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

Uncertain Beginnings /53
took a job as a housekeeper, his sister emigrated and became a teacher in
Georgia, and his brothers continued practicing their tradesman crafts. Early
the following year, Alfred applied for and received a teaching post at Reverend
Abraham Hill’s Collegiate School at Leicester, where he met the soon-to-befamous
entomologist Henry Walter Bates. Both of modest means, Bates and
Wallace took a liking to each other and developed a close friendship that
would culminate in a joint venture to South America.
While still in England, however, Bates introduced Wallace to the importance
of variety in nature, particularly the abundant diversity of insect species
just within the local area—an estimated 10,000 varieties in a circle of just
ten miles! Wallace added literary discoveries to his entomological finds, including
Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels in South America, Prescott’s
History of the Conquests of Mexico and Peru, Darwin’s Voyage of the
Beagle, and “perhaps the most important book I read,” Malthus’s Essay on
Population, the “main principles” of which “remained with me as a permanent
possession.” 62 Like most people interested in natural history, Wallace also read
the 1844 anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(by Robert Chambers) and was intrigued by the author’s hypothesis that “the
simplest and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like-production
is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced
the next higher, and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance being in
all cases very small.” The highest, of course, was man, placed there ultimately
by “Providence.” 63 No pure materialist was Chambers, who stated unequivocally
the fact that “God created animated beings, as well as the terraqueous
theatre of their being, is a fact so powerfully evidenced, and so universally
received, that I at once take it for granted.” 64 The idea grabbed Wallace’s
attention. It was a theory of evolution without a mechanism. Already a synthetic
thinker with a bold personality, perhaps Wallace was already thinking
that he might be the one to find that mechanism.
Bates, along with most everyone else in the scientific community, including
and especially Darwin, lambasted Vestiges for being too speculative and lacking
observational support. Chambers accepted the French naturalist Jean Baptiste
Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, noting,
for example, that the children of parents that habitually lie to them will grow
up to be habitual liars themselves, in turn passing on the trait to their children.
Reflecting the cultural attitudes of the day, Chambers explained that this problem
was especially prevalent among the poor. He also cited experiments allegedly
supporting the doctrine of spontaneous generation. The larvae of Oinopota
cellaris, for example, was apparently found nowhere but in beer and
wine during fermentation, leading Chambers to conclude that they had been
generated spontaneously only after the invention of the process of fermenta-