Where Australia Collides with Asiatheir heroes’ lives of travel, adventure and observation of natural history were things
they could only dream of.
It was in February 1846, while Wallace was teaching at Leicester, that he received
news of his brother William’s sudden death. William had continued his surveying work
in Wales and had been called to London to give evidence before a committee on the
proposed South Wales Railway Bill. Returning to Wales in the cheapest transportation
available, which was an open railway carriage, he caught a severe chill which followed
by sleeping in a damp bed in Bristol brought on congestion of the lungs.
While attending his brother’s funeral and speaking with his friends, Wallace learnt
of the current railway boom with speculators throwing money at new railway lines to
be built across Britain. Wallace had inherited his brother’s surveying equipment and
there was now a huge demand for surveyors. He contracted with a civil engineer who
employed him to survey a line that would run up the valley from Neath to Merthyr
Tydfil. Wallace received what for him was the outstanding sum of two guineas a day
plus all the expenses of chain and staff men, food, hotel accommodation, etc. This
outdoor work took all summer and Alfred Wallace loved being out in the open air
again and enjoying the natural beauty of South Wales:
The work took me along pleasant lanes, through woods and by streams, and up one of the
wildest and most picturesque glens I have ever explored. Here we had to climb over huge
rocks as big as houses, ascend cascades, and take cross-levels up steep banks and precipices
all densely wooded.In 1844 a book, published anonymously and entitled Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation, caused a stir in drawing rooms across Britain. The book was a mixture of
fact and fiction that proposed the general idea of biological evolution, supported by
some provocative facts and arguments, but without any theory of how evolution might
work. A huge success among less critical readers, it was dismissed by the scientific
community as sensationalist junk, and voraciously condemned by the Church and the
Establishment. However, the book helped Wallace focus on the crucial question which
had already been in his mind – if species arise by natural transformation as Vestiges
argued, then what was the mechanism by which it occurred? Bates wrote to Wallace
giving his opinion of the book and he replied from his surveying work in Wales:
I have a more favourable opinion of the Vestiges than you appear to have. I do not consider
it a hasty generalization, but rather an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some
striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional
light which more research may throw upon the problem. It furnishes a subject for every104
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