![]() One Wallace scholar has stated that the most reasonable interpretation is therefore that he was an Englishman born in Wales. Other historians have questioned this because neither of his parents were Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because he consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh. Since he was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh. One result of Wallace's early travels is a modern controversy about his nationality. The natural history of his surroundings aroused his interest from 1841 he collected flowers and plants as an amateur botanist. Between 18, Wallace worked as a land surveyor in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. Then at the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Wales. They moved repeatedly to different places in Mid-Wales. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice for six years. Here he was exposed to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of the English-born political theorist Thomas Paine. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute. ![]() This was a stopgap measure until William, his oldest brother, was ready to take him on as an apprentice surveyor. Wallace then moved to London to board with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. A photograph from Wallace's autobiography shows the building Wallace and his brother John designed and built for the Neath Mechanics' Institute. He attended Hertford Grammar School until 1837, when he reached the age of 14, the normal leaving age for a pupil not going on to university. Wallace's mother was from a middle-class family of Hertford, to which place his family moved when Wallace was five years old. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family's financial position. ![]() Wallace's father graduated in law but never practised it. His family claimed a connection to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century. His mother was English, while his father was of Scottish ancestry. He was the eighth of nine children born to Mary Anne Wallace ( née Greenell) and Thomas Vere Wallace. It continues to be both popular and highly regarded.Īlfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire. He wrote prolifically on both scientific and social issues his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Southeast Asia, The Malay Archipelago, was first published in 1869. He was one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with other scientists. Īside from scientific work, he was a social activist, critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. He was one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of whether there was life on Mars. Wallace's 1904 book Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, working on warning coloration in animals and reinforcement (sometimes known as the Wallace effect), a way that natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species, and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography", or more specifically of zoogeography. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, starting in the Amazon River basin. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie (1870)Īlfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator.
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