In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

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Uncertain Beginnings
The year 1889 was a historically interesting one, although no more nor less
than most others in the latter half of this rapidly changing century. Adolf
Hitler was born, Brazil was proclaimed a republic, Benjamin Harrison became
the twenty-third president of the United States, the British South Africa Company
was given a Royal Charter, Barnum and Bailey’s circus opened in London,
Vincent van Gogh painted his Cypress Tree landscape, Alexander Gustave
designed the Eiffel Tower, Richard Strauss penned his poem “Don Juan,”
and Gilbert and Sullivan produced “The Gondoliers.” In science Ivan Pavlov
began his research into the digestive system that would lead to his discovery
of classical conditioning, Francis Galton introduced the concept of the correlation
coefficient as a tool for the scientific study of the heritability of human
abilities, and George Fitzgerald anticipated Einstein when he formulated the
principle that objects shrink slightly in the direction they are traveling.
In May of that year a British naturalist published a panoramic summary of
evolutionary theory in which he outlined his heretical views on the evolution
of the human mind and the spiritual purposefulness of all evolutionary progress:
“To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d’être of the world—with
all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress,
the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the ultimate
appearance of man—was the development of the human spirit in association
with the human body.” 1 The book was entitled Darwinism, An Exposition of
the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications, but its author
was not Charles Darwin, who was already seven years interred at Westminster
Abbey. It was the definitive statement of Alfred Russel Wallace who, at
seventy-six years of age, was bringing together in a consilience of inductions
(as his colleague William Whewell called this process of convergence from
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