The question of how this world and all the things in it were made,
has, so far as we know, always been asked. And volunteers have at no
time been slow about coming forward and answering. For this service the
volunteer has usually asked for honors and also exemption from toil more
or less unpleasant.
He has also demanded the joy of riding in a coach, being carried in a
palanquin, and sitting on a throne clothed in purple vestments, trimmed
with gold lace or costly furs. Very often the volunteer has also
insisted on living in a house larger than he needed, having more food
than his system required, and drinking decoctions that are costly, spicy
and peculiar.
All of which luxury has been paid for by the people, who are told that
which they wish to hear.
The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
turf.
Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
adapted to their understanding.
Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
followed explanations of what God did each day.
Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew
discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
was the guiding impulse of their lives.
In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
against them.
Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.
Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that
animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of
moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into
higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but
some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion
and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also
taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of
life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high
degree of development having gradually come about through growth from
very lowly forms.
Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements,
and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that
between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there
was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also
taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things,
animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place
from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.
According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of
truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took
the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in
the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by
his leaning toward "Darwinism."
Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as
our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you
like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover,
thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does
not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the
thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition
that snuffs out his life.
And the dead they soon grow cold.
The recipe for popularity is to hunt out a weakness of humanity and then
bank on it. No one knows this better than your theological volunteer.
Aristotle, the father of natural history, who early in life had a
Pegasus killed under him, taught that the diversity in animal life was
caused by a diversity of conditions and environment, and he declared he
could change the nature of animals by changing their surroundings. This
being true he argued that all animals were once different from what they
are now, and that if we could live long enough, we would see that
species are exceedingly variable.
To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just
as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things
evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small
sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and
the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what
they wish to hear.
The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had
their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linnæus and Buffon
appeared.
In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who
stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth
his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a
common original germ.
In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of
Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book,
"Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of
all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more
as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so
little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful
accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were
firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of
devotees and followers.
But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now
planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing
Christendom with doubt.
In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in
public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and
modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of
Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was
fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from
fiction.
Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, Charles Darwin received
from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the
Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At
this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linnæus
Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,
or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural
Selection."
The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the
Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for
twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject,
which he some day intended to issue in book form.
His paper for the Linnæus Society simply summed up his convictions. And
now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular
subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him--of all
men!
Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were
alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir
Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and
laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that
both papers should be read the same evening before the Linnæus Society,
and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred
Fifty-eight.
Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species," which in his
preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by
the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace
full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all
that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his
shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased
with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read
the book in far-off Australia.
The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the
hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will
ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace,
who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.
* * * * *
In an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he
began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace
was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large
family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the
indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It
is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think
you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.
About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on
in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as
apprentice to a surveyor.
Chance is a better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for
tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich
digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and
count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the
stars, and eat out of a skillet.
A little later we find Alfred working for his elder brother in an
architect's office, gazing abstractedly out of the window betimes, and
wishing he were a ground-squirrel, fancy free on the heath and amid the
heather, digging holes, thus avoiding introspection. "Houses are
prisons," he said, and sang softly to himself the song of the open road.
I think I know exactly how Alfred Russel Wallace then felt, from the
touchstone of my own experience; and I think I know how he looked, too,
all confirmed by an East Aurora incident.
Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the
foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing
behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe,
slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged
trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a
fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke
there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that
told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.
"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he
began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was
nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form
divine--or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of
introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and
gave him a chance to say something for himself.
He was English, that was very sure--and Oxford English at that. "You
see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo
Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a
fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out
as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me
out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a
set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain
with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously
continued.
"But about your father, Mr. Wallace--do I know him?"
"I think so; he has written you several letters--Alfred Russel Wallace!"
You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the
letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my
baby boy."
I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find
him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways--as really great men
ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical
phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with
him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up
against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw,
exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S'
long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window.
"S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.
But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most
famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like
fog-horns.
"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"--I was aroused from my
little mental excursion, and noticed that my visitor had hair of a
light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his
hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind
of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"--and I handed
him the pickax.
Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing
everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son
of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In
fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence,
but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the
post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his
father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the
letter: it was nine finely written pages.
