Science Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

"Modification of form" sounds polite, almost bureaucratic, for what Wallace is really smuggling into the room: the radical claim that nature has a clock, and that clock is enough. In one spare line, he strips evolution of melodrama. No sudden leaps, no guiding hand, no need for nature to "try" anything. Change isn’t a miracle; it’s an accumulation. Time is the enabling technology.

Wallace was writing in the intellectual weather system of the mid-19th century, when Darwin wasn’t yet the default and "species" still carried the aura of permanence. Saying modification is "a matter of time" is a tactical move: it reframes the controversy away from whether species can change (heretical to many) toward how long you’re willing to grant the planet. The sentence is doing courtroom work. "Admitted" signals a pressure point: even skeptics, he implies, already concede gradual variation. Once you grant that, time becomes the lever that pries open everything else.

The subtext is also defensive, aimed at the era’s prestige science. Geology had already stretched Earth’s age, and Wallace is borrowing that expanded timeline to make biological transformation feel not just possible but inevitable. The phrase "form" keeps the focus on observable morphology, not metaphysics; it’s evolution pitched as measurable, almost mundane. For a Victorian audience, that mundanity is the provocation: if time is sufficient, then design is optional, and human exceptionalism starts to look like just another temporary arrangement.