life
• 1876 The Geographical Distribution of Animals
• 1869 The Malay Archipelago (Book)
• 1858 On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type

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