But to my disappointment not a word about marsupials, siamangs or
Syndactylæ: just news about John, William, Mary and Benjamin; with
references to chickens and cows, and a new greenhouse, with a little
good advice about keeping right hours and not overeating.
The young man had spent three years at Oxford, and was an electrical
engineer. He was intent on finding out just as much about the secrets of
American railroad construction as he possibly could. As for intellect, I
did not discover any vast amount; perhaps, for that matter, he didn't
either. But we all greatly enjoyed his visit, and when he went away I
presented him with a clean, secondhand flannel shirt and my blessing.
* * * * *
From the appearance of the young man I imagine that Alfred Russel
Wallace at twenty-one was very much such a man as his son, who did such
good work at the Roycroft with pick and shovel. Alfred was earnest,
intent, strong, and had a deal of quiet courage that he was as
unconscious of as he was of his digestion.
He taught school, and to interest his scholars he would take them on
botanical excursions. Then he himself grew interested, and began to
collect plants, bugs, beetles and birds on his own account.
By Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight, the confining walls of the school had
become intolerable to Wallace, and he started away on a wild-goose chase
to Brazil, with a chum by the name of Henry Walter Bates, an ardent
entomologist. Alfred had no money either, but Bates had influence, and
he cashed it in by arranging with the Curator of the British Museum,
that any natural-history specimens of value which they might gather and
send to him would be paid for. And so something like a hundred pounds
was collected from several scientific men, and handed over as advance
payment for the wonderful things that the young men were to send back.
They embarked on a sailing-vessel that was captained by a kind kinsman
of Bates, so the fare was nil, in consideration of services rendered
constructively.
Arriving in Brazil the young men began their collecting of specimens.
They got together a very creditable collection of birds' eggs and sent
them back by the captain of the ship they came out on, this as an
earnest of what was to come.
Bates and Wallace were together for a year. Bates insisted on remaining
near the white settlements; but Wallace wanted to go where white men had
never been. So alone he went into the forests, and for two years lived
with the natives and dared the dangers of jungle-fever, snakes,
crocodiles and savages. For a space of ten months he did not see a
single white person.
He collected nearly ten thousand specimens of birds, which he skinned
and carefully prepared so they could be mounted when he returned to
England; there was also a nearly complete Brazilian herbarium, and a
finer collection of birds' eggs than any museum of England could boast.
This collection represented over three years' continuous toil. All the
curious things were packed with great care and placed on board ship.
And so the young naturalist sailed away for England, proud and happy,
with his great collection of entomological, botanical and ornithological
specimens.
But on the way the ship took fire, and the collection was either burned
or ruined by soaking salt water.
That the crew and their sole passenger escaped alive was a wonder.
Wallace on reaching England was in a sorry plight, being destitute of
clothes and funds.
And there were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only
been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of
Brazil was gotten out of Humboldt's books.
In one way, Wallace surely paralleled Humboldt: both lost a most
valuable collection of natural-history specimens by shipwreck.
Several of the good men who had advanced money now asked that it be
paid. Wallace set to work writing out his recollections, the only asset
that he possessed.
His book, "Travel on the Amazon and Rio Negro," had enough romance in it
so that it floated. Royalties paid over in crisp Bank of England notes
made things look brighter. Another book was issued, called, "Palm-Trees
and Their Uses," and proved that the author was able to view a subject
from every side, and say all that was to be said about it. "Wallace on
the Palm" is still a textbook.
The debts were paid, and Alfred Russel Wallace at thirty was square with
the world, the possessor of much valuable experience. He also had five
hundred pounds in cash, with a reputation as a writer and traveler that
no longer caused bookworms to sneeze.
Having paid off his obligations, he felt free again to leave England, a
thing he had vowed he would not do, so long as his reputation was under
a cloud. This time he selected for a natural-history survey a section of
the world really less known than South America.
* * * * *
Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace
reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best
collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was
possible to make.
White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information
as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.
Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian
natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he
stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He
was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode
horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before
trod by the foot of a white man.
The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from
there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the
Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his
specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery.
In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand
natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which,
later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.
On returning to England, Wallace took six years in preparation of his
book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking,
which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology,
zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of
information and suggestion for natural-history workers.
The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty
dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not
only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being
enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might
be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing
orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as
excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.
Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred
is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of
snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the
crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even
with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his
prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his
back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the
female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up
the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile
tears.
The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee and gorilla,
which are found only in Western Africa.
In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has
given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that
good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen.
Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and
belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred
thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young
ladies.
The orang, or mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes
to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and
have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a
man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his
attendants that he wanted to secure several specimens of these "wild men
of the woods," they cried, "Alas! he is making a collection: it will be
our turn next!" And they fled in terror.
Wallace then hired another set of servants and resolved to make no
confidants, but just go ahead and find his game.
He had hunted for weeks through forest and jungle, but never a glimpse
or sight of the man-ape! He had almost given up the search, and
concluded with several English scientists that this orang-utan was a
part of that great fabric of pseudo-science invented by imaginative
sailormen, who took most of their inland little journeys around the
capstan. And so musing, seated in the doorway of his bamboo house, he
looked out upon the forest, and there only a few yards away, swinging
from tree to tree, was a man-ape. It seemed to him to be about five
times as large as a man.
He seized his gun and approached; the beast stopped, glared, and railed
at him in a voice of wrath. It broke off branches and threw sticks at
him.
Wallace thought of the offer made him by the South Kensington Museum:
"One hundred pounds in gold for an adult male, skin and skeleton to be
properly preserved and mounted; seventy-five pounds for a female."
The huge animal showed its teeth, cast one glance of scornful contempt
on the puny explorer, and started on, swinging thirty feet at a stretch
and catching hold of the limbs with its two pairs of hands.
Wallace grasped his gun and followed, lured by the demoniac shape. A
little of the superstition of the natives had gotten into his veins: he
dare not kill the thing unless it came toward him, and he had to shoot
it in self-defense.
It traveled in the trees about as fast as he could on the ground.
Occasionally it would stop and chatter at him, throwing sticks in a most
human way, as if to order him back.
Finally, the instincts of the naturalist got the better of the man, and
he shot the animal. It came tumbling to the ground with a terrific
crash, grasping at the vines and leaves as it fell.
It was quite dead, but Wallace approached it with great caution. It
proved to be a female, of moderate size, in height about three and a
half feet, six feet across from finger to finger. Needless to say that
Wallace had to do the skinning and the mounting of the skeleton alone.
His servants had chills of fear if asked to approach it. The skeleton of
this particular orang can now be seen in the Derby Museum.
In a few hours after killing his first orang, Wallace heard a peculiar
crying in the forest, and on search found a young one, evidently the
baby of the one he had killed. The baby did not show any fear at all,
evidently thinking it was with one of its kind, for it clung to him
piteously, with an almost human tenderness.
Says Wallace:
"When handled or nursed it was very quiet and contented, but when laid
down by itself would invariably cry; and for the first few nights was
very restless and noisy. I soon found it necessary to wash the little
mias as well. After I had done so a few times it came to like the
operation, and after rolling in the mud would begin crying, and continue
until I took it out and carried it to the spout, when it immediately
became quiet, although it would wince a little at the first rush of the
cold water, and make ridiculously wry faces while the stream was running
over its head. It enjoyed the wiping and rubbing dry amazingly, and when
I brushed its hair seemed to be perfectly happy, lying quite still with
its arms and legs stretched out. It was a never-failing amusement to
observe the curious changes of countenance by which it would express its
approval or dislike of what was given to it. The poor little thing would
lick its lips, draw in its cheeks, and turn up its eyes with an
expression of the most supreme satisfaction, when it had a mouthful
particularly to its taste. On the other hand, when its food was not
sufficiently sweet or palatable, it would turn the mouthful about with
its tongue for a moment, as if trying to extract what flavor there was,
and then push it all out between its lips. If the same food was
continued, it would proceed to scream and kick about violently, exactly
like a baby in a passion.
"When I had had it about a month it began to exhibit some signs of
learning to run alone. When laid upon the floor it would push itself
along by its legs, or roll itself over, and thus make an unwieldy
progression. When lying in the box it would lift itself up to the edge
in an almost erect position, and once or twice succeeded in tumbling
out. When left dirty or hungry, or otherwise neglected, it would scream
violently till attended to, varied by a kind of coughing noise, very
similar to that which is made by the adult animal.
