Alfred Russel Wallace

For the Cornish painter, see Alfred Wallis.

Alfred Russel Wallace
File:Alfred Russel Wallace.jpg Alfred Russel Wallace
Born	January 8 1823 Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales
Died	November 7 1913 Broadstone, England
Citizenship	British
Known for	his work on natural selection and biogeography
Awards	Royal Society's Royal Medal (1866) and Copley Medal (1908), Order of Merit (1908)
Scientific career
Fields	exploration, biology, biogeography

Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS (January 8 1823 – November 7 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He did extensive field work first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace line dividing the fauna of Australia from that of Asia.

He is best known for independently proposing a theory of natural selection which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own more developed and researched theory sooner than he had intended. He was also one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century who made a number of other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory, including the concept of warning colouration in animals. Wallace was also considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography".

Wallace was strongly attracted to radical ideas in politics, religion and science. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with the scientific establishment, especially with other early proponents of evolution. He was a strong critic of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th century Britain. He was one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity.

Early life

Wallace was born in the village of Llanbadoc, near Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales. He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. When Wallace was five years old his family moved to Hertford, north of London, where he attended Hertford Grammar School until financial difficulties forced his family to withdraw him in 1836.

After a stint as an apprentice builder in London, he began to work as a surveyor with his older brother William. Between 1840 and 1843, he spent his time surveying in the west of England and Wales. In 1844, he was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester. After the death of his brother William in 1845, Wallace left his teaching position to assume control of his brother's firm. For the next three years Wallace lived in a cottage near the town of Neath, Glamorgan with his mother, brother John and sister Fanny (his father having died in 1843) and earned his living surveying the Vale of Neath

Exploration and Study of the Natural World

Illustration of a flying frog from The Malay Archipelago

A. R. Wallace in Singapore in 1862

Inspired by the chronicles of earlier traveling naturalists including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and William Henry Edwards, Wallace decided that he wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist as well.

In 1848, Wallace, together with another naturalist, Henry Walter Bates (whom he had met in Leicester), left for Brazil to collect specimens in the Amazon Rainforest, with the intention of selling them to collectors back in England, and the hope of gathering evidence to support the idea of the transmutation of species. Wallace's younger brother Herbert joined them in 1849, but he died two years later in a yellow fever epidemic.

After four years charting the Rio Negro and collecting specimens, Wallace embarked for England on the brig Helen. After twenty eight days at sea, a cargo of balsam on the ship caught fire and the crew were forced to abandon ship. Wallace's entire collection was lost, and he could only save part of his diary and a few sketches. Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open boat before being picked up by the brig Jordeson.

After returning eventually to England, Wallace spent the next eighteen months living in London. Fortunately his collection had been insured, so he had some funds to live on. During this period, despite having lost almost all of the notes from his South American expedition, he wrote three academic papers (one of which was On the Monkeys of the Amazon) and two books; Palm Trees on the Amazon and Travels on the Amazon.

From 1854 to 1862, Wallace travelled through the Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia), to collect specimens for sale and to study nature. His observations of the marked zoological differences across a narrow zone in the archipelago led to his hypothesis of the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line. One of his better known species descriptions during this trip is the gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus known as Wallace's flying frog. His studies and adventures there were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago. The Malay Archipelago would be one of the most popular journals of scientific exploration of the 19th century, remaining continuously in print through its original publisher (Macmillan) until at least the 2nd decade of the 20th century. It would be praised by scientists such as Darwin, and Lyell, and by non scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad, who called it his "favorite bedside companion" and used it as source of information for several of his novels.

Marriage and children

In 1866 Wallace married Annie Mitten. Wallace had been introduced to Mitten by Richard Spruce, a botanist and explorer who had become a close friend of Wallace in Brazil and who was also a good friend of Annie Mitten's father, William Mitten, an expert in mosses. They would have 3 children, Herbert (1867-1874), who died in childhood, Violet (1869-1945), and William (1871-1951).

