Alfred Russel Wallace Born (1823)

The great 19 Century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823 (died 1913). Today, Wallace is known mostly as a footnote—the other originator of the idea of evolution and natural selection, aside the much more famous Charles Darwin. His prolific career as a naturalist and social commentator, however, made Wallace one of the most famous and honored men of England during his life.

Wallace was born to a working-class family in Gwent, Wales, and was forced to quit school at age 14 to take up work with his brother as a surveyor. As they roamed southern England and Wales surveying, Wallace took an interest in the landscapes they charted. He bought a book about botany and began to identify the plants along his surveying transects. A naturalist was born! When the surveying business went bust, he joined a local school as a drafting teacher. His interest expanded to beetles, and he never looked back.

With a fellow teacher, he left for a multiple-year expedition to Brazil in 1848, at the age of 25. There, he collected specimens of all kinds, with the goal of selling them to collectors back home. After four years in Brazil, he boarded a ship along with his treasure of new and exotic specimens and many live animals. A few days out from port, the ship caught fire and sank. Along with it sank Wallace’s specimens and fortune. The survivors, including Wallace, floated in leaky lifeboats for ten days before being rescued.

Undaunted, Wallace started a second major expedition in 1854, this time to what we now call Indonesia. Collecting was again his agenda, but this time he also planned to investigate an idea that had captured his thinking—evolution. He spent a total of eight years exploring the region, collecting and sending home more than 125,000 specimens and in the process discovering 1000 new species. His most spectacular find was the golden birdwing butterfly; he described the moment he found it:

“None but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I 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 much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death.”