Peter Raby. (A folklorish giant).(Review)

Peter Raby Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life. Princeton University Press, 340 pages, $29.95

Alfred Russel Wallace, heroic naturalist, anthropologist, and evolutionary theorist, began his ninety years in a Welsh cottage as so unpromising a new-born that the family performed a make-do "half-baptism" until the vicar could do a proper one at Llanbadoc five weeks later, on 16 February 1823. He went through his life being the short half of great enterprises. He and Darwin discovered the mechanics of evolution neck-and-neck. He and Henry Walter Bates explored the Amazon together, but Bates's Naturalist on the River Amazons remains the classic account. In the great foment of Victorian geology, etymology, and botany he was--until his last decade--looked down on as the lower-class boy from the Welsh hills who didn't quite fit in with the gentlemen at the Royal Society.

Wallace was also accident prone. All in one day in the Brazilian jungle he infuriated a swarm of bees, lost his glasses, and mistook a live alligator for a dead one. The ship bringing him and his specimens to England, a veritable natural history museum in hundreds of crates and cages, caught fire and sank. The crew escaped in an open long boat. Wallace swore an oath that he would never set foot on a ship again. Almost immediately, however, he set out for the Malay Straits where from 1854 to 1862 he endured the bone-wracking adventures recounted in his most readable book, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise: A Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man and Nature (1869).

Dover, the most intelligent and educated of American publishers, keeps this book in print. I hope they will add Wallace's Island Life and his epochal The Geographical Distribution of Animals, with a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface (1876); they serve as a kind of Brahm's First to the Beethoven's Ninth of Darwin's Origin and Descent. "Wallace's Line" still snakes across maps of Southeast Asia in zoology texts: these animals (e.g., tigers) above it; these (e.g., kangaroos) below it.

Except for the young Wallace's reading every book he could lay hand on, he had only a spotty, primary education. His older brother John taught him surveying, all activity that was an education ill itself. Moreover it made him curious about geology and botany. At age fourteen he was probably more knowledgeable than a Harvard or Yale senior of the moment. It was books of travel (yon Humboldt, Bonpland) that made an explorer of him. A shilling pamphlet published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge led him to John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopedia of Plants and set him on his way, to being one of the world's greatest botanists. Genius invents itself. Mungo Park educated himself as a child while pushing the arm of a grist mill, holding a book open with his thumbs, around and around. Hugh Miller, disgusted by his third-grade teacher, took his cap from its peg, and walked out, ...