On the Organic Law of Change

A Facsimile Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfed Russel Wallace’s Species Notebook of 1855–1859

Annotated by

James T. Costa

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1823–1913. On the organic law of change : a facsimile edition and annotated transcription of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Species notebook of 1855–1859 / Alfred Russel Wallace ; annotated by James T. Costa. pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: Notes from Wallace’s Malay expedition. ISBN 978-0-674-72488-4 (alk. paper)
1. Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1823–1913—Travel—Malay Archipelago.
2. Natural history—Malay Archipelago 3. Natural selection. 4. Evolution (Biology) I. Costa, James T., 1963– II. Title. III. Title: Species notebook of 1855–1859. QH375.W35 2013

508.598—dc23

2013010172

For Leslie, tiger swallowtail mom, with love

Contents

Preface

ix xi

1
Note on the Text Introduction

Species Notebook (Recto) Species Notebook (Verso)
15
393

Appendix 1

535

537
Species Notebook Entries Bearing on Transmutation and Related Topics

Appendix 2
On Wallace’s Critique of Charles Lyell

and Principles of Geology

References

545

557 559 561
Acknowledgments Note on A. R. Wallace Literary Works Index

Preface

lecting triumphs and failures, and still others with lovely drawings and diagrams—I suddenly wondered, why has this notebook not been published? Biologists, students
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) would have appreciated of evolutionary biology and its history, evolution mavens, the improbable and happenstance manner in which this Wallace and Darwin enthusiasts—all, I knew, would be project got its start: aboard the Oxford tube en route to keenly interested in its contents. London one characteristically wet English morning, I was
Concurring with McKinney, I saw that Wallace’s reading a paper by the late historian of science H. Lewis Species Notebook was well named: it is a window into McKinney. Wallace might, in fact, have considered it Wallace’s early evolutionary thinking, encompassing the providential that I happened to be reading McKinney’s period in which his fertile mind was churning out paper account of Wallace’s field notebook dubbed the “Species aﬅer insightful paper as he searched for clues to the origin Notebook” not merely en route to London, but in fact on of species. e period of the notebook is, notably, puncmy way to the very locale where, according to the paper, tuated by the publication of two watershed papers in the this wondrous notebook resided: the library and archives history of the field—Wallace’s Sarawak Law paper (1855) of the venerable Linnean Society of London. Andrew and Ternate essay (1858)—among others. In its notes, Berry and I make an annual pilgrimage to the Linnean sketches, and narratives we see Wallace the philosopher with our students in Harvard’s Oxford-based summer and Wallace the collector: the arguments for his planned program on Darwin and evolutionary biology, and we book on transmutation are found side by side with specihad never realized that most of Wallace’s notebooks and men label designs; his discussions of the nature of species journals from his travels in Southeast Asia sit demurely on and varieties, the meaning of fossils, struggle in nature, or a paneled bookshelf scant meters from the library where the branching history of life all share space with notes on we have the privilege of viewing precious works on natural the cost of rice, lists of books to read, a proposed remedy history. e sedate and stately Linnean is a far cry from the for the proliferation of taxonomic synonyms, and a practithatched huts and praus of the Malay Archipelago where cal scheme for a library of natural history. en there are they were written some 150 years ago, but it is a most fit- the myriad collection notes, from the hunting of orangting home considering that Wallace’s notebooks and jour- utans and birds of paradise to his catches of curious beetles

nals are now among the crown jewels of biology.

and beautiful butterﬂies.

It was, therefore, with much anticipation that we ap-

Although historians have long been aware of the

proached Lynda Brooks, head librarian of the Linnean, Species Notebook, and some, like McKinney, have studied about seeing the Species Notebook at the end of our pro- it to good eﬀect, beyond a small circle of Wallace scholars gram that day. Lynda kindly proﬀered it, and as we pored it has been a well-kept secret. Andrew and I wondered: over its pages—some packed with Wallace’s neat script, could we make it more widely available? And perhaps not others with dense tables recording his daily catch and col- merely as a transcription but as an annotated transcription,

.

