Alas! soon after the
agreement with the publishers was signed and in the very month that the
plan of the work was to have been shown to Wallace, his hand was
unexpectedly stilled in death; and the book remains unwritten. But as
the names of Darwin and Wallace are inseparable even by the scythe of
time, a slight attempt is here made, in the first sections of Part I.
and Part II., to take note of their ancestry and the diversities and
similarities in their respective characters and environments--social and
educational; to mark the chief characteristics of their literary works
and the more salient conditions and events which led them,
independently, to the idea of Natural Selection.
Finally, it may be remarked that up to the present time the unique work
and position of Wallace have not been fully disclosed owing to his great
modesty and to the fact that he outlived all his contemporaries. "I am
afraid," wrote Sir W.T. Thiselton-Dyer to him in one of his letters
(1893), "the splendid modesty of the big men will be a rarer commodity
in the future. No doubt many of the younger ones know an immense deal;
but I doubt if many of them will ever exhibit the grasp of great
principles which we owe to you and your splendid band of
contemporaries.
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