S TOR Y

THE ECSTASY OFALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

By Daniel Mason

I wrote a letter to [Darwin] in which Isaid that I hoped the idea would be asnew to him as it was to me, and that itwould supply the missing factor to ex-plain the origin of species. asked him ifhe thought it suHiciently important toshow it to Sir Charles Lyell, who hadthought so highly of my former paper.

H -A.R.W., My Life

e was a man entranced by life'svariety. As a child, he had collected-fossil, flower, beetle, stone-and it wasas a collector that he would come tounderstand his purpose. Forced by his fa-ther's debts to abandon school in histhirteenth year, he learned from whathe could gather: broadsheets and belem-nites, discarded primers, Milton andTom Jones. Let the great men of Oxfordand Cambridge proceed with theirphilosophies. No: he was not one fortheory. The machinations of a Godwith the whimsy to make birds of par-adise, place hearts on the left and twistseashells to the right-this was beyondhis ken. But the search! The search washis calling. Hadn't a phrenologist toldhim he would always be seeking? Ofthe twenty-seven brain organs, he hadlarge protuberances in Ideality and Won-der. When he contemplated nature and

Daniel Mason is the author of the novelsThe Piano Tuner and A Far Country(both from Vintage).

78 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

all her permutations, it filled him withan ecstasy that at times felt like lust.

To Samuel Stevens, his agent in Lon-don, he sent his collections, destined forcabinets of curiosities and municipalmuseums, and from Stevens came themeans to finance his expeditions. FromWales he left for the River Amazon,where bees entangled themselves in hisbeard and his legs erupted with bites ofthe pium. In Barra, he hypnotized streeturchins. In the slack-water lagoons atSao Gabriel, pink dolphins encircledhis boat. Ants attacked his bird skins,with a preference for the eyes. Thosespecimens he wished to keep whole hebottled in cane liquor, and well intohis old age, when he thought of life andits vast diversity arrayed, it smelled tohim of spirits. By the time he returnedto England at the age of twenty-nine, hehad endured the death of his brother,eight bouts of malaria, the destructionof his collections in a fire on the Sar-gassoSea. To such misfortunes he wouldadd the general indifference of hishomeland to his discoveries, his dis-missal as a "bug collector" and a "speciesman." He swore he would never travelagain. In March of 1854, he left oncemore, for the Malay Archipelago, on asteamer of the P & 0 Line.

If, in his letters to his mother, hewrote joyfully of where he went, hisphysical travels were but a faint trail

through the vastness of his wonder.Whether he expected great revelationsin his early collections, he did notknow; the collections seemed an endin themselves, the consequences ofwhich he did not consider until theconsequences seized him. When heturned, at last, to theory, one thingwas clear: he did not intend to destroyfaith; he intended to explain the shap-ing of a beetle's horns. Should faithfall inthe process, he thought (andthen thought about it no more), it wasa matter for theologians to resolve.

And so he was unprepared for themagnitude of the epiphany, when itcame, delivered as if by an angel, onthat spectacularly warm, tropicalspring morning in 1858. Indeed, theysaid he had the naivete of a child:too trusting, too awed by others'greatness to know that he deservedgreatness himself. There were hourswhen he thought: I know nothing.And there were other hours, chieflyat night, waking from dreams hedidn't remember, that a differentthought came: the idea, that beauti-ful burning idea, that recasting andrefiguring and resculpting of the

world, that idea burst forth

L from me, and me alone.

ater, back among Englishmen,he would say it came to him in a fit of

fever. This was only part of the truth,but it was the answer he would givethem, the only answer that would col-or that moment of illumination withsymptoms they could understand.

For months he had been traveling,like a nomad, through the shatteredvolcanoes of the Archipelago:Celebes, Sarawak, Kalimantan.Monsoons greeted his arrivals. InSingapore, great cauldrons loomedon the decks of American whalers.

On Borneo, he shot orangs. His boatneeded only to touch shore and hewould vanish into the jungles withhis net in his hand.

