His letters that we have show that this was a common topic over 135 are in our archive and full transcripts can be found on the Wallace Correspondence Project site. This letter (March 1913: the year of Wallace’s death) asked the then fourth director of Kew, David Prain, for gardening advice. We can show him to have exchanged letters with four different directors of Kew right up until his death. Wallace corresponded with Kew throughout most of his professional life even when in Indonesia. He was one of Wallace’s closest associates and one of the earliest champions of the theory of evolution.” Y donde hizo algunos de los descubrimientos científicos más importantes de los últimos tiempos. This second book is especially interesting to us because the work was dedicated to Kew’s second director Joseph Hooker. Es la tierra que Alfred Russel Wallace exploró durante ocho años, desde 1854 hasta 1862. The topic fascinated him and in 1880 he brought out “Island life: or, the phenomena and causes of insular faunas and floras”, which discussed possible reasons for the phenomenon of the Wallace line. Wallace’s most famous publication “The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise (1869)” opens with a description of the area which includes the fact that the archipelago can (evolutionary speaking) be split in two. This line would prove to be one of the most impactful outcomes of Wallace‘s research in Indonesia. Most wildlife on the islands follows this line – even birds and some plants such as certain species of Eucalyptus. The animals found on each side of the line can be shown to have an evolutionary connection to either Asia (to the West of the Wallace line) or Australasia (to the East). To account for the phenomenon, Wallace proposed an imaginary line to divide the region into two parts. These two islands are only 22 miles apart – about the distance between York and Leeds – and yet not even birds travel between them. He found that islands as close together as Bali and Lombok had completely different animals on them. He had travelled for more than 14,000 miles all over the closely-grouped archipelago and noticed that “between these corresponding groups of islands, …, there is the greatest possible contrast in the animal productions.” (Wallace, 1863, p. It’s here that Wallace came upon a curious pattern. Together they collected ~125,660 natural history specimens. Recent estimates put the number of the staff helping him at one time or another to at least 1,200 people (Wyhe, 2018, p. Conversely, his enthusiasm for spiritualism and vehement opposition to vaccination do not enhance his scientific reputation.At just 31 years old, he travelled around the country for 8 years (1854–1862) collecting animals and plant samples there in collaboration with a veritable army of (mostly) local helpers, guides, and research assistants. He was also very interested in land nationalization and conservation, shaped partly by a meeting with John Muir on a trip to the USA. His liberal worldview encouraged him to resist Francis Galton’s early ideas on eugenics, with Wallace thinking that education, equality and women’s emancipation were the best ways of improving humanity’s condition. He thought at length about human evolution and, although extremely liberal in his day, many of his ideas (as with those of many of his contemporaries) do not stand well today a particular low was choosing to present a paper to the overtly racist Anthropological Society of London, instead of the less problematic Ethnological Society. He also had many other interests, which posterity has viewed variably. During the course of their preparations, Wallace and Bates read Darwin’s Beagle journal, as well as key works by Humboldt, Lyell and Malthus that were so influential in Darwin’s own thinking on evolution.Īlongside natural selection, Wallace will be best remembered for biogeography, something that his field experience made him especially suited to appreciate. Bates and Wallace encouraged one another’s enthusiasm for collecting, until they managed to get funding for a joint collecting expedition to the Amazon, departing in 1848. Particularly important was his meeting with another young amateur entomologist, Henry Walter Bates (subsequently the discoverer of Batesian mimicry), during Wallace’s brief period as a schoolmaster in Leicester. This work took him all over the countryside of England and Wales, giving him the opportunity to collect plants and insects. Wallace was educated in the local schools there until the age of 14, when he became an apprentice surveyor, working with his brother. When Wallace was three years old, the family moved from this Welsh rural idyll to the town of Hertford, immediately north of London. His parents were financially struggling members of the lower middle class, and money woes would accompany Wallace for all of his life. Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 near Usk, now in Wales but in a region historically disputed with England.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |