Alfred Russel Wallace

A detailed Summary of Alfred Russel Wallace


Alfred Russel Wallace is one who has been overlooked in the ever-dominating association of evolutional theory and the work of Charles Darwin. Wallace, the British naturalist is best known for his theory of evolution based upon natural selection and his geographical distinction of organisms, which he and Darwin both became aware of through similar adventures and thought.

Wallace was born in a village in Monmouthshire, England in 1823. He left school at the age of 14 and worked as an apprentice with his brother. He began surveying land in counties around his home and later went on to work as a drawing master at collegiate school in Leicester where he became interested in botany and other sciences.

When he was twenty-five years old, he made expedition to the Amazon River with a fellow teacher named Henry Walter Bates. He spent four years covering the tropical jungle of Brazil collecting specimens and taking notes. On his journey home, his ship cut on fire and his entire collection was lost, although a passing ship rescued him and his crew. Though disappointed, Wallace struggled to rewrite the story of his journey in Brazil, Travels o


n the Amazon and Rio Negro in 1853.

Wallace wrote On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, and sent a copy to Darwin. Wallace and Darwin's manuscripts were read at the same Linnaean Society meeting in July of 1858. Darwin then published his own theory known as On the Origin of Species a year later which he received credit for his contribution, though Wallace was never given as much credit. Wallace did receive some recognition for his accounts of his travels, and his study on the distribution of organisms. Wallace's Line was a supposed boundary between geographical regions where many fish, bird, and mammals are represented heavily on one side of the line, but fewer on the other side. Wallace wrote "In mammalia and birds, the distinction is marked by genera, families, and even orders confined to one region; insects by a number of genera and little groups of peculiar species, the families of insects having generally a very wide or universal distribution. "

He then began another adventure in the islands of Malaysia, where he worked collecting exotic animals and insects for European merchants. This is where he developed the basis for t

Some common words found in the essay are:
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