Life's Pleasures Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace is doing something sly here: he praises the “marvellous” without smuggling in miracles. In the mid-19th century, “adaptation” was loaded language, often used to imply a designer’s hand. Wallace keeps the emotional kick of wonder, but redirects it toward a systematic, almost bureaucratic accumulation of evidence. “In all works” and “constantly” are doing quiet heavy lifting: he’s not offering a quirky observation from the field, he’s claiming a pattern so pervasive that Natural History itself can’t stop tripping over it.

The sentence is also a reframing of authority. He doesn’t say, “I have seen,” even though Wallace’s credibility was built in rainforests and on riverboats; he points to the literature, to the shared archive of science. That move makes adaptation not a personal anecdote but a collective fact, a consensus formed through repetition across texts, specimens, and habitats.

Subtextually, he’s sharpening the problem that will soon demand a mechanism. If animals are fitted to “food,” “habits,” and “localities,” then nature looks less like a static catalog and more like an engine that produces match-ups between bodies and environments. Wallace is writing in the pressure-cooker decade around Darwin’s work, and his intent is to normalize the phenomenon of fit so thoroughly that the reader feels the real scandal isn’t that adaptation exists, but that anyone could still treat it as incidental. Wonder becomes an argument; description becomes a demand for explanation.