ix

In the annotations, I also highlight the many points of parallel thinking, intersection, and occasional divergence between Wallace and Darwin during the notebook period and beyond. ese should be read as an effort not to measure Wallace against Darwin but to show how very resonant was the thinking of these giants, a point that underscores the importance, even justice, of restoring Wallace’s unwarrantably dimmed star to its former brilliance. e Species Notebook is an excellent starting point for appreciating just how profound Wallace’s insights were in those years, pre–Origin of Species, when he labored in solitude.
We are fortunate indeed that his Species Notebook did not meet the fate of those from his South American journey, lost in the Atlantic as his homebound ship went first up in flames and then down into the depths. Considering the rigors of Wallace’s peripatetic life in Southeast Asia, covering, by his reckoning, some 14,000 miles in eight years of travels, the survival of the notebook is itself cause for celebration. rough it we hear Wallace’s voice loud and clear from the steamers and praus, huts and houses, jungle trails and trading villages across that infinite archipelago. to help readers more fully understand and appreciate the remarkable depth and breadth of Wallace’s thinking? at last point is important. Wallace is decidedly underappreciated relative to his illustrious colleague Charles Darwin, all but unknown outside of scholarly circles and even little known within, and this despite his being not only the codiscoverer of one of humanity’s greatest insights into the workings of nature—evolution by natural selection—but also the founder of the modern discipline of zoogeography. He made fundamental contributions in evolutionary biology, biogeography, ornithology, and entomology, and weighed in on a host of social issues of his day in a continuous stream of scientific papers, essays, interviews, and books. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to appreciate that history, in some respects, has not been just to Wallace.
at his giﬅs and contributions are not more widely appreciated today is our loss, for Wallace’s story is nothing short of epic, his achievements all the more poignant for their realization against all odds. Wallace’s unique blend of pluck, perseverance, and creativity were combined with the temperament of a philosopher, the sense of wonder of a child, and more than a dash of genius. is centennial year marking the naturalist’s death in 1913 offers an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on the man and his accomplishments, and there is so much to celebrate and reflect upon. In this regard Wallace’s Species Notebook is an unparalleled lens through which the scope of his early evolutionary thought is seen to advantage, in the context of life in the field where the ideas were conceived. It is in the spirit of enabling the reader to accompany Wallace on his journeys both physical and intellectual that my annotations are offered.
Berlin

February 10, 2013

.

preface

x

Note on the Text

Species Notebook Transcription

e A. R. Wallace Species Notebook, Linnean Society of London manuscript number 180, was used “tête-bêche” by Wallace, with text running in opposite directions inward from each cover, flipped with respect to each other. ese pages are here designated recto (going forward from the front of the book to the back) and verso (the reverse, running from back to front). is notebook transcription is based on (but not identical to) the Manuscript Transcription Protocol of the A. R. Wallace Correspondence Project at the Natural History Museum, London (www.nhm.ac.uk/wallacelettersonline).
Every effort was made to reflect the layout of Wallace’s original text in the transcription. Transcribed lines that for reasons of space wrap to the next line are indented on the wrapped line.

e Species Notebook is paginated following Wallace’s page numbers. Prefatory pages and endleaves with entries on them are designated [a], [a-1], [b], [b-1], and so on. e following notations are used in the transcription:

Regular square brackets [ ]

Enclose editorial insertions, as when completing abbreviated terms: e.g., “coll.”

is completed as “coll.[ected]”; “coll.^d” as “coll.[ecte]^d” (exception: in lists and tables on the verso pages, words are leﬅ uncompleted as a space-saving measure)

Italic square brackets [ ]

Enclose editorial comments, which are themselves italicized

Indicates uncertain interpretation of text Indicates text is missing or illegible Text crossed out in original

[?] [illeg.]

Struck text Super- and subscript insertions in original A full stop that appears as a dash in original Wallace’s spelling variants (e.g., Aru, Arru)
Shown in superscript or subscript Transcribed as a period (.) Not corrected

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xi

Annotations

Place Names

e names of many of the locales (towns, islands) referenced by Wallace have changed over time. e place names Wallace used in the Species Notebook and in publications quoted by him are given; modern versions of these names are added parenthetically, except in quoted passages.

Editions of Key Books

In his Southeast Asian travels Wallace used the fourth (1835) edition of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (four volumes); all quotations from Lyell’s Principles come from this edition unless otherwise noted.
Much material from the Species Notebook was later incorporated into Wallace’s acclaimed travel memoir e Malay Archipelago, ﬁrst published in 1869 in two volumes by Macmillan and Company (London) and in the same year in a single volume by Harper & Brothers (New York). e single-volume American edition (see Wallace 1869a in the References) is used for all quotations and page numbers reported in the Species Notebook annotations; it is

cited simply as Malay Archipelago.

Wallace referenced the second (1845) edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches in the Species Notebook. All references to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the annotations pertain to the ﬁrst (1859) edition unless otherwise noted.

