< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu
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ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

taken up as a subject of inquiry. These opinions of 1889 were the summation of twenty-nine years of work.

To return to the life narrative, the autumn of 1860 found Wallace in the Moluccas reading the "Origin of Species" through five or six times, each time with increasing admiration. A letter of September 1 to his friend George Silk contains the key to the subsequent direction of his research, namely, his recognition of the vast breadth of Darwin's principles and his determination to devote his life to their exposition:

I could never have approached the completeness of his book, its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the world. Mr. Darwin has created a new science and a new philosophy; and I believe that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to the labors and researches of a single man. Never have such vast masses of widely scattered and hitherto quite unconnected facts been combined into a system and brought to bear upon the establishment of such a grand and new and simple philosophy.

The discovery of "Natural Selection" again turned the course of Wallace's life. In his autobiography he writes:

I had, in fact, been bitten with the passion for species and their description, and if neither Darwin nor myself had hit upon "natural selection," I might have spent the best years of my life in this comparatively profitless work, but the new ideas swept all this away. . . . This outline of the paper will perhaps enable my readers to understand the intense interest I felt in working out all these strange phenomena, and showing how they could almost all be explained by that law of "Natural Selection" which Darwin had discovered many years before, and which I also had been so fortunate as to hit upon.

The coloring of animals as observed in the tropics and the Malayan Islands was the subject in which Wallace made his most extensive and original contributions to Darwinism. In his "Sketch" of 1858-9 he wrote:

Even the peculiar colors of many animals, especially insects, so closely resembling the soil or the leaves or the trunks on which they habitually reside, are explained on the same principle; for though in the course of ages varieties of many tints may have occurred, yet those races having colors best adapted to concealment from their enemies would inevitably survive the longest.

Returning from the Archipelago in 1862, he published in 1864 his pioneer paper, "The Malayan Papilionidæ or Swallow-tailed Butterflies, as illustrative of the Theory of Natural Selection," in which he at once took rank beside Bates and Müller as one of the great contributors to the color characteristics of animals. We see him step by step developing the ideas of protective resemblance which he had fully discussed with Bates, of alluring and warning colors, and of mimicry, pointing out the prevalence of mimicry in the female rather than in the male. The whole series of phenomena are believed to depend upon the great principle of the utility of every character, upon the need of color protection by almost all animals, and upon the known fact that no characteristic is so

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