Before he met Annie Mitten, Wallace had been engaged to a woman in 1864 that he would only identify as Miss L. in his autobiography. She had broken off the engagement, to Wallace's considerable dismay.

Theory of evolution

Early evolutionary thinking

Unlike Darwin, Wallace started his career as a traveling naturalist already believing in the transmutation of species. He had come to this belief in part because he was always inclined to favor radical ideas in politics, religion and science. He was also profoundly influenced by Robert Chambers work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work of popular science published in 1844 that advocated an evolutionary origin for the solar system, the earth, and living things. Wallace hoped to find evidence that supported the ideas found in that controversial book. Wallace deliberately planned some of his field work to try and test the hypothesis that under an evolutionary scenario closely related species should inhabit neighbouring territories. During his work in the Amazon basin he came to realize that geographical barriers, such as the Amazon and its major tributaries, often separated the ranges of closely allied species and he included these observations in the paper On the Monkeys of the Amazon published in 1853. Near the end of the paper he asks the question Are very closely allied species ever separated by a wide interval of country?

In 1855, Wallace published a paper, On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species based on his pioneering work at Mount Santubong, Sarawak, in which he gathers and enumerates general observations regarding the geographic and geologic distribution of species (biogeography), and concludes that Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species. Thus answering the question he had asked in his earlier paper on Amazon river basin monkeys. The paper, also known as the Sarawak Law (named after the state of Sarawak, located on the island of Borneo) was a foreshadowing of the momentous paper he would write three years later.

Natural selection and Darwin

See also: Publication of Darwin's theory

By February 1858 Wallace was convinced by his biogeographical research of the reality of evolution. As he would later say in his autobiography:

The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?

According to his autobiography, it was while he was sick in bed with a fever on the island of Ternate, that he thought of Thomas Malthus's idea of positive checks on human population growth and came up with the idea of natural selection. He describes it as follows:

It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about... In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained.

Wallace had once briefly met Darwin, and was one of Darwin's correspondents whose observations Darwin used to support his theories. Wallace knew that Darwin was interested in the question of how species originate, and trusted his opinion on the matter. Thus, Wallace sent Darwin his essay, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type, and asked Darwin to review it. On 18 June 1858 Darwin received the manuscript from Wallace. While Wallace's essay did not employ Darwin's term "natural selection", it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was essentially the same as the theory that Darwin had worked on for twenty years, but had yet to publish. Darwin wrote in a letter to Charles Lyell: "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters!" Although Wallace had not requested that his essay be published, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker decided to present the essay, together with excerpts from a paper that Darwin had written in 1844, and kept confidential, to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, highlighting Darwin's priority.

Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, grateful that he had been included at all. Darwin's social and scientific status was at that time far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken as seriously. However he pointed out, in a largely overlooked passage of the 1858 paper that "The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor". The cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson observed though seeing it only as an illustration Wallace had "probably said the most powerful thing that’d been said in the 19^th. Century". Though relegated to the position of co-discoverer, and never the social equal of Darwin or the other elite British natural scientists, Wallace was granted far greater access to tightly-regulated British scientific circles after the advocacy on his part by Darwin. When he returned to England, Wallace met Darwin and the two remained friendly afterwards.

Defence of Origin of Species

After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species Wallace became one of its staunchest defenders. In one incident that particularly pleased Darwin in 1863, Wallace published the short paper Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species in order to utterly demolish a paper by a professor of geology at the University of Dublin that had sharply criticised Darwin’s comments in the Origin on how hexagonal honey bee cells could have evolved through natural selection.

