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Alfred russel wallace family8/31/2023 ![]() ![]() Wallace had lost most of his notes, journals, and specimens. Disaster struck Wallace as he was almost four weeks into his journey back home: the cargo hold of the Helen had caught on fire, and the crew was forced into lifeboats to escape the consuming flames. His accomplice, Henry Walter Bates, would continue collecting in South America for over ten years. He had still yet to discover what drives evolution to occur. Suffering ill health, Wallace concluded his expedition and departed for Britain on Jaboard the brig Helen. While there, Wallace would collect countless animal specimens, as well as document the local peoples, the geography, and the course of the Rio Negro. Wallace and Bates arrived in Brazil on May 28, 1848. On April 26, 1848, Wallace and Bates departed Liverpool for Brazil. For Wallace, this expedition had three purposes: collect specimens for himself, earn much-needed cash by acquiring specimens for collectors and museums, and to find what causes evolution. Edwards, Wallace convinced Henry Bates that they should go on a specimen collecting trip to Brazil. Inspired by Chambers’ book, along with another work entitled A Voyage Up the River Amazon, by W.H. Wallace wasn’t quite sure what this hidden mechanism was himself, but he thought he might be able to find the answer by studying the geographical and geological ranges of organisms and their evolutionary history. Fascinated by this new concept, Wallace would eventually make it his mission to discover the engine that drives evolution to occur (an area that Chambers fell short on in his book). ![]() Alfred Wallace would be introduced to the concept of “transmutation of the species” (later known as “evolution”) in 1845, through the revolutionary book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, written by Robert Chambers. In 1844, he became friends with an entomologist named Henry Walter Bates, whose love of the natural world would help spur Wallace’s curiosity in this arena. In 1843, Wallace was twenty-years-old, and had taken a position at the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach surveying, amongst other trades. It was during this time that Wallace was beginning to take interest in the natural world, particularly in geology, botany, and astronomy. By 1837, he was now living his brother William in Bedfordshire, where he was learning the trade of his brother’s surveying business. In late 1836, Wallace’s parents were forced to remove him from school due to their lack of funds, and the young thirteen-year-old was sent to London to room with his older brother John. By all accounts, Wallace had a happy childhood until his family fell on very hard times in 1835, due to his father being swindled out of his family’s property. He was the eighth of nine children, born into a middle-class family. Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823, in his family home of Kensington House in Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales. ![]()
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