Ian Mitchell’s Book Recommendations
Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace – by James T. Costa
Princeton University Press, 552 pages, Hardback 2023, ISBN 978 0691 233796
THE BEAUTY of life in the Scottish Highlands and islands becomes more evident than normal immediately after the Festive season. Quiet descends once the drunken hordes of the lost and lonely have departed for their usual habitat leaving the rest of us free to get on with useful things, like reading Radical by Nature, which has had me engrossed since the last pasty-faced Byres Road shit-kicker staggered unshaven onto the M.V. Glen Sux and the gang-plank was raised.
The “Radical” concerned was Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist who independently hit upon evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century. The story of the evolution of his own thought and ideas will appeal to anyone who is curious about life beyond the liars, thieves and public-sector pot-hole designers of “a modern Sco’land (poli’ical)”, which is almost all that the mainstream media cover in terms of local public life.
Wallace showed what can be achieved by perfectly ordinary people who are not hag-ridden by government, and when science is left free to get on with learning about the world and its marvels. He was born into the “upper tradesman” class on the English-Welsh border and started his working life as a surveyor’s lad. He travelled round south-central England mapping contours and distances (often for railway or enclosure projects) while simultaneously developing a consuming interest in the geology and the living world he encountered in the course of his work.
In the 1840s there was no iPad football to destroy curiosity or to insulate people from their environment when in interesting new places, and Wallace soon started taking his studies seriously. He was helped by a network of Mechanics’ Institutes and such like organisations which in those days helped many curious people engage with the world beyond their own doorsteps. Ironically, in view of the degenerate state of education in “a modern Sco’land”, and the hatred of self-reliance that our thuggish bureaucrats take out on the people they control, the movement which produced these estimable centres of curiosity and knowledge originated in Scotland.
The School of Arts in Edinburgh was the first, launched in 1821 “for the instruction of mechanics in such branches of physical science as are of practical application in their several trades.” (pp. 19, 424) Pre-socialist Glasgow was not far behind. Wallace was following an admirable Scottish lead when he went to the Hall of Science, off Tottenham Court Road in London, to attend evening lectures “on scientific principles, phenomena and the latest discoveries.” These were very popular and gave important encouragement to those who wanted to learn so they could work productively.
Within five years, Wallace had scraped together the funds—no enterprise grants, sponsorship proposals, mission statements or risk assessments needed—to take him up the Amazon for four years, paying his way later on by sending scientific specimens he found there back to London museums and other collectors. His curiosity was insatiable, and his industry prodigious. The amount of new species he discovered, and the notes and drawings he made, seem almost incredible today. But he did it because he loved it.
Finally, on 12 July 1852, he set sail for London from Belem at the mouth of the Amazon on the Helen, a 235-foot brig carrying India rubber and “balsam of caprivi” (whatever that is). Wallace was accompanied by his most recent boxes of specimens, both living and dead, and most of the drawings, notes and paperwork he had accumulated over the four years. Four weeks later, he found himself in a leaking lifeboat, three hundred miles south-east of Bermuda watching flames leaping up from the deck of the Helen, after the main cargo caught fire due to inappropriate stowage in the tropical heat.
“The decks were a mass of fire, and the bulwarks broke off and fell flaming into the sea with a hiss. Most of Wallace’s menagerie was dead by now, but a few surviving monkeys and parrots made it to the bowsprit. Rowing as close as they dared, they tried in vain to coax the hapless animals into the boats… Fire crept up the bowsprit. Most of the uncomprehending animals trapped there dashed into the flames to their doom; they managed to save a single parrot that had fallen into the sea.” (p. 119)
The survivors were adrift in the mid-Atlantic for ten days with “dwindling food and water supplies”. Everyone in the lifeboats was “constantly wet from spray and rain, blistered by the sun, and threatened with foundering in heavy swells.” But, despite the loss of his notes and drawings, Wallace continued to observe the “interesting birds and flying fish, the curious jellies and schools of ‘superb’ dolphins of gorgeous green blue and golden hues… and the meteors!” (p. 121)
In “a modern Sco’land” Wallace would have been told he had “mental health issues” and “post-traumatic stress syndrome”, and been forced to take poisonous medication at public expense. Not in nineteenth century Britain. Within twenty months, he had departed undaunted for the Far East to repeat the experiment, staying away this time for over ten years.
By the time he returned home, in 1862, his reputation was assured and his place in scientific history unrivalled, with the exception of Darwin himself. Darwin had been the first to suggest seriously that species evolve and change. Wallace had arrived at the similar conclusion independently, and was the first to write up such a theory. In 1858, the Linnean Society in London discussed a paper of his, called “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type”. It was based on the novel idea of speciation and change. He sent his text to Darwin from New Guinea, where he was still gathering specimens at a prodigious rate. But Darwin was the first to publish a book about it, On the Origin of Species, which came out a year later, in 1859. History gives credit to the older man—he was already at university when Wallace was born—but really they were both responsible, rather like Newton and Leibnitz with the calculus.
However—and this is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the controversy—they were both anticipated by an amateur researcher who suggested something similar to evolutionary theory in 1844. An anonymous author published a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This presented the explosive idea that natural history, then called “transmutation”, was about change and not the fixed species map which conventional Christian theory said was ordained by God and described in Chapter One of the Book of Genesis. The half-witted “woke” establishment of the day, led by the pious Anglican hierarchy, called the book “vile” and tried to “cancel” it. But it was wildly popular. Prince Albert read it to Queen Victoria, while Disraeli and Gladstone also studied it, as did Schopenhauer and T.H. Huxley. But who wrote it?
It transpired, decades later, that the author was another Scot who was fortunate enough to have lived before the infantilization of his country by authoritarian life-haters.
Robert Chambers was born in Peebles where his father was a weaver. After the weaving trade collapsed due to mechanisation, the teenaged Robert and his brother betook themselves to Edinburgh where they sold Bibles in the street. They needed no “new business start-up support” or other institutional nappy-changing because they had energy, initiative and interest in life.
Chambers wrote a book of local folk-lore which attracted the attention of Sir Water Scott. Within a decade, the brothers had published Chambers Encyclopaedia. W. & R. Chambers grew to be one of the most successful publishing houses in nineteenth century Britain.
Robert was a self-taught scientist and Vestiges was not a crank production. It was more of a “kite”. He put it forth as an “essay” (i.e. in the true sense, as a test effort), writing in the second edition: “I said to myself: Let this book go forth to be received as truth, or to provoke others to a controversy which may result in establishing or overthrowing it…”
That is the spirit of free debate which “a modern Sco’land” is terrified of since it threatens the power, and therefore financial interests, of the corrupt political bed-wetters in Holyrood, and all their fawning shrimp-brained imitators in the bureaucracy. The story of Wallace’s life makes a good antidote to all of that. I wonder how many of our Cabinet of Curiosities have even heard of him?
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Photo of Alfred Russel Wallace from public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=841392