Warning colouration and sexual selection

In 1867 Darwin wrote to Wallace about a problem he was having understanding how some caterpillars could have evolved very conspicuous colour schemes. Darwin had come to believe that sexual selection, an idea Wallace didn’t accept (at least, to the extent Darwin did), explained many conspicuous animal colour schemes, but he realized there was no way it could apply to caterpillars. Wallace responded that he and Henry Bates had observed that many of the most spectacular butterflies had a peculiar odour and taste, and that he had been told by John Jenner Weir that birds would not eat a certain kind of common white moth because they found it unpalatable. Now, as the white moth is as conspicuous at dusk as a coloured caterpillar in the daylight, Wallace wrote back to Darwin that it seemed likely that the conspicuous colour scheme served as a warning to predators and thus could have evolved through natural selection. Darwin was impressed by the idea. At a subsequent meeting of the Entomological Society Wallace asked for any evidence anyone might have on the topic. In 1869 Weir published data from experiments and observations involving brightly coloured caterpillars that supported Wallace’s idea. Warning colouration would prove to be one of a number of contributions Wallace would make in the area of the evolution of animal colouration. It was also part of a life long disagreement Wallace would have with Darwin over the importance of sexual selection. In his 1878 book Tropical Nature and Other Essays he wrote extensively on the colouration of animals and plants and proposed alternative explanations for a number of cases Darwin had attributed to sexual selection.

Wallace effect

In 1889 Wallace wrote the book Darwinism which explained and defended natural selection. In it he proposed the hypothesis that when two populations of a species had diverged beyond a certain point, hybrid offspring would be less fit than either parent form, and at that point natural selection will tend to eliminate the hybrids, contributing to the reproductive isolation of the populations. This idea came to be known as the Wallace effect.

Spiritual views, and application of the theory to mankind

In a letter to his brother in law in 1861, Wallace wrote:

...I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths. I will pass over as utterly contemptible the oft-repeated accusation that sceptics shut out evidence because they will not be governed by the morality of Christianity...I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions. To the mass of mankind religion of some kind is a necessity. But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction.

In 1864, before Darwin had publicly addressed the subject—though others had—Wallace published a paper, The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection', applying the theory to mankind. Wallace subsequently became a spiritualist, and later maintained that natural selection cannot account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical musings, and wit and humor; and that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history: 1. The creation of life from inorganic matter. 2. The introduction of consciousness in the higher animals. 3. The generation of the above-mentioned faculties in mankind. He also believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit.(Wallace, 1889) These views greatly disturbed Darwin in his lifetime, who argued that spiritual appeals were not necessary and that sexual selection could easily explain such apparently non-adaptive phenomena.

In many accounts of the history of evolution, Wallace is mentioned only in passing as simply being the "stimulus" to publication of Darwin's own theory. In reality, Wallace developed his own distinct evolutionary views which diverged from Darwin's, and was considered by many (including Darwin) to be a chief thinker on evolution in his day whose ideas could not be ignored. He is among the most cited naturalists in Darwin's Descent of Man, often in strong disagreement.

Wallace began investigating Spiritualism in the summer of 1865, probably at the urging of his older sister Fanny Sims, who had been involved with it for some time. After making some attempts to test the phenomena he saw at séances he came to believe that they were real. He would remain convinced that at least some such phenomena were genuine for the rest of his life, no matter how many accusations of fraud skeptics would make, or how much evidence of it they would produce. It has been suggested that the fact that he was still suffering from the emotional shock he had received a few months earlier when his first fiancée broke their engagement was a factor in his receptiveness to Spiritualist doctrine at the time. Spiritualism appealed to many educated Victorians who no longer found traditional religious doctrine, such as that of the Church of England, acceptable but who were unsatisfied with the completely materialistic and mechanical view of the world that was increasingly emerging from 19th century science. Other prominent 19th century intellectuals involved with Spiritualism included, the social reformer Robert Owen, who was one of Wallace’s early idols, the physicists William Crookes and Lord Rayleigh, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, and even Darwin’s cousin, the polymath Francis Galton. Wallace was also an enthusiast of phrenology, and early in his career he experimented with hypnosis then known as mesmerism. He used some of his students in Leicester as subjects.