"If no one was in the house, or its cries were not attended to, it would
be quiet after a little while; but the moment it heard a footstep would
begin again, harder than ever. It was very human."
* * * * *
The most lasting result of the wanderings of Alfred Russel Wallace
consists in his having established what is known to us as "The Wallace
Line." This line is a boundary that divides in a geographical way that
portion of Malaysia which belongs to the continent of Asia from that
which belongs to the continent of Australia.
The Wallace Line covers a distance of more than four thousand miles, and
in this expanse there are three islands in which Great Britain could be
set down without anywhere touching the sea.
Even yet the knowledge of the average American or European is very hazy
about the size and extent of the Malay Archipelago, although through our
misunderstanding with Spain, which loaded us up with possessions we have
no use for, we have recently gotten the geography down and dusted it off
a bit.
There is a book by Mrs. Rose Innes, wife of an English official in the
Far East, who, among other entertaining things, tells of a head-hunter
chief who taught her to speak Malay, and she, wishing to reciprocate,
offered to teach him English; but the great man begged to be excused,
saying, "Malay is spoken everywhere you go, east, west, north or south,
but in all the world there are only twelve people who speak English,"
and he proceeded to name them.
Our assumptions are not quite so broad as this, but few of us realize
that the Protestant Christian Religion stands fifth in the number of
communicants, as compared with the other great religions, and that
against our hundred millions of people in America, the Malay Archipelago
has over two hundred millions.
Wallace found marked geological, botanical and zoological differences to
denote his line. And from these things he proved that there had been
great changes, through subsidence and elevation of the land. At no very
remote geologic period, Asia extended clear to Borneo, and also included
the Philippine Islands. This is shown by the fact that animal and
vegetable life in all of these islands is almost identical with life on
the mainland: the same trees, the same flowers, the same birds, the same
animals.
As you go westward, however, you come to islands which have a very
different flora and fauna, totally unlike that found in Asia, but very
similar to that found in Australia.
Australia, be it known, is totally different in all its animal and
vegetable phenomena from Asia.
In Australia, until the white man very recently carried them across,
there were no monkeys, apes, cats, bears, tigers, wolves, elephants,
horses, squirrels or rabbits. Instead there were found animals that are
found nowhere else, and which seem to belong to a different and
so-called extinct geologic age, such as the kangaroo, wombats, the
platypus--which the sailors used to tell us was neither bird not beast,
and yet was both. In birds, Australia has also very strange specimens,
such as the ostrich which can not fly, but can outrun a horse and kills
its prey by kicking forward like a man. Australia also has immense
mound-making turkeys, honeysuckers and cockatoos, but no woodpeckers,
quail or pheasants.
Wallace was the first to discover that there are various islands, some
of them several hundred miles from Australia, where the animal life is
identical with that of Australia. And then there are islands, only a
comparatively few miles away, which have all the varieties of birds and
beasts found in Asia.
But this line that once separated continents is in places but fifteen
miles wide, and is always marked by a deep-water channel, but the seas
that separate Borneo and Sumatra from Asia, although wide, are so
shallow that ships can find anchorage anywhere.
The Wallace Line, proving the subsidence of the sea and upheaval of the
land, has never been seriously disputed, and is to many students the one
great discovery by which Wallace will be remembered.
Wallace's book on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals" sets forth
in a most interesting manner, the details of how he came to discover the
Line.
It was in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five that Wallace, alone in the wilds
of the Malay Archipelago, became convinced of the scientific truth that
species were an evolution from a common source, and he began making
notes of his observations along this particular line of thought. Some
months afterward he wrote out his belief in the form of an essay, but
then he had no definite intention of what he would do with the paper,
beyond keeping it for future reference when he returned to England. In
the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, however, he decided to send it
to Darwin to be read before some scientific society, if Darwin
considered it worthy. And this paper was read on the evening of July
First, before the Linnæus Society, with one by Darwin on the same
subject, written before Wallace's paper arrived, wherein the identical
views are set forth. Darwin and Wallace expressed what many other
investigators had guessed or but dimly perceived.
