Who and what manner of man was Alfred Russel Wallace?  Who were his forbears?  How did he obtain his insight into the closest secrets of nature?  What was the extent of his contributions to our stock of human knowledge?  In which directions did he most influence his age?  What is known of his inner life?  These are some of the questions which most present-day readers and all future readers into whose hands this book may come will ask.

As to his descent, his upbringing, his education and his estimate of his own character and work, we can, with rare good fortune, refer them to his autobiography, in which he tells his own story and relates the circumstances which, combined with his natural disposition, led him to be a great naturalist and a courageous social reformer; nay more, his autobiography is also in part a peculiar revelation of the inner man such as no biography could approach.  We are also able to send inquirers to the biographies and works of his contemporaries—­Darwin, Hooker, Lyell, Huxley and many others.  All this material is already available to the diligent reader.  But there are other sources of information which the present book discloses—­Wallace’s home life, the large collection of his own letters, the reminiscences of friends, communications which he received from many co-workers and correspondents which, besides being of interest in themselves, often cast a sidelight upon his own mind and work.  All these are of peculiar and intimate value to those who desire to form a complete estimate of Wallace.  And it is to help the reader to achieve this desirable result that the present work is published.

It may be stated here that Wallace had suggested to the present writer that he should undertake a new work, to be called “Darwin and Wallace,” which was to have been a comparative study of their literary and scientific writings, with an estimate of the present position of the theory of Natural Selection as an adequate explanation of the process of organic evolution.  Wallace had promised to give as much assistance as possible in selecting the material without which the task on such a scale would obviously have been impossible.  Alas! soon after the agreement with the publishers was signed and in the very month that the plan of the work was to have been shown to Wallace, his hand was unexpectedly stilled in death; and the book remains unwritten.  But as the names of Darwin and Wallace are inseparable even by the scythe of time, a slight attempt is here made, in the first sections of Part I. and Part ii., to take note of their ancestry and the diversities and similarities in their respective characters and environments—­social and educational; to mark the chief characteristics of their literary works and the more salient conditions and events which led them, independently, to the idea of Natural Selection.