Alfred Russel Wallace was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin. In a feverish 'flash of light', Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet published. 'So all my originality,' he wrote, 'whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.'

History, however, has been kinder to Darwin than he feared, and it is Wallace who has been relegated to the footnotes. In fact, what was in many ways Wallace's finest hour may paradoxically have contributed to his neglect by posterity. It has caused him to be forever bracketed with Darwin, but not as an equal; he has been condemned always to play Watson to Darwin's Holmes. Even Wallace's biographers have been sucked into the vortex - a 1966 biography was called Darwin's Moon.

LRB 18 May 2000 | PDF Download