Wallace himself laid out the grounds, including the serpentine drive from the road now known as Dell Road, (College Avenue did not exist when the house was built). He employed as his architect Thomas Wonnacott of Farnham who appears to have had experience in this new building material. He decided to build in concrete because there was a nearby cement works and a supply of gravel on the site. His second son, William, was born there in December 1871.ĭuring the stay at Holly Lodge he had secured the lease of 4 acres of land at Grays, which included an old chalk pit, on which to build a house to his own instructions. He moved temporarily to Holly Lodge in Barking - "a miserable kind of village, surrounded by marshes and ugly factories". The possibility of securing the directorship of a proposed museum to be built at Bethnal Green caused him to look for a house in Essex. Two months later his account of his journeys in the East, The Malay Archipelago was published, considerably enhancing his reputation. During this time a son, Herbert Spencer, was born in June 1867, and a daughter, Violet, in January 1869. For some years the couple lived mainly at Annie's parents' house in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex. For the next few years Wallace was busy writing, lecturing and attending meetings, much of his time being spent in support of the "Darwinian" theory of evolution. It was 1862 before Wallace was back in England. This insures me the acquaintance of these eminent men on my return home." He showed it to Dr Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, who thought so highly of it that they had it read before the Linnean Society. I sent Mr Darwin an essay on a subject upon which he is now writing a great work. two of the most eminent naturalists in England, which have highly gratified me. He reported that he had received letters from. His reaction as a comparatively young man of 35 with only distant acquaintance with the scientific establishment, can perhaps be judged from a letter to his mother. Wallace, still in the East, only learned of the meeting after the event. It is difficult today to imagine the impact on a general public that was barely accepting the idea that every species had not literally been created during a single week in 4004 BC. After much anguish on Darwin's part it was decided by the eminent scientists of the day that the paper by Wallace and one by Darwin should be read at a meeting of the Linnean Society on 1st July 1858. Darwin wrote to a friend "Your words have come true with a vengeance that I should be forestalled". The similarities with Darwin's own, as yet unpublished, ideas were startling. For eight years he travelled through the islands collecting and identifying countless species previously unknown to the scientists of Europe.Įarly in 1858 he wrote to Charles Darwin from a small island in what was then the Dutch East Indies, enclosing a paper entitled "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type". After a year or so he set out again, this time to the Malay Archipelago arriving in Singapore in April 1854. He returned home after four years with a growing reputation. They were to collect botanical specimens for sale to museums and private collectors.
Any spare time was spent in training himself as a naturalist by reading and correspondence, by attending lectures at "Mechanics Institutes" (the Workers Educational Association of the time) and by observation and collecting in the field.Īt the age of twenty-five and with £100 saved from earnings as a surveyor he set off for South America with a like-minded friend, Henry Bates. In 1837 he was apprenticed as a surveyor and worked for over six years on surveys for the Tithe Awards and the new railways. The family moved to Hertford when he was three and he received his formal education in the town, leaving school when he was fourteen. Wallace was born on the 8th January 1823 in Usk, Monmouthshire, the fifth of six children, four boys and two girls. Alfred Russel Wallace lived in Grays for a number of years he is chiefly remembered for his association with Charles Darwin in proposing the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection.
0 kommentar(er)
