AFTER his five-year round-the-world voyage on board HMS Beagle, the naturalist Charles Darwin suffered from illness for the rest of his life. By 1858, his 20 years of study on the subject of the evolution of species, together with pressure from his scientific peers to publish the results of his work, had increased his health problems. Then one summer morning, he received a package of papers that filled him with despair. It contained a letter signed by Alfred Russel Wallace together with a 4,000-word essay dated February 1858 with the title ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. Darwin’s conclusions on evolution, on the brink of publication, had been anticipated by a naturalist 14 years his junior.
In contrast with the affluent Darwin, Wallace grew up in modest circumstances. Born on 8 January 1823 near Usk in Monmouthshire, he was the eighth of
