Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/527



LFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, the last survivor of the great group of British naturalists of the nineteenth century, passed away on November 7, 1913, in the ninety-first year of his age and the sixty-fourth year of active service and productiveness. He followed by only a few months another member of the group, Sir Joseph Hooker, who introduced the famous Darwin-Wallace papers on Natural Selection to the Linnæan Society in 1858.

Lyell, Darwin and Wallace were three successive but closely kindred spirits whose work began and ended with what will be known as the second great epoch of evolutionary thought, the first being that of the precursors of Darwin and the third that in which we live. They established evolution through a continued line of attack by precisely similar methods of observation and reasoning over an extremely broad field. As to the closeness of the intellectual sequence between these three men, those who know the original edition of the second volume of "The Principles of Geology," published in 1832, must regard it as the second biologic classic of the century—the first being Lamarck's "Philosophie Zoologique" of 1809,—on which Darwin through his higher and much more creative vision built up his "Journal of Researches." When Lyell faltered in the application of his own principles, Darwin went on, and was followed by Wallace.

The two elder men may be considered to have united in guiding the