Alfred Russel Wallace – The Early Yearsobserver of nature to attend to; every fact he observes will make either for or against it, and
it thus serves both as an incitement to the collection of facts, and an object to which they
can be applied when collected.In 1847 the railway boom collapsed. Millions of pounds of shareholders’ money
was lost and Wallace was out of a job, but through hard work and his natural frugality
he had managed to save the princely sum of £100. Here was a chance for these two
young men to fulfil their youthful dreams and Henry Walter Bates describes the fateful
letter he received from Alfred Russel Wallace:
In late 1847 Mr A.R. Wallace ... proposed to me a joint expedition to the River Amazon, for
the purpose of exploring the Natural History of its banks; the plan being to make ourselves
a collection of objects, dispose of the duplicates in London to pay for the expenses, and
gather facts, as Mr Wallace expressed in one of his letters towards solving the problem of
the origin of species.Full of enthusiasm and ready for adventure, Wallace and Bates decided to pool
their resources and organize an expedition to the Amazon basin. They would finance
the expedition by collecting fauna and flora for the commercial market, selling their
specimens to the affluent private collectors who bought and displayed natural history
specimens, as others displayed works of art. They met in London early in 1848 to
study South American plants and animals in the principle collections – butterflies
at the Natural History Museum, insects at the India Museum, plants at the Kew
Botanical Gardens. It was at the Natural History Museum that the young Wallace
recalls meeting Charles Darwin in the hallways, although it seems that Darwin had no
similar recollection. After a visit to the British Museum, Wallace wrote to Bates that
he wanted to study one genus or family of insects in depth:
I begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection, little is learned by it. I should
like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of
the origin of species. By that means I am strongly of the opinion that some definite results
might be arrived at.More importantly, they learned from the museum curators how to preserve fragile
specimens and send them back to England intact. Also they needed to find someone
who could receive and sell their specimens and be trusted to forward funds to some
obscure settlement on the banks of the Amazon. Fortunately they found Samuel
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