Wallace's very public advocacy of spiritualism and his repeated defense of spiritualist mediums against allegations of fraud in the 1870s damaged his scientific reputation. It strained his relationships with previously friendly scientists such as Henry Bates, Thomas Huxley, and even Darwin who felt he was overly credulous. Others, such as the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter and zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester became openly and publicly hostile to Wallace over the issue. Wallace and other scientists, notably William Crookes, who defended spiritualism, were subject to much criticism from the press, with The Lancet, the leading English medical journal of the time, being particularly harsh. The controversy would affect the public perception of Wallace’s work for the rest of his career. When Darwin first tried to rally support among naturalists for getting Wallace awarded a Civil pension in 1879, Joseph Hooker responded:

Wallace has lost caste considerably, not only by his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately and against the whole voice of the committee of his section of the British Association, brought about a discussion of on Spiritualism at one of its sectional meetings. That he is said to have done so in an underhanded manner, and I well remember the indignation it gave rise to in the B.A. Council.

Hooker would eventually relent and agree to support the pension request.

Biogeography and ecology

Front piece of The Geographical Distribution of Animals showing Wallace's 6 Biogeographical regions

In 1872, at the urging of many of his friends including Darwin, Philip Sclater, and Alfred Newton, Wallace began research for a general review of the geographic distribution of animals, but did not make much progress in part because classification systems for many types of animals were in flux at the time. He was able to resume the work in earnest in 1874 thanks to the publication of a number of new works on classification. He was able to extend the system developed by Sclater, which divided the earth into 6 separate geographic regions for describing the geographical distribution of birds, to cover mammals, reptiles and insects as well. The resulting system is the basis for the ecozones still in use today. He discussed all of the factors then known to influence the current and past geographic distribution of animals within each geographical region, including the effects of the appearance and disappearance of land bridges (such as the one currently connecting North America and South America), and the effects of periods of increased glaciation. He provided maps that displayed factors, such as elevation of mountains, depths of oceans, and the character of regional vegetation, that effected the distribution of animals. He also summarized all the known families and genera of the higher animals and listed their known geographic distributions. He organized the text so that it would be easy for a traveler to use to learn what animals could be found in a particular location. The resulting 2 volume work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, was published in 1876 and would serve as the definitive text on biogeography for the next 80 years.

In 1880 Wallace published the book Island Life as a sequel to The Geographical Distribution of Animals. It surveyed the distribution of both animal and plant species on islands. Wallace classified islands into 3 different types. Oceanic islands, such as the Galapagos and Hawaiian Islands (then known as the Sandwich Islands) formed in mid ocean and had never been part of any large continent. Such islands were characterized by a complete lack of terrestrial mammals and amphibians, and their inhabitants (with the notable exceptions of migratory birds and species introduced by human activity) were the typically the result of accidental colonization and subsequent evolution. He divided continental islands into to 2 separate classes depending on whether they had recently been part of a continent (like Britain) or much less recently (like Madagascar) and discussed how that difference affected the flora and fauna. He talked about how isolation affected evolution and how that could result in the preservation of classes of animals, such as the Lemurs of Madagascar that were remnants of once widespread continental faunas. He extensively discussed how changes of climate, particularly periods of glaciation, may have affected the distribution of flora and fauna on some islands. Island Life was considered a very important work at the time of its publication, and was discussed extensively in scientific circles both in published reviews and in private correspondence.

Environmental issues

Wallace’s interest in biogeography made him acutely aware of the impact of human activities on the environment. In Tropical Nature and Other Essays, which he published in 1878, he warned about the dangers of deforestation and soil erosion especially in tropical climates prone to heavy rain fall. Noting the complex interactions between vegetation and climate, he warned that the extensive clearing of rain forest for coffee cultivation in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India would adversely impact the climate in those counties and lead to their eventual impoverishment due to soil erosion. In Island Life Wallace again talked about deforestation and also the impact of invasive species. He wrote the following about the impact of European colonization on the island of St. Helena:

