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Engaging with Lyell: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Sarawak Law and Ternate papers as reactions to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology

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Abstract

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) are honored as the founders of modern evolutionary biology. Accordingly, much attention has focused on their relationship, from their independent development of the principle of natural selection to the receipt by Darwin of Wallace’s essay from Ternate in the spring of 1858, and the subsequent reading of the Wallace and Darwin papers at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. In the events of 1858 Wallace and Darwin are typically seen as central players, with Darwin’s friends Charles Lyell (1797–1875) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) playing supporting roles. This narrative has resulted in an under-appreciation of a more central role for Charles Lyell as both Wallace’s inspiration and foil. The extensive anti-transmutation arguments in Lyell’s landmark Principles of Geology were taken as the definitive statement on the subject. Wallace, in his quest to solve the mystery of species origins, engaged with Lyell’s arguments in his private field notebooks in a way that is concordant with his engagement with Lyell in the 1855 and 1858 papers. I show that Lyell was the object of Wallace’s Sarawak Law and Ternate papers through a consideration of the circumstances that led Wallace to send his Ternate paper to Darwin, together with an analysis of the material that Wallace drew upon from the Principles. In this view Darwin was, ironically, intended for a supporting role in mediating Wallace’s attempted dialog with Lyell.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Guest Editor, U. Kutschera, for his kind invitation to contribute to the Theory in Biosciences special issue dedicated to Alfred Russel Wallace. This paper was written while a 2012–2013 Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Wissenschaftskolleg and Western Carolina University’s Scholarly Leave program in making my stay in Berlin possible, and I thank the Wissenschaftskolleg’s librarians Sonja Grund, Anja Brockmann, Marianne Buck, and Kirsten Graupner for their considerable assistance. I have benefitted greatly from my many enjoyable discussions concerning Wallace with Andrew Berry and George Beccaloni. Many thanks, finally, to Leslie Costa for helpful comments and criticisms on the manuscript.

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  1. Highlands Biological Station, 265 N. Sixth Street, Highlands, NC, 28741, USA

    J. T. Costa

  2. Department of Biology, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, 28723, USA

    J. T. Costa

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Correspondence to J. T. Costa.

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This article is a contribution to the Special Issue Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913): the man in the shadow of Charles Darwin–Guest Editors U. Kutschera, U. Hossfeld.

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Costa, J.T. Engaging with Lyell: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Sarawak Law and Ternate papers as reactions to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology . Theory Biosci. 132, 225–237 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-013-0188-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-013-0188-1

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