Product Description

A biography of scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1858 Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin and told him he had worked out a theory of natural selection. Darwin's outline and Wallace's paper were presented jointly in London. A year later Darwin published "The Origin of the Species", yet Wallace felt no bitterness and in fact Wallace and Darwin became friends. Wallace had none of the advantages of Darwin. He was born in Usk, Gwent in 1823, he left school at 14 and in his mid-20s he spent four years in the Amazon collecting for musuems, only to lose it all in a shipboard fire. He later went to the East Indies where he began an eight year trek and discovered countless unknown species and identified the point of divide between Asian and Australian fauna, now known as "Wallace's Line". This biography reveals Wallace as a courageous, unconventional explorer who loved the wild and the independent spirit of the people he met. When he returned to England he retreated into country life and stayed vital and alert until his death at the age of 90, in 1913. This biography hopes to put Alfred Russel Wallace back into the centre stage of the science world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #565497 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 340 pages

Allen Keast, The Quarterly Review of Biology
Readable, modestly priced, and rich in fascinating observational, personal, and family anecdotes.

From the Back Cover
"This delightfully written biography is a real find. The subject is timely, and the author brings a lively sensibility and sympathy to Wallace's situation in the evolutionary story without falling prey to over-sensationalist hysteria. Wallace had a marvelously interesting life and deserves the extensive treatment that he has been given here. The chapters concerning Wallace's travels simultaneously convey the intensity of the experience and the achievements and dangers. Further, he treats the Victorian context with a light and sure touch." (Janet Browne, author of Voyaging, a biography of Charles Darwin)

About the Author
Peter Raby lectures in Drama and English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of the widely praised biography Samuel Butler, Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers (Princeton), Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz, and Aubrey Beardsley and the 1890s. He also writes extensively on theater and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde and The Cambridge Companion to Pinter (forthcoming).

Customer Reviews

An elegant depiction of a most singular naturalist
John Langdon Brooks, in his brilliant study, "Just before the Origin" (1984), presented a cohesive, documented insight into how, without attribution or guilt, Charles Darwin, in May 1858, received a brilliant manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace in Ternate, "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type". In desparation, Mr Darwin, using Mr Wallace's manuscript,and an 1855 article Mr Wallace had penned on speciation, rewrote the 6th chapter of his manuscript "Natural Selection" (with 41 folio pages based upon Mr Wallace's original research),which, in turn, formed the important chapter 4 of the "Origin of species" published in 1859.Mr Wallace "lost", and Mr Darwin took credit for what was not his. Now, Mr Raby has presented an excellent overview of the naturalist who, in my mind,was one of the finest philosophers of systematic biology, a man who, knowing he had been betrayed, transcended the event (speaking always with warmth toward Mr Darwin), and went on to seek knowledge in the answers for which he had questions. Mr Raby provides one with an elegant depiction of a most singular naturalist,remarkably free of the racialist/colonialist paradigms of Victorian biological thought, who outlived most of his generation, yet never forgot.