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Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) traveller and naturalist, independently of but at the same time as, Charles Darwin, identified Natural Selection as the key to evolutionary change.
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8th, 1823, near the town of Usk in Monmouthshire, to Thomas Vere Wallace (died May 1843) and Mary Anne Wallace (née Greenell; died 15 November 1868). The family moved to Hertford, Essex, in about 1826. Their father, originally a gentleman of independent means and a non-practicing solicitor, lost money in unsuccessful financial speculation and took up a series of low-paid jobs, and the family moved several times for economic reasons.
When Mrs Greenell, Mary Wallace's stepmother, died in 1826, the family moved to her home-town, Hertford, in Essex. Here ARW met another child, George Silk, who became a lifelong friend and correspondent. The Wallaces lived first in a house in Andrews Street, next at an address in Old Cross, a short distance away.
Other members of the family included Aunt Wilson, Mary Anne Wallace's sister, wife of Thomas Wilson, lawyer, who in 1826 lived in Dulwich. Thomas Wilson was controlling trustee of a Greenell family legacy which paid for, among other things, John Wallace's board, and held money in trust for the other Wallace children. When Thomas Wilson was declared bankrupt in 1834, the legacy became involved and the Wallace's income was drastically reduced.
ARW was educated at Hertford Grammar School and then Hertford School where in his final year he was a pupil-teacher. In 1837, aged 14, he went to London where he stayed with his brother John (an apprentice builder) and became an apprentice surveyor as pupil to his brother William. His parents moved to Rawdon Cottage, Hoddesdon, in the same year.
ARW began collecting insect specimens found during his surveying trips, and became increasingly interested in natural history. In 1848 he went with fellow enthusiast H W Bates to the Amazon on a collecting expedition, hoping to make a living as a collector of natural history specimens. His brother Herbert (usually known by his second name, Edward) subsequently joined him, but died of Yellow Fever in 1851. ARW returned to England in 1851, losing his journals and collection of specimens when the ship in which he was sailing caught fire and sank.
Still hoping to make a living as a collector and naturalist, ARW sailed for Malaysia in 1854 with a young assistant, Charles Allen. He spent eight years in the Malay Archipelago, collecting birds and insects and studying and writing on the local flora, fauna and people. It was here that he began writing scientific papers, formed his ideas on the natural selection and geographical distribution of species, and began corresponding with Charles Darwin.
At a meeting of the Linnean Society on July 1st, 1858, Wallace's paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type", written in early 1858 while he was at Ternate in the Moluccas, was presented jointly with an unpublished essay of 1844 on the subject by Darwin.
ARW returned to England in 1862, and subsequently published widely on a variety of scientific and other subjects, and gave public lectures. He travelled to America and Canada for a lecture tour in 1886-1887. He was member of a number of scientific societies, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1892 and was awarded the Order of Merit by the King in 1908.
ARW married Annie Mitten, the daughter of pharmacist and bryologist William Mitten, in about 1866. They had three children, Herbert Spencer, (1867-1874), William Greenell (born 1871) and Violet, (born 1869).
ARW died at home in Broadstone, Dorset, on 8 November, 1913.