Success Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

A careful hedge dressed up as quiet bravado: Wallace is doing two things at once here, and both are strategic. On the surface, he’s claiming confidence in a “necessary connexion” - the 19th-century naturalist’s way of saying cause-and-effect isn’t just a story we tell after the fact, but something you can actually track in the living world. Underneath, he’s also acknowledging how slippery that tracking can be, especially when you’re trying to turn messy observation into a defensible mechanism.

The giveaway is the comparative move: “especially among birds.” Birds were the Victorian laboratory of the wild - conspicuous, varied, and obsessively collected. They offer clear traits (plumage, song, mating displays) and relatively legible pressures (predation, sexual selection, habitat). Wallace is signaling that nature sometimes hands you a cleaner dataset. His subtext: don’t judge the whole enterprise of evolutionary explanation by the hardest case.

Then comes the humility that doubles as calibration: “often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.” That “attempted” isn’t self-effacement; it’s method. Wallace is pre-empting critics who want a single weak explanation to discredit a broader framework. He’s arguing for probabilistic science before that term was fashionable: some connections are demonstrable, others provisional, and the honest move is to separate the two.

Context matters: Wallace is writing in the wake of Darwin, when natural selection was still fighting to look like rigorous inference rather than speculative philosophy. The sentence is a credibility maneuver - a scientist insisting that explanation should scale from compelling examples outward, not from dogma downward.