He traveled, as he always did,without rest, driven by the constantfear that there were species he wouldmiss, forms and colors he would nev-er know. Wracked by malaria, thin,exhausted, he could barely remainupright for the entirety of his meals,and yet, in the field, he moved with

Illustration of birds of paradise from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon,1897 © PoodlesRock/CORBIS

the same alacrity as he had duringhis childhood days collecting inWales: powered not by physicalstrength but by a momentum ofmind, of wonder and joy, movementdriven by movement itself, by thesun and heat and cold on his neck,the astonishment of the naturalworld unfolding. From life at sea, hehad acquired the habit of rising ear-ly; from the rivers and countlessportages, the conviction that onedoes not own what one cannot carry.In moments of reverie, he imaginedhis body light of all but the clotheson his back and the exquisite cata-logue of his mind. He was thirty-four. To his mother he wrote, I amrunning out of time.

Bug collector, species man. It wasfitting perhaps that the first fatefulcommunication from Darwin cameas a simple request for specimens ofMalay domestic fowl. When that let-ter arrived, addressed from DownHouse, he could not believe it wasreal. Surely, he thought, it was apractical joke, played on him by afriend! It was only two years beforethe day that would inextricably linkhis name to Darwin, and yet it wasbeyond his wildest daydreams tothink of the great man as a corre-spondent. He had been seventeenwhen he read The Voyage of the Bea-gle, and for his entire life, his impres-sion of Darwin would remain that ofa young boy for a hero. He had readall his works on barnacles.

He sent both a domesticated duckand a wild type from which the do-mesticated breed derived. And in afit of boldness, he included musingson a question that had begun to oc-cupy him; namely, the appearance ofvariations among species, aboutwhich he had written a single forayinto theory, an essay penned onSarawak, published in the Annals,and generally ignored. When at last,in Macassar, after months in the jun-gle, he received Darwin's reply, heopened it on the docks.

His hand trembled as he read,over and over again:

I can plainly see that we havethought much alike & to a certain ex-tent have come to similar conclusions.

Tears sprang to his eyes. Again heread it, then folded it away and began

STORY 79

to walk back to the shore, stoppingten yards later to check his pocketand assure himself it was there.Ican plainly see that we have thought

much alike & to a certain extent havecome to similar conclusions. Did he rec-ognize that the letter contained notonly praise but a veiled intimidation?This summer will make the 20th year sinceIopened my first notebook, on the ques-tion how & in what way do species & va-rieties differ from each other, Darwin hadwritten. I am now preparing my work forpublication. If it was a warning, it wasnot one Wallace would heed. Like aboy infatuated, he felt his love could dono wrong.

And so, in Macassar, inspired, hewrote. On the natural history of theArus, the Habits and Transforma-tion of a species of Ornithoptera.From rotting jackfruits, he scrapedbeetles. He reviewed his notes onbirds of paradise. Near the ruggedterritory of the Bugis, he watchedrivers disappear into the earth.Brown snakes tangled in his net ashe ruffled it through the leaves. Itwas summer. He sweated, bent hisspectacles so they wouldn't slip fromhis nose.

Bug collector, species man. Andyet now, something greater had be-gun to reveal itself to him. If as a boyhe had sworn off theory, now, in thepatterns of the insects that hepushed pin by pin into his boxes, hesaw the effects of a grander principleat work, though what it was he didnot know. He felt as he did when,walking through the jungle, hesensed the presence of another crea-ture following in the shadows. Apresence that vanished when helooked. At night he began to dreamof a great generating machine, anengine, through which old speciespassed and new ones emerged.

Steadily he was making his waythrough the Archipelago, each hourticking toward the night the angelwould meet him on Ternate. Timor,Banda, Ambon. The islands amongwhich he found himself in the earlymonths of the year of his discoverywere lush and forbidding, wracked byearthquakes, or, as he wrote: tor-tured. By now he was distracted bythe immensity of his collections,mocked by their size and his inability

80 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

to explain how such diversity hadcome to be:

Butterflies-620 species.Moths-2000 species.Beetles-3700 species.Bees and Wasps-7S0 species.Flies-660 species.Bugs and Cicadas-SOO species.Locusts-I 60 species.Dragonflies-II 0 species.