* * * * *
Of the six immortal modern scientists, three began life working as
surveyors and civil engineers--Wallace, Tyndall, Spencer. From the
number of eminent men, not forgetting Henry Thoreau, Leonardo da Vinci,
Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Washington--aye! nor old John Brown, who
carried a Gunter's chain and manipulated the transit--we come to the
conclusion that there must be something in the business of surveying
that conduces to clear thinking and strong, independent action.
If I had a boy who by nature and habit was given to futilities, I would
apprentice him to a civil engineer.
When two gangs of men begin a tunnel, working toward each other from
different sides of a mountain, dreams, poetry, hypothesis and guesswork
had better be omitted from the equation. Here is a case where
metaphysics has no bearing. It is a condition that confronts them, not a
theory.
Theological explanations are assumptions built upon hypotheses, and your
theologian always insists that you shall be dead before you can know.
If a bridge breaks down or a fireproof building burns to ashes, no
explanation on the part of the architect can explain away the
miscalculation; but your theologian always evolves his own fog, into
which he can withdraw at will, thus making escape easy. Darwin, Huxley,
Spencer, Tyndall and Wallace all had the mathematical mind. Nothing but
the truth would satisfy them. In school, you remember how we sometimes
used to work on a mathematical problem for hours or days. Many would
give it up. A few of the class would take the answer from the book, and
in an extremity force the figures to give the proper result. Such
students, it is needless to say, never gained the respect of either
class or teacher--or themselves. They had the true theological instinct.
But a few kept on until the problem was solved, or the fallacy of it had
been discovered. In life's school such were the men just named, and the
distinguishing feature of their lives was that they were students and
learners to the last.
Of this group of scientific workers, Alfred Russel Wallace alone
survives, aged eighty-nine at this writing, still studying, earnestly
intent upon one of Nature's secrets that four of his great colleagues
years ago labeled "Unknown," and the other two marked "Unknowable."
To some it is an anomaly and contradiction that a lover of science,
exact, cautious, intent on certitude, should accept a belief in personal
immortality. Still, to others this is regarded as positive proof of his
superior insight.
All thinking men agree that we are surrounded by phenomena that to a
great extent are unanalyzed; but Herbert Spencer, for one, thought it a
lapse in judgment to attribute to spirit intervention, mysteries which
could not be accounted for on any other grounds. It was equal to that
sin against science which Darwin committed, and which he atoned for in
contrite public confession, when he said: "It surely must be this,
otherwise what is it? Hence we assume," and so on. Some recent writers
have sought to demolish Wallace's argument concerning Spiritism by
saying he is an old man and in his dotage. Wallace once wrote a booklet
entitled, "Vaccination a Fallacy," which created a big dust in Doctors'
Row, and was cited as corroborative proof, along with his faith in
Spiritism, that the man was mentally incompetent.
But this is a deal worse excuse for argument than anything Wallace ever
put forth. The real fact is that Wallace issued a book on Spiritism in
Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six
reissued it with numerous amendments, confirming his first conclusions.
So he has held his peculiar views on immortality for over thirty years,
and moreover his mental vigor is still unimpaired.
Whether the proof he has received as to the existence of disembodied
spirits is sufficient for others is very uncertain; but if it suffices
for himself, it is not for us to quibble. Wallace agrees to allow us to
have our opinions if we will let him have his.
His views are in no sense those of Christianity; rather, they might be
called those of Theosophy, as the personal God and the dogma of
salvation and atonement are entirely omitted.
The Doctrine of Evolution he carries into the realm of spirit. His
belief is that souls reincarnate themselves many times for the ultimate
object of experience, growth and development. He holds that this life is
the gateway to another, but that we should live each day as though it
were our last.
To this effect we find, in a recent article, Wallace quotes a little
story from Tolstoy: A priest, seeing a peasant in a field plowing,
approached him and asked, "How would you spend the rest of this day if
you knew you were to die tonight?"
The priest expected the man, who was a bit irregular in his churchgoing,
to say, "I would spend my last hours in confession and prayer." But the
peasant replied, "How would I spend the rest of the day if I were to die
tonight?--why, I'd plow!"
Hence, Wallace holds that it is better to plow than to pray, and that in
fact, when rightly understood, good plowing is prayer.
All useful effort is sacred, and nothing else is or ever can be. Wallace
believes that the only fit preparation for the future lies in improving
the present. Please pass the dotage!
[Illustration: JOHN FISKE]