Nature & Animals Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

There is a quiet provocation in Wallace’s “But”: a small word doing the work of a manifesto. He’s not merely adding a footnote to natural history; he’s signaling a pivot away from the tidy, cabinet-of-curiosities mindset that dominated early 19th-century naturalism. The old project was inventory. Wallace is arguing the new project must be explanation - a governing logic that can make sense of “infinitely varied forms” without treating each species as an isolated miracle.

The key phrase is “some other principle.” It’s diplomatically vague, and that vagueness is strategic. In Wallace’s era, bluntly naming a mechanism that undercut special creation wasn’t just scientifically risky; it was socially radioactive. So the sentence performs a balancing act: it reassures the scientific reader that this is about regulation and lawfulness (not chaos), while leaving enough room to avoid triggering a direct theological brawl. “Regulating” is the loaded verb - it implies nature isn’t a museum, it’s a system with rules.

Context matters: Wallace is writing from the edge of empire, immersed in biodiversity hotspots where variation is overwhelming and classification starts to feel like paperwork. The subtext is impatience with mere description. He’s aiming at a new standard for credibility: not who can name the most specimens, but who can identify the mechanism that makes diversity intelligible. In a single line, he drafts natural history into modern science.