.

note on the text

xii

On the Organic Law of Change

Alfred Russel Wallace (age thirty-nine), Singapore, February 1862. is photograph, the only one known of Wallace from the Malay Archipelago, was taken just before his departure for Britain. Copyright A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund and G. W. Beccaloni. Photograph generously provided by G. W. Beccaloni.

formal education at the local grammar school. Continued deterioration of the family’s finances compelled him to leave school at fourteen, and he then moved to London to live with his brother John for a time before becoming apprenticed to his eldest brother, William, a land surveyor (and thereaﬅer, briefly, to a clockmaker). He returned to surveying with William in 1839, as Great Britain’s burgeoning railway network and the controversial new enclosure laws, which required new surveys for the enclosure of common lands, had created a surveying boom. Living in Neath, on Swansea Bay, Wales, the brothers also became involved in a host of architectural and civil-engineering projects (Wallace would eventually design a new building for the Neath Mechanics’ Institute, later the Free Library, erected in 1847 and still extant). Busts tend to follow on the heels of booms, and so it was with land surveying in Wales. A downturn forced Wallace to leave his brother’s employment in early 1844, but he put his six and a half years of practical surveying experience to good use in securing a job as a schoolteacher in Leicester, hired by the local clergyman to teach surveying, mapping, and drawing.
Keen of mind and intensely curious, Wallace frequented the town and workingmen’s libraries and mechanic’s institutes wherever he lived, reading voraciously and attending lectures. He was a regular in the Leicester library, and the subjects he chose to explore reflected his somewhat iconoclastic personality: reading the great revolutionary omas Paine in Leicester and listening to utopian socialist Robert Owen in London were two formative experiences that tidily represent Wallace’s openness to heterodox ideas (see Claeys 2008). It was in Leicester that Wallace first encountered mesmerism and phrenology, and read works scientific, philosophical, and social that

Introduction

In the mean time I am going over to France— A Share in two revolutions is living to some purpose—

—omas Paine to George Washington
London, October 16, 1789

e year 1844 was momentous in the history of evolutionary biology. at fateful year saw the publication of

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the sensational

manifesto on transmutation—what we now term biological evolution—published anonymously by the Scottish author and publisher Robert Chambers, as well as the draﬅing of a lengthy private essay on transmutation by the thirty-ﬁve-year-old rising naturalist Charles Darwin. at same year, twenty-one-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace, an unemployed sometime apprentice builder and surveyor, moved to the town of Leicester, England, to take a teaching post in a local school. Wallace spent little more than a year in Leicester, but in his own assessment his short stay there had a “determining inﬂuence” on his future. He concluded his discussion of Leicester in his autobiography, My Life, by declaring that his year there “must . . . be considered as perhaps the most important in my early life” (Wallace 1905, 1: 240).
. . .

e eighth of nine children, Wallace was born in 1823 into a genteel but impoverished family in Usk, Wales. e family moved oﬅen, as the ﬁnances of Wallace’s father, lawyer and erstwhile publisher omas Vere Wallace, waned even as the size of his family waxed. When the young Wallace was ﬁve the family moved to Hertford, the hometown of his mother, Mary Ann Greenell, where he received his only

.

1

were to have a lasting inﬂuence on him: Malthus’s Essay on

Population (1798), Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (1818), Darwin’s Journal of Researches (1845), and Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–

1833), to name some of the more important authors. In Leicester he also met a kindred spirit in Henry Walter Bates, two years his junior, an apprentice hosier and ardent amateur entomologist who expanded Wallace’s interest in for every observer of nature to turn his attention to; every fact he observes must make either for or against it, and it thus furnishes both an incitement to the collection of facts & an object to which to apply them when collected—I would observe that many eminent writers gave great support to the theory of the progressive development of species in Animals & plants. (Wallace Correspondence Project, WCP346)

nature, in particular inspiring him to become a keen beetle e two kept up their correspondence, much of it spent collector. A new world, that of natural history, ﬁred his reveling in their favorite topic: collecting insects, especially

imagination (see Berry 2008).