On the island of Gilolo, theforests bloomed with scarlet Ixora. Inan abandoned Portuguese fort, hemet a Dutch corporal and quartet oflistless Malay soldiers, with krisesrattling as they rose from the stones.From a lean-to near the shore, hewandered into grass that waved highabove his head. He watched mound-builders bury their eggs on the shore,noted mimicry among orioles andhoneysuckers, shot a ground thrushwith shoulders of azure. Of theblooms of Ixora, he wrote that Godmust hold a particular affection forthe bees. His malaria returned (thisfever, he wrote, this ague, familiarfriend). Sick and miserable, he crossedthe short channel to' the island ofTernate, with its slumbering cone,where he sought to rest. Langsats andmangosteens ringed the town, In theruins of the palace of the sultan, hewaited for his fever to break.

If his fame would become inextri-cable from Ternate, he knew it was buta coincidence, for it was in Sao Gabrielon the Rio Negro that he heard theribeirinhos speak of shape-shifters; onKalimantan, in the mildewed libraryof the White Rajah that he read Ovid;and on Gilolo, there in the high grass,fever massing as a storm, that hethought of Malthus and of death, andonce he thought of death, he could notescape her. He saw the trails limnedwith the carapaces of beetles, saw thestrangling figs, saw rot, fragments ofbone, shores of shattered coral, dryingwrack, waves curling sea crabs, rollingfish onto the sand. The solution-thatit was death that eliminates the weak-est, selects varieties, and thus shapesthe forms fittest for survival-was sosimple and so beautiful that the mo-ment he uncovered it, he could notbelieve that he, or any man, had everthought anything else. He had been

moving toward this moment. But itwas on Ternate that the answer came,possessedhim, sliding into him like thebolt on a gun, and he rose feverish fromhis bed, carrying the vision before him(and how he could feel it, that beauti-ful idea in all its completion, thatwarmth in the recesses of his eyes),carefully, delicately, as if an insect hedid not wish to crush, and he sat and hebegan to write:

The life of wild animals is arJ" struggle for existence .. ,

~ he whole field appeared in a singlemoment to Apelles, wrote Ficino, inanother time and another place, andaroused in him the desire to paint. Andso, pen gripped against his tremors,the bug collector worked, wrapped inblankets when struck by chill, thenstripped bare against the heat insidehim. Epiphany or fever, he later didnot know. The night would be ablur, the sweat running in rivuletsdown his chest, his eyes burningwith his own salt, his penis limp anddamp on the cold slats of the rattanchair. He was not a religious man; hehad heard too many creation mythsto privilege only one. And yet hecouldn't help think of the momentas anything but a visit by an angel,delivering inspiration from a worldbeyond his own. He was but a scribe.When he awoke the following morn-ing and found the essay complete,delivered to him by that other, it didnot occur to him to send it to any-one but Darwin.

He mailed the essay on March 9,1858, in a Dutch schooner bound forJava. His letter accompanying it wasshort, his words deferential. The es-say was titled "On the Tendency ofVarieties to Depart from the OriginalType," and sought to explain the ex-traordinary modifications of form, in-stincts, and habits of the natural world.With luck the letter would be in Dar-win's hands in ten weeks, mid-May.And Darwin would respond directly, ashe had up until that day, his reply ar-riving in Ternate as early as July,

Letter steaming toward London, hefelt a great emptiness. He planned toreturn to the forest, but in the daysthat followed, he haunted the shore,watched the horizon in expectation, asif somehow the idea could vault seas.

When he could bear the wait nolonger, he set sail in the Hester Hele-na, for New Guinea, hoping that therhythm of collection would calm therunning of his mind.

He landed at Dorey, on the north-ern coast. The island was vast andmist-shrouded. He had wished to es-cape the unbearable joy of his discov-ery, fleeing as one might flee a desirefrom which there is no deliverance.But everywhere he looked he saw thestruggle for existence. He could nothappen upon an insect without won-dering how every trait had saved itfrom nature's fire. Even the most de-lightful forms and colors were shadedby the specter of death. This daily andhourly struggle, he wrote in his jour-nals. And again: this incessant warfare.

In the darkness of the Papuan forest,he found deerflies with horns beneaththeir eyes. In the jungles he cameacross poachers of the prince of Tidore.He hunted tree kangaroos and the elu-sive cuscus. Wrapped in his reverie,he wandered without aim. He knewhe was incautious, setting off into un-familiar forests, unaware of the trailhe followed and how he would return.But he heeded neither his good sensenor the imploring of his men. At nightthey pulled snakes from the rafters.Fever lit through the crew. Dysenterytook away his boy [umaat, whom theydraped in white and buried in the sand.

