Down House. They enjoyed each other’s company and conversed either in Darwin’s
study or as they paced around the sandwalk. Wallace liked the family atmosphere he
found there. This was a life he could contemplate for himself once he had settled down
and found a wife. Their mutual affection was genuine and the relationship continued
through their correspondence and the occasional lunch when Darwin came up to
London. Although they were now equals, Wallace’s roots went deep into the social
structure of Victorian England and he always saw Darwin as his social and scientific
superior.
The first mark of his recognition in London was election as a fellow of the Zoological
Society. In the succeeding years he published eighteen papers in the Transactions and
Proceedings of the Linnean Society. In June 1863, he read one of his most important
papers before the Royal Geographical Society, entitled ‘On the Physical Geography
of the Malay Archipelago’.
His friend Henry Walter Bates had returned from Brazil three years earlier in
1859 and was encouraged by Charles Darwin to write up his eleven-year stay on the
Amazon. His book entitled The Naturalist on the River Amazons – A Record of the
Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects
of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel was published in 1863.
Bates’ account of his stay, including observations of nature and the people around him,
occupies most of this book. The result was widely admired, although some reviewers
disagreed with the book’s support for Darwin’s theory of evolution, but they generally
enjoyed his account of the journey, scenery, people and natural history. His main
scientific contribution was his observations of the coloration of butterflies which led
him to describe what is now called Batesian mimicry, where an edible species protects
itself by appearing like a distasteful species. Bates observed how they fly in the same
parts of the forest as their model and are often in company with them. So a scarce,
edible species takes on the appearance of an abundant, noxious species. Predators,
Bates supposed, learn to avoid the noxious species and a degree of protection covers
the edible species. Darwin was particularly struck by Bates’ evidence of mimicry,
especially in the butterflies of the genus Heliconius, for here was some evidence of
speciation actually in progress and he wrote:
The facts just given are, therefore, of some scientific importance, for they tend to show that
a physiological species can be and is produced in nature out of the varieties of a pre-existing
closely allied one. This is not an isolated case ... But in the very few has it happened that the
species which clearly appears to be the parent, co-exists with one that has been evidently
derived from it.Alfred Russel Wallace – The Return to England 187