Where Australia Collides with Asiathe world, it occurred to me that these had never been properly utilized as indications of the
way in which species had come into existence.Wallace had embarked on his expedition up the Amazon and now across Borneo
with the question of the origin of species already in his mind. With the rainy season
holding up his collecting he had time to put his facts and ideas on paper and wrote an
essay ambitiously titled ‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New
Species’. He finished the essay in February 1855 and shipped it off to England where
the editorial board of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History decided to publish
what has become known as his ‘Sarawak Law’. The key argument, based on his own
extensive observations, was that new species and an allied genus were normally found
in the same geographic area. In his essay Wallace set out his simple law – ‘That every
species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing
closely allied species’. A simple law based on his own observations in the Amazon
and Borneo, he still had no explanation of how this happened but he hoped to at least
start a discussion and perhaps even obtain a response from Charles Darwin based on
his observations in the Galapagos Islands.
Apart from Darwin’s unpublished ‘Essay’ this was entirely new thinking on the
origin of species and Wallace eagerly awaited a response from the scientific community
in England. He did get a response from a few friends, but otherwise there was silence.
There are some factors that may explain this. Firstly, where was he? Certainly not at
the meetings of the Entomological Society or the Zoological Society in London, but
somewhere out in the wilds of Borneo. Secondly, he was not a ‘gentleman expert’, he
had no social standing or even any fixed address. Thirdly, he was not a naturalist but
a ‘commercial’ collector who sold insects, butterflies and stuffed birds for a living.
Surely his opinions could not count for very much.
His friend Henry Bates was still collecting in the Amazon when he read Wallace’s
‘Sarawak Paper’. Bates was also at the front line of the species question and they must
have discussed it many times while together in the jungles of the Amazon. He wrote
an enthusiastic response to Wallace:
I was startled at first to see you are already ripe for the enunciation of the theory. You can imagine
with what interest I read and studied it, and I must say that it is perfectly well done. The idea is
like truth itself, so simple and obvious that those who read and understand it will be struck by
its simplicity; yet it is perfectly original ... Few men will be in a condition to comprehend and
appreciate the paper, but it will infallibly create for you a high and sound reputation.
After the many months that it took for the letter to reach Wallace in the Indonesian
archipelago, he responded to Bates:
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