In his second month, he fell and cuthis ankle. The wound ulcerated. For amonth he couldn't leave his shelter. Inhis best moments he watched butter-flies settle on the windowsill. Hestrained his eyes to identify them, butthey were too far away to see. He imag-ined them new species, escaping, per-haps never to be caught again. In hisworst moments, he clawed his leg inpain and screamed.

His only consolation was thethought of his letter, which by nowhad surely reached London, had beenoffloaded from the steamship and wasmaking its way toward Down House.He could see it, moving steadilythrough the teeming, fetid streets ofthat city, through the swarms of men,the droves marching past the post-man who carried it, oblivious to thegrace his bag contained. He imag-ined Darwin receiving it, alone. Andalone, reading.

Boats passed in the distance: littlepraus and great Dutch schooners, war-ships bristling with guns. It was Augustby the time another ship anchored offDorey, to return him to Ternate.When he arrived, he would have leaptto shore but for his ankle. Yes, said theharbormaster, looking up behind glass-es empty of their lenses, there werepackages awaiting him. But nothingfrom Darwin.

If his ankle still pained him, he nolonger wrote of it. He was a man im-mune to solitude, and yet now he feltalone as he never had before. In hismind, his beautiful idea paced, as acaged tiger paces. To his housekeep-ers, a pair of Malay sisters, old girls withfaces like walnuts, he confessed theagony of waiting, led them through hiscollections, speaking of Natural Se-lection in a mixture of Portuguese andBahasa Malay. They were good Ma-hometans, he wrote, and when heasked What made this plume, this ar-mour? What made this lizard's skin? theyanswered, God is great, to which hecould agree, and God is merciful, whichhe would not countenance. Each morn-ing, he rose early and went to the dock,

to see if a ship had anchored

A during the night.

ugust passed.These tortured islands. What had

happened? By now, the response fromDarwin should have arrived. Each dayhis worry deepened. His work stalled.Absentminded, he cut his palm pry-ing mussels. The wind opened his un-latched shutters and spirited away hisbutterflies, his Hestias, his blues. Twicehe upended the preserving arrack, un-til he was forced to buy from Chinesetraders, who whispered how all Eng-lishmen were drunks. There were, ofcourse, reasons for a letter to be lost,countless disasters to befall a ship. Butif so, he must act, and quickly. He couldnot risk waiting, lest the angel visitsomeone else. How many months hadpassed? He must write again.

And yet ... And yet, a faint voiceurged restraint. For if the letter had ar-rived? Crouching by the shore, hewatched fishermen push kora-kora outto sea. He had heard of no shipwreck,no pirates. And since July, he had re-ceived responses to other letters he senton that very same March day. Perhaps

STORY 81

the great man was ill or otherwise in-disposed. If so, he must wait. He mustnot seem impatient, lest Darwin thinkhim an overeager colleague and sus-pend correspondence out of fear of theresponsibilities it might entail. Withthe housekeepers of Ternate, he toldhimself, the secret was forever safe.

There was another possibility, ofcourse, which he began to fear morewith each passing day. It was not thathis letter had been lost but that it hadbeen received. And if so, then onlyan idea so shameful or so beautifulcould have driven their correspon-dence to a halt. By September, heknew something was terribly wrong.He must have written lines of such of-fense or ignorance as to leave the greatman no choice but to sever contact. Hehad not kept a copy of his letter or theessay. As he tried to recall his words,they seemed to change, metamorphose,until the letter took a form so vile thathe wished it lost beneath the seas.

Soon he was certain. Darwin, hav-ing read his letter of introduction, andfinding it agreeable, had turned to theaccompanying essay,surprised perhapsthat he had been sent a draft ratherthan a published piece, and yet gra-ciously granting that his correspon-dent (and brieflyhe had to scan the let-ter to remember the species man'sname) was at the ends of the earthand thus without access to the journalsof the grand societies. He began toread, only to find the ravings of a manin the fit of a fever. Bombastic, pre-posterous speculation, its logic victimto its author's ignorance: so incom-plete, so rushed, so absurd as to de-stroy all previous consideration thathe had for this younger man who haddared initiate a correspondence whenhe, Darwin, had written only request-ing ducks.

