The 35-Year-Old British Specimen Collector Who Independently Discovered Natural Selection While Lying in a Fever in the Spice Islands in February 1858

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) had grown up in a downwardly-mobile English provincial family without enough money to send him to university. He had worked as a surveyor’s assistant, then as a teacher, then through his twenties as a self-funded specimen-collecting naturalist — the 19th-century occupational category that supplied British and European museums and private collectors with exotic biological specimens at a per-piece price.

His first major collecting expedition had been to the Amazon basin from 1848 to 1852. The return voyage on the brig Helen in August 1852 caught fire in the mid-Atlantic, and Wallace had lost approximately four years of specimens, sketches, journals, and the live animals he had been bringing back to sell. He was rescued by a passing brig, made it home, recovered his health, and within a year was raising money for his next expedition.

The next expedition — to the Malay Archipelago (modern Indonesia, Malaysia, and East Timor) — ran from 1854 to 1862. It produced approximately 125,000 specimens, the discovery of approximately 1,000 species new to European science, and the formulation of the species-distribution boundary now known as the Wallace Line (separating the Asian and Australasian biogeographical zones, running approximately through the Lombok Strait east of Bali).

It also produced, in early 1858, the independent discovery of natural selection.

Ternate, February 1858

Wallace was based on the volcanic island of Ternate in the Maluku Spice Islands from January 1858. He was 35, recovering from one bout of malaria and going into another. The fevers were severe enough to keep him in bed for days at a time.

During one of these fevers — Wallace’s autobiographical accounts give the date as approximately mid-February 1858, though the specific day cannot be reconstructed — he was reading Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population (he had read it twice before in England) and turning over the puzzle of how species change.

The synthesis came in a few hours. Malthus’s argument that human populations are continuously checked by famine, disease, and predation must, Wallace realised, apply to every species in nature. The fittest individuals in each generation survive disproportionately. Heritable variation between individuals — observed everywhere in nature — must therefore accumulate over time into different species. The mechanism is automatic, requires no design, and works on any heritable variation.

He wrote it up. The manuscript ran to approximately 4,000 words. He titled it “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” He posted it to Charles Darwin at Down House in Kent, asking Darwin to forward it to Charles Lyell if Darwin thought it worth publishing. The post left Ternate by the next available mail steamer in early March 1858.

What happened at Down House

Wallace’s letter and manuscript reached Darwin at Down House on 18 June 1858. Darwin opened it. The shock was profound. The theory was the one Darwin had been refining privately for the previous twenty years, since reading Malthus in October 1838.

Darwin wrote to Lyell on the day he received Wallace’s letter:

I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.

The ethical position was awkward. Darwin had unpublished priority by twenty years but Wallace had submitted a complete publishable paper independently. Darwin’s first instinct, expressed in the same letter, was to give up his own claim entirely. Lyell and Joseph Hooker persuaded him otherwise.

The Linnean Society reading

Lyell and Hooker arranged the simultaneous presentation of Wallace’s manuscript together with two unpublished Darwin documents (an 1844 sketch and an 1857 letter to Asa Gray that summarised the theory). The combined presentation took place at the Linnean Society of London on the evening of 1 July 1858 under the title “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.”

Wallace was on Ternate. He learned of the presentation by mail several months later. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was present at the meeting. The president of the Linnean Society, Thomas Bell, summarised the year’s proceedings the following May by noting that 1858 had been a year unmarked by “any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise” — a judgement that would, within eighteen months, be the most ridiculed line in the institutional history of Victorian science.

Darwin’s Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859. Wallace returned from the Malay Archipelago in 1862. He spent the rest of his career as a working naturalist, defended Darwin’s priority for the rest of his life, and consistently described the theory as Darwin’s rather than as joint.

He died at his Dorset home in November 1913, aged 90, having outlived Darwin by thirty-one years. The 1858 letter from Ternate is in the Linnean Society’s archive at Burlington House, London.