…yet the general aspect of the island is now so barren and forbidding that some persons find it difficult to believe that it was once all green and fertile. The cause of this change, is however, very easily explained. The rich soil formed by decomposed volcanic rock and vegetable deposits could only be retained on the steep slopes so long as it was protected by the vegetation to which it in great part owed its origin. When this was destroyed, the heavy tropical rains soon washed away the soil, and has left a vast expanse of bare rock or sterile clay. This irreparable destruction was caused, in the first place, by goats, which were introduced by the Portuguese in 1513, and increased so rapidly that in 1588 they existed in the thousands. These animals are the greatest of all foes to trees, because they eat off the young seedlings, and thus prevent the natural restoration of the forest. They were, however aided by the reckless waste of man. The East India Company took possession of the island in 1651, and about the year 1700 it began to be seen that the forests were fast diminishing, and required some protection. Two of the native trees, redwood and ebony, were good for tanning, and, to save trouble, the bark was wastefully stripped from the trunks only, the remainder being left to rot; while in 1709 a large quantity of the rapidly disappearing ebony was used to burn lime for building fortifications!

Social and political views

During his time as an apprentice builder in London, starting in 1836, he was exposed, mainly through lectures and books at the London Mechanics' Institute, to radical reformist political ideas that had a profound and lasting influence on his thinking. He was particularly influenced by the ideas of Robert Owen and Thomas Paine. His deep sympathy for what he considered to be an oppressed working class and his discomfort with class conscious English society would always separate him from a British scientific establishment that in the 19th century was dominated by members of the upper class. In 1889 Wallace would read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and thereafter he would refer to himself as a socialist.

These ideas would lead him to oppose both Social Darwinism and Eugenics, ideas supported by other prominent 19th century evolutionary thinkers, on the grounds that contemporary society was too corrupt and unjust to allow any reasonable determination of who was fit or unfit.

One of the political causes to which Wallace devoted a significant amount of time was land reform. He believed that rural land should be owned by the state and leased to people who would make the use of it that benefited the most people, thus breaking the often abused power of wealthy land owners in English society. In 1881 Wallace was elected as the first president of the Land Nationalization Society. Later that year he wrote a book, Land Nationalization, on the topic. Another topic on which he wrote and spoke at length was the negative effects of international trade on the lives of working class people.

Other controversies

In 1884 Wallace was drawn into the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination. Wallace originally saw the issue as a matter of personal liberty, but after studying some of the statistics provided by anti-vaccination activists he began to question the efficacy of vaccination. At the time the germ theory of disease was very new and far from universally accepted, and no one knew enough about the human immune system to understand why vaccination worked. When Wallace did some research he discovered some cases where questionable statistics had been used by supporters of vaccination. Always suspicious of authority, Wallace became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were in fact due to better hygiene and sanitation, and that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination. In 1889 Wallace gave evidence before a Royal Commission investigating the controversy. When the commission examined the material he had submitted to support his testimony, they found a number of errors including some questionable statistics. The Lancet stated that Wallace and the other anti-vaccination activists were being highly selective in their choice of statistics, ignoring large quantities of data inconsistent with their position. The commission found that smallpox vaccination was effective and should remain compulsory, though they did recommend some changes in procedures to improve safety and that the penalties for people who refused to comply be made less severe. Wallace would write a pamphlet attacking the commission’s findings, which was in turn attacked by the Lancet, which stated that it contained many of the same errors as his evidence given to the commission.

In 1907 Wallace wrote the short book Is Mars Habitable? to criticize the claims made by Percival Lowell that there were Martian canals built by intelligent beings. Among other things Wallace pointed out that spectroscopic analysis had shown no signs of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere.

Death and aftermath

On November 7, 1913 Wallace died at home in Broadstone England where he had built a country house he called Old Orchard a decade earlier. He was 90 years old. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him "the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century." Another commentator in the same edition said “No apology need be made for the few literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the 'Malay Archipelago.'”

Some of Wallace's friends suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and had him buried in the small cemetery at Broadstone. Several prominent British scientists formed a committee to have a medallion of Wallace placed in Westminster near where Darwin had been buried. The medallion was unveiled Nov 1, 1915.