Yes: Darwin had been generous toconsider the thoughts of such an in-genue. But there were limits to gen-erosity. Who was this young managain? Must he ask Lyell? Could heremember him, haunting the lecturehalls, in the same suit day after day,smelling vaguely of a boardinghouse,never wearing a school tie? Onecannot escape one's station. Hadn'tDarwin written of a native, fromTierra del Fuego, raised in London,who had abandoned his English

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manners and returned to the bar-barism of his race? I could not havebelieved how wide was the differencebetween savage and civilized man: it isgreater than between a wild and do-mesticated animal. This from TheVoyage of the Beagle, which the bugcollector had once loved so. It was,he realized, only a matter of timebefore Darwin and the Great Men ofthe academies would see him forwhat he was: the son of a bankruptfather, scavenger for hire, gracelessin the parlor, nothing but a manwith a net and the presumption tothink he could be one of them.

Bugcollector, speciesman. And yet,beneath these fears, the dim embersof his euphoria persisted, bursting forthat times to flame. Since his night offever, the implications of his discoveryhad only grown. No longer was it sim-ply the vastness of life that astoundedhim. Now he looked upon the worldand what he saw was not life but lifechanging, accumulating flight andspeed and color as nature culled theweakest, the slowest, the lesser-taloned:a force that had come rumbling to-ward this moment and would rumbleon, destroying its infinity of forms andbringing forth that many more.

His thumbs turned violet from theskins of mangosteens, and his journalsturned violet from his thumbs. He nolonger washed. Through the marketsofTernate he wandered, restless,racingeach morning to check the mails. Didhe wonder what he must look like toother men?A creature possessed,a mindcargoed with a dream so beautiful thatit would destroy them all, Genesis andAristotle and Archbishop Ussher. No,he had not erred. He could doubt it nomore than he could doubt every singlebeetle, every bird, that he had collect-ed on his journeys.

This was why Darwin could notrespond. They were waiting for thissolution, the good men of the Lin-naean Society and the Royal Acade-my, and now this letter had come,postmarked from a village none hadever heard of, in the trembling handof a young man half their age. I havebrought fire to their halls, he wrote onpages stiff with arrack spilled, andthen obliterated the words. Themonths that had passed-the excru-ciating days of heat and waiting, the

expectant staring at the horizon forthe mail ship to appear, the dreams,the incessant repeating dreams ofopening a letter again and again-this was the time that it was takingto burn, for the fire sent into theirhalls to burst into a conflagration,which would not stop until worldswere destroyed, not only Scriptureand all old concepts of the speciesbut (and this he knew, for he knewthe beauty of the search) the entirepurpose of Darwin himself.

If so, then he was waiting for thefire to find its tinder, for the GreatMen to stand before. the majesty ofhis discovery, to marvel. To marvel,and then, slowly, lifting themselvesand staring out across their halls, togather together and take it for theirown. They knew (as did he) that suchmajesty did not befit a bug collectorwho had done his learning at the Me-chanics Institute. He now understoodwhy earlier Darwin had warned him,and so kindly. It was never his; it washis heresy to have ever thought so.

Then let it burn, he thought, stop-ping on the coralline shore, his pantlegs rolled up, the breakers stirringover his ankles. Let it burn and letthe ashes settle. Its time had come.As Copernicus tore us from the uni-verse's core, so let them be the onesto bear man these new tidings. Letthem destroy Scripture and let thembuild from it a new world, thisGospel of deerflies and tree kanga-roos. He would go back to the jungle.Let them have their fame; he cared

only for wonder, and to

I wonder he would return.

n September, with still no reply,he left for Gilolo. By then the letterfrom Down House was already at sea,somewhere in the Indian Ocean, itswords complimentary if careful, hint-ing nothing at the devastation theyoung collector had caused, thechanges he had set in motion. But hecould not know this, that autumn, inthe forests of Gilolo, where he col-lected an unusual variety oflory, pre-viously unknown to him, ornament-ed in red and blue and green, andthen, a few days later, a day-flyingmoth, Coctyia, a specimen that wasnot only very beautiful but extraor-dinarily rare. _