Shaking with fever on a spice island, he worked out how species evolve — and posted the idea to Charles Darwin.
In February 1858, a self-taught specimen collector lay sick with malaria in the Moluccas, on the far side of the world from London. Between fits of fever, as he later told it, the answer came to him: in every generation the less fit die and the better adapted survive, and over long ages that is how new species form. Within days he had written it up and mailed it to the one naturalist he thought would understand it. That was Charles Darwin, who had been quietly working on the same theory for twenty years.
Darwin was stunned. His friends arranged for both men's work to be read together, and the next year On the Origin of Species made Darwin's name famous. Alfred Russel Wallace was the son of a family that had come down in the world. He had left school in his early teens and paid his way by selling beetles and bird skins. He never resented any of it. He went on to map the hidden border that runs between Asia's animals and Australia's, and he more or less founded the science of where life lives.
A life in the field
The lifeline
1823
Born 8 January in Usk, Monmouthshire, the eighth of nine children
1848
Sails for the Amazon with fellow collector Henry Walter Bates
1852
His ship home burns at sea; four years of specimens are lost
1858
His Ternate essay reaches Darwin; the two are read together on 1 July
1869
Publishes The Malay Archipelago, dedicated to Darwin
1913
Dies 7 November at Broadstone, Dorset, aged 90
By the numbers
The measure of him
125,660
Specimens he collected in the Malay Archipelago, by his own count
8 yrs
He spent in the islands, 1854–1862, often alone or with a single assistant
10 days
Adrift in open boats after the brig Helen caught fire in 1852
22
Books he wrote, plus more than 700 articles, letters and essays
What he worked out
The work
1853
Rebuilding from ashes. With almost all his Amazon collection gone, he wrote Palm Trees of the Amazon and Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro from the few notes and drawings he had saved.
1855
The “Sarawak Law.” Writing in Borneo, he argued that every species has come into existence close in space and time to a closely related species that already existed. It was evolution in all but name.
1858
The Ternate essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” It set out natural selection independently of Darwin and pushed Darwin into print.
1859–63
The Wallace Line. He traced a sharp divide in the archipelago between Asian and Australian animals. Thomas Huxley gave it Wallace's name in 1868, and it is still used today.
1876
The Geographical Distribution of Animals, in two volumes. It divided the world into zoological regions and laid the foundations of biogeography.
1907
Is Mars Habitable? At 84 he took apart Percival Lowell's claims about Martian canals and concluded that Mars could not support life of the kind Lowell imagined.
Honoured, then eclipsed
Recognition
In his lifetime
A household name. The Royal Society gave him its Royal Medal (1868) and its Copley Medal (1908)
The first recipient of the Linnean Society's Darwin–Wallace Medal, in 1908
Awarded the Order of Merit in 1908
Often short of money. A Civil List pension, which Darwin lobbied for, kept him afloat from 1881
The century after
Faded behind Darwin; the theory he co-discovered came to be called “Darwinism” (a word he himself popularised)
His support for spiritualism and his campaigns against vaccination cost him scientific standing
Restored in his 2013 centenary, when a bronze statue was unveiled at London's Natural History Museum
His line, his regions and his specimens still underpin biogeography today
The land that made him
The Malay Archipelago
From Singapore to New Guinea he went from island to island by trading prahu, steamer and canoe, hunting birds of paradise and birdwing butterflies. Between Bali and Lombok he noticed that the birds changed completely over a short stretch of water. Just east of there he wrote the essay he dated “Ternate, February 1858.” Historians still argue over whether he really wrote it on Ternate or across the water on Halmahera (Gilolo).
~14,000 mi
He travelled within the archipelago, by his own estimate
15 mi
The width of the strait between Bali and Lombok, as he described it, that separates two worlds of animals
1858
Ternate, a volcanic clove island in the Moluccas, his base when the essay was written
“The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it.”
— Alfred Russel Wallace, on catching a birdwing butterfly on Bacan The Malay Archipelago, 1869