beetles. But clearly their interest in the diversity of insects

Wallace had to leave Leicester in early 1845 when his extended to a broader philosophical interest in the nature brother William unexpectedly succumbed to pneumonia. of species and variation: “I begin to feel rather dissatisfied Aﬅer moving back to Neath to help sort out his broth- with a mere local collection; little is to be learnt by it. I er’s affairs, Wallace kept in touch with Bates, and they should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, exchanged ideas and news of their latest insect catches. principally with a view to the theory of the origin of speIt was in Neath that Wallace first read the anonymously cies. By that means I am strongly of opinion that some published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation definite results might be arrived at,” Wallace wrote in an (1844). Victorian England was abuzz with the scandalous 1847 letter to Bates. e letter concluded: “ere is a work Vestiges, a book Wallace would eagerly devour, immedi- published by the Ray Society I should much like to see, ately convinced that its author was on to something. In Okens Elements of Physiophilosophy. ere is a review of a November 1845 letter to Bates Wallace wrote, “Have it in the Athenaeum. It contains some remarkable views you read ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,’ or on my favourite subject—the variations, arrangements, is it out of your line?” (Wallace Correspondence Project, distribution, etc., of species” (Wallace Correspondence WCP345). Bates evidently was not as taken with Vestiges Project, WCP348). Wallace later quoted this letter in as Wallace was, provoking Wallace to write a month later: his autobiography to make the point that the question of species origins was very much on his and Bates’ minds in
I have rather a more favorable opinion of the “Vestiges”

those early days. “I was not satisﬁed with the more or less than you appear to have—I do not consider it as a hasty

vague solutions [concerning species origins] at that time

oﬀered,” he wrote. “I believed the conception of evolution through natural law so clearly formulated in the ‘Vestiges’ to be, so far as it went, a true one; and . . . I ﬁrmly believed generalisation, but rather as an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies but which remains to be proved by more facts & the additional light which future researches may throw upon the subject.—it at all events furnishes a subject that a full and careful study of the facts of nature would ul-

.

introduction

2

added bonus of providing ample raw material for the minute study of species diversity and variation. A steady stream of letter extracts and short articles by Wallace were published back in London, demonstrations of his industry and powers of observation; papers with titles like “On the Umbrella Bird (Cephalopterus ornatus)” (1850), “On the Monkeys of the Amazon” (1852), “On the Habits of the Butterﬂies of the Amazon Valley” (1854), and more. timately lead to a solution of the mystery” (Wallace 1905, 1: 257).
Bates visited Wallace in Neath in the autumn of 1847, and it was then that an audacious plan the two had been vaguely devising began to actually take shape: a journey to the Amazon, a locale inspired by W. H. Edwards’s ro-

mantic book A Voyage up the River Amazon (1847). ey

arranged to meet in London to visit the entomological collections of the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. Fortuitously, they met Edwards himself, who proved to be helpful and encouraging, and received advice and assistance from a host of others as well. Crucially, the pair got a crash course in the processing, preservation, and shipping of all manner of specimens (including insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish), and were referred to Samuel Stevens, the highly respected natural-history agent of Bloomsbury Street, London. Himself a knowledgeable naturalist and the brother of a naturalhistory specimen auctioneer, Stevens took Wallace and Bates on as clients and under his wing, and he proved to be an able and enthusiastic promoter as well as supporter of their endeavors.
Seemingly against all odds, these earnest young men managed to pull off their great adventure, finding themselves collectors deep in Amazonia before the year was out. Wallace would spend the next four years there, Bates eleven. “e more I see of the country, the more I want to, and I can see no end of, the species of butterflies when the whole country is well explored,” Wallace wrote to Stevens in 1849 (Wallace Correspondence Project, WCP4267; original emphasis). e great motivation for Wallace’s travels was the species question, and collecting was both the means to this end—by paying his way—and had the
e triumphs and tragedies of that first great expedition of Wallace’s life have been compellingly recounted in several works published over the past decade or so (see, e.g., Berry 2002, 9–18; Fichman 2004, 24–29; Raby 2001, 34–82; Shermer 2002, 60–76; Slotten 2004, 47–83). Suffice it to say here that the tragedies—the death of his younger brother, Herbert, who had come from England to help him but succumbed to disease in Amazonia, followed by the loss of most of his private collection and all the specimens he had collected during the last two (and most interesting) years of his trip, when the ship he was sailing home on burned and sank in the Atlantic—were somehow balanced by the triumphs: the grandeur, sublimity, and excitement of the tropics, where, Wallace felt, one must be closer to the great engine of species creation, whatever that might be. He had already, too, built a reputation as a diligent and able collector and observer. Wallace was not back in England long before he began to feel the pull of the tropics, the collecting life, and of course the species question; there were observations to be made and data to be collected (and not incidentally, a living to be made as well). e solution to the mystery of how species change was waiting out there, he believed, a mystery that, as he had written nine years previously, “furnishes both an incitement to the collection of facts & an object to which