When Wallace was five years old, his family moved to Hertford, north of London, where he attended Hertford Grammar School until financial difficulties forced his family to withdraw him in 1836. He inherited some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family's financial position. Thomas Wallace received a law degree but never actually practiced law. Thomas Wallace was of Scottish ancestry and his family, like many Scottish Wallaces, claimed a connection to William Wallace, the leader of a 13th-century rising against England. His mother was from a respectable middle-class English family from Hertford. He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. Wallace was born in the village of Llanbadoc, near Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales.
His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with the scientific establishment, especially with other early proponents of evolution. Wallace was strongly attracted to radical ideas. He was also considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography". Wallace was also one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century who made a number of other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory, including the concept of warning colouration in animals, and the Wallace effect. He is best known for independently proposing a theory of natural selection which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own more developed and researched theory sooner than intended. He did extensive fieldwork first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace line dividing the fauna of Australia from that of Asia. Royal Society's Royal Medal (1866) and Copley Medal (1908), Order of Merit (1908)Īlfred Russel Wallace OM, FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. His work on natural selection and biogeography
Born 8 January 1823 ( ) Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales Died 7 November 1913 (aged 90) Broadstone, Dorset, England CitizenshipĮxploration, biology, biogeography, social reform
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