Abstract
Conventional wisdom has had it that the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his colleague Henry Walter Bates journeyed to the Amazon in 1848 with two intentions in mind: to collect natural history specimens, and to consider evidential materials that might reveal the causal basis of organic evolution. This understanding has been questioned recently by the historian John van Wyhe, who points out that with regard to the second matter, at least, there appears to be no evidence of a “smoking gun” variety proving it so. In the present essay the circumstances of Wallace’s interest in the matter are reviewed, and van Wyhe is taken to task with alternate explanations for the facts he introduces in his argument. The conclusion is that Wallace almost certainly did have the second objective in mind when he left for both the Amazon, and the Far East. Keywords: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, evolution, natural selection.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adams, Charles Baker. 1850 (1849–1852). Contributions to Conchology. New York and London: H. Baillière.
Anon. 1912. “Dr. Wallace and the University of Colorado.” Science 900: 487.
Bates, Henry Walter. 1862. As quoted in the Leicestershire Mercury, 13 December 1847, p. 8.
Bates, Henry Walter. 1863. The Naturalist on the River Amazons. London: John Murray.
Bates, Henry Walter. 1864. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 2nd ed. London: John Murray.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. San Francisco:Chandler.
Chambers, Robert (published anonymously). 1845. Explanations: A Sequel to “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. London: John Churchill.
Clodd, Edward. 1916. Memories. London: Chapman and Hall.
Cockerell, Theodore D.A. 1903. “The Making of Biologists.” Popular Science Monthly 62(6): 512–520.
Costa, James T. (ed.). 2013. On the Organic Law of Change: A Facsimile Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Species Notebook of 1855–1859. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Costa, James T. 2014. Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Forbes, Edward. 1854. “On the Manifestation of Polarity in the Distribution of Organized Beings in Time.” Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution 1: 428–433.
Forster, Thomas. 1823. Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena, 3rd ed. London: Hardig, Mavor, and Lepard.
Gray, Alonzo and Adams, Charles Baker. 1857. Elements of Geology. New York: Harper Brothers.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1853. Introductory Essay to the Flora of New Zealand. London: Lovell Reeve.
Humboldt, Alexander von. 1822. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, 4 vols., 3rd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
LeConte, John L. 1852. “On the Difference between Primordial Races and Introduced Races.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 6: 35–36.
Lieberman, Bruce S. 2005. “Geobiology and Paleobiogeography: Tracking the Coevolution of the Earth and Its Biota.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219: 23–33.
Marchant, James (ed.). 1916. Alfred Russel Wallace; Letters and Reminiscences. London: Cassell.
Michaux, B. 1991. “Distributional Patterns and Tectonic Development in Indonesia: Wallace Reinterpreted.” Australian Systematic Botany 4(1): 25–36.
Michaux, B. 2000. “Comment”. http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S020.htm.
Powell, Revd Baden. 1856. The Unity of Worlds and of Nature: Three Essays, 2nd ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts.
Robin, Libby, Sörlin and Sverker, Warde, Paul (eds.). 2013. The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change. New Haven: Yale University Press.
St. John, Spenser. 1879. The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood.
Schouw, Joakim Frederik. 1852. The Earth, Plants, and Man. London: H. G. Bohn.
Smith, Charles H. 2004. “Wallace’s Unfinished Business.” Complexity 10(2): 25–32.
Smith, Charles H. 2005. “Alfred Russel Wallace: Past and Future.” Journal of Biogeography 32(9): 1509–1515.
Smith, Charles H. 2013a. “A Further Look at the 1858 Wallace-Darwin Mail Delivery Question.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 108(3): 715–718.
Smith, Charles H. 2013b. “Alfred Russel Wallace’s World of Final Causes.” Theory in Biosciences 132(4): 239–249.
Smith, Charles H. 2013c. Early Humboldtian Influences on Alfred Russel Wallace’s Scheme of Nature. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlps_fac_pub/73/.
Van Amringe, William F. 1848. An Investigation of the Theories of the Natural History of Man by Lawrence, Prichard, and Others. New York: Baker & Scribner.
van Wyhe, John. 2013. Dispelling the Darkness; Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific.
van Wyhe, John. 2014. “A Delicate Adjustment: Wallace and Bates on the Amazon and ‘The Problem of the Origin of Species’.” Journal of the History of Biology 47(4): 627–659.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1845. “An Essay, On the Best Method of Conducting the Kington Mechanic’s Institution”. Richard Parry (ed.), The History of Kington. Kington: Charles Humphreys, pp. 66–70.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1848. “Emigration”. The People’s Journal 5(2, suppl). The Annals of Progress: 3.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1852. “On the Monkeys of the Amazon.” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 20: 107–110.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1853. A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. London: Reeve & Co.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1854. “On the Habits of the Butterflies of the Amazon Valley”. Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 2 (n.s.): 253–264.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1855. “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species”. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 16(2nd s.): 184–196.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1858. “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology 3(9): 53–62.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1892. “H. W. Bates, the Naturalist of the Amazons.” Nature 45: 398–399.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1898. The Wonderful Century; Its Successes and Its Failures. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1905. My Life; A Record of Events and Opinions. London: Chapman & Hall.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1909. Untitled address. The Darwin–Wallace Celebration Held on Thursday, 1st July 1908, by the Linnean Society of London. London: Burlington House, Longmans, Green & Co., pp. 5–11.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Smith, C.H. Alfred Russel Wallace and the Road to Natural Selection, 1844–1858. J Hist Biol 48, 279–300 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9397-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9397-9