Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and Charles Darwin (1809–82) arrived at many of the same ideas about natural selection at almost precisely the same time while in correspondence with each other. Darwin's publication of his theories made him a legend, but Wallace has been mostly relegated to a footnote in the history books. Here Costa (biology, Western Carolina Univ.; The Annotated Origin) hopes to remedy that imbalance, recounting and analyzing Wallace's life and work with the ease and familiarity befitting one who edited and prepared the naturalist's previously unpublished Species Notebook. The author attempts to pin down Wallace's inner life and thought processes through painstaking textual analysis of his subject's reading material, correspondence, notebooks, and publications, as well as some of Darwin's. This is a book for Wallace fans, specialists, and scholars familiar with the man's life and work (not, as Costa makes clear in his introduction, Wallace-Darwin conspiracy theorists).