Alfred Russel Wallace, and signature, from the frontispiece of Darwinism (1889)

Awards, honours, and memorials

• Among the many awards presented to Wallace were the Order of Merit (1908), the Royal Society's Royal Medal (1868) and Copley Medal (1908), the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal (1892) and the Linnean Society's Gold Medal (1892).
• Elected head of the anthropology section of the British Association in 1866.
• Elected president of the Entomological Society of London in 1870.
• Elected head of the biology section of the British Association in 1876.
• Awarded a civil pension of £200 a year, in large part due to lobbying by Darwin and Huxley, by British government in 1881.
• Asked to chair the International Congress of Spiritualists (which was meeting in London) in 1898.
• In 1928, a house at Richard Hale School was named for Wallace. Wallace attended Richard Hale as a student from 1828-1836
• In November 1, 1915, a medallion with his name on it was placed in Westminster Abbey.
• He is also honoured by having craters on Mars and the Moon named after him.
• A center for biodiversity research in Sarawak named in his memory was proposed in 2005.

Key publications

Selected books

• The Malay Archipelago - 1869
• Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - 1870
• The Geographical Distribution of Animals - 1876
• Tropical Life and Other Essays - 1878
• Island Life - 1881
• Darwinism - 1889
• My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions - 1905

Selected papers

• On the Monkeys of the Amazon - 1853 Speculates on the effect of rivers and other geographical barriers on the distribution of closely allied species.
• On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species - 1855 Wallace's thoughts on the geographic distribution of closely allied species and the implications for evolution.
• On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type - 1858 Paper on natural selection sent by Wallace to Darwin.
• On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago - 1859 Contains first description of Wallace Line.
• Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species - 1863 Wallace's defence of the Origin on the topic of evolution of the hexagonal bee cell.
• Caterpillars and Birds - 1867 Wallace's request for data on warning colouration.
• English and American Flowers - 1891 Contains speculation on how glaciation may have affected distribution of mountain flora in North America and Eurasia.

Here is a more comprehensive list of Wallace's publications that are available online.

See also

• Australia-New Guinea
• Wallace line
• Operation Wallacea
• Fauna of Indonesia
• Flora of Indonesia

References

• Larson, Edward J. Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. The Modern Library: New York, 2004. ISBN 0-679-64288-9
• Slotten, Ross A. The heretic in Darwin's court: the life of Alfred Russel Wallace Columbia University Press: New York, 2004. ISBN 0-231-13010-4
• Tuen, A. A. (2005). "Wallace in Sarawak– 150 years later: Proceedings of an International Conference on Biogeography and Biodiversity. Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation". University Malaysia Sarawak, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia. Retrieved 2007-04-04. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Wallace, Alfred Russel (1889). "Darwinism, Chapter 15". The Alfred Russel Wallace Page. Retrieved 2007-04-04. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
• Wallace, Alfred Russel (1881). "Island Life". Google Books. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
• Wallace, Alfred Russel (1905). "My Life". Google Books. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
• Wilson, John G. The Forgotten Naturalist: In search of Alfred Russel Wallace. Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 2000. ISBN 1-875606-72-6
• Schermer (2002). In Darwin's Shadow:The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oxford University press. ISBN 0-19-514830-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |First= ignored (|first= suggested) (help)

Further reading

• Works by Alfred Russel Wallace at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Alfred Russel Wallace at Internet Archive
• Works by Alfred Russel Wallace at Google Books
• Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Evolution by John Langdon Brooks ISBN 1-58348-111-7
• The Spice Islands Voyage: The Quest for Alfred Wallace, the Man Who Shared Darwin's Discovery of Evolution by Tim Severin ISBN 0-7867-0721-6
• My Life an autobiography : (1905) Alfred Russel Wallace By Chapman & Hall, Ltd., London
• Song of the Dodo by David Quammen ISBN 0-684-82712-3
• "Missing Link-Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin's neglected double" by Jonathan Rosen, The New Yorker, 12 February 2007

External links

• The Alfred Russel Wallace Page
• Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago
• Feb 2007 article on Wallace in New Yorker magazine