Wallace, Alfred Russel

wol'iss, Alfred Russel (1823-), an eminent English naturalist. He was a native of Monmouthshire. He received an academic education and was trained for the profession of surveying. While engaged as an instructor in a school at Leicester he formed a friendship with Walter Bates. Both were enthusiastic collectors of insects. In 1848 they formed the project of a trip to the valley of the Amazon. They spent four years in this region. On their return Wallace wrote a charming Narrative of Travel on the Amazon and the Rio Negro. The collections and reports of the two young men marked an epoch in the study of entomology. Later, Mr. Wallace was privileged to reside, travel, and collect for eight years (1854-1862) in the Malay Archipelago. The British government and the Royal Geographical Society enabled him to employ helpers. He returned with 125,660 specimens of natural history, including mammals, reptiles, birds, shells, butterflies, beetles, and other insects. His observations were published in a work of surpassing interest, The Malay Archipelago, The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise: a Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. His name has been perpetuated by "Wallace Line," a term applied to a deep sea chasm or barrier that separates the animals and plants of Australia from those of Asia. In scientific questions Wallace and Darwin worked in harmony. In fact what are known as Darwin's theories were in part originated by Wallace. In the end Darwin's name will be associated chiefly with the origin of species; the name of Wallace with the geographical distribution of plants and animals. See Darwin; Huxley

The keen enjoyment that Mr. Wallace experienced in New Guinea appears in the following interesting extract from his writings:

During my first walk into the forest at Batchian I had seen, sitting on a leaf, out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark color marked with white and yellow spots. I could not capture it as it flew away high up into the forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of a new species of Ornithoptera, or, "bird-winged butterfly," the pride of the Eastern tropics. I was very anxious to get it and to find the male, which in this genus is always of extreme beauty. During the two succeeding months I saw it only once again, and shortly afterward I saw the male flying high in the air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever getting a specimen as it seemed so rare and wild; till one day, about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large white leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble insects hovering over it, but it was too quick for me and it flew away. The next day I went again to the same shrub and succeeding in catching a female, and the day after a fine male. I found it to be, as I expected, a perfectly new and most magnificent species, and one of the most gorgeously colored butterflies in the world. Fine specimens of the male are more than seven inches across the wings, which are velvety black and fiery orange, the latter color replacing the green of the allied species. The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I had at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head and I felt more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a most inadequate cause.