Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/572

 Voysey married in 1852 Frances Maria, daughter of Robert Edlin, partner in the banking firm of Herries, Farquhar & Co. They had four sons and six daughters.

 WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL (1823–1913), naturalist, was born 8 January 1823, at Usk, Monmouthshire. He was the third son and seventh of the eight children of Thomas Vere Wallace, by his wife, Mary Anne Greenell. The father, a dabbler in many subjects but master of none, had lost most of his money in a literary venture. Alfred Wallace was educated at the grammar school at Hertford, whither the family had moved in 1828, and acted as pupil-teacher there from 1836 to 1837. His tastes were those of the average intelligent boy. He was fond of reading and of making toys and mechanical devices, two traits which, in his own opinion, were of importance to his later life. When fourteen he left school, joined his brother William in London, and set himself to learn surveying with him. In connexion with the practical work of surveying he also learnt the rudiments of geology. A year later (1838) he went to live as apprentice with a watchmaker named Matthews at Leighton Buzzard, and would probably have settled down in that business had not William Wallace been enabled to take Alfred with him to Herefordshire in 1839 to help in his surveying work. Here Alfred became interested in astronomy, in agriculture, and particularly in botany and in botanical problems, such as that of a natural classification. About 1843 he began the valuable practice of systematizing his ideas on subjects which interested him by writing them down. In that year his father died; and in 1844, his brother's prospects not being good, he became a master at the collegiate school at Leicester. Here he read much and conducted experiments in hypnotism. One set of experiments in what he called ‘phreno-mesmerism’ is of considerable interest, although the phenomena seem more likely to shed light on suggestion and telepathy than on phrenology. Here also—a turning-point in his career—he made the acquaintance of Henry Walter Bates [q.v.], the naturalist, by whom he was introduced to the science of entomology; and he read Malthus On Population, a book which for him, as for Darwin, was one of the foundations for the theory of natural selection.

In 1846 William Wallace unexpectedly died. Alfred left the collegiate school in order to take up his brother's work, finding plenty of well-paid employment in connexion with the railway mania. After a short interlude at Neath, where he was joined by his brother John, and added building and architectural designing to his other work, and also gave his first public lecture, he suggested to Bates that they should join forces for a collecting trip on the Amazon. Expenses were to be defrayed by the sale of specimens. Bates agreed, and they sailed in April 1848. In March 1850 they parted company, Wallace remaining four years in all, Bates returning after a stay of no less than eleven years. In 1849 Wallace was joined by his younger brother Herbert, who, however, died of yellow fever in 1851. Wallace tells us that the three things which impressed him most in the Amazons were the majesty and variety of the equatorial forest, the beauty and strangeness of the butterflies and birds, and the contact with savage man—a contact which had made a deep impression on Darwin also. During the return voyage the ship was destroyed by fire. The ship's company, after ten days in open boats, were rescued; but all of Wallace's collections and notes which had not previously been sent home were lost—a circumstance which, he wrote in his old age, was of great service to him in the long run, as it stimulated him later to visit the Malay Archipelago. On his return he settled in London to work out his collections. He became a regular attendant at scientific meetings, and made the acquaintance of many notable men of science.

In 1854, having satisfied himself that the Malay Archipelago offered the richest field for a collector, Wallace set off thither by himself, on a voyage which lasted no less than eight years. He visited every important island in the group, often more than once, and became fascinated both by the practical and by the theoretical side of the work. When urged by his brother-in-law, in 1859, to return to England, he answered that he had set himself to work out ‘the whole problem’ of the Archipelago, and would not think of coming home before he had done so to his satisfaction. One of his most interesting discoveries was that the Archipelago is divided zoologically into two very distinct regions by the narrow but deep strait between Bali and Lombok (now known as ‘Wallace's Line’); the western area is Oriental in the character of its fauna, the eastern, Australasian. In 1855 he published his first contribution to the species problem, an Essay on the Law which has regulated the 546