The Jungle Books

Over the next few months he fed his “orphan baby” from a bottle and with biscuits soaked in water. He made a little cradle for her and a pillow from an old stocking, gave her baths, rubbed her dry, and even found a monkey playmate for her. In short, he did everything for her a human parent—or, given the expectations of the time, a human mother—would have done. (Perhaps with the exception of the monkey playmate.) 

“There never was such a baby as my baby,” Wallace boasted in a letter to his sister Fanny. On one occasion, the little ape got hold of Wallace’s beard and whiskers, holding onto them with all her might, “cruelly tight,” as he complained.  

Wallace’s sweet bonding experience with his orphan orang, his “dear little duck of a darling,” did not keep him from killing more members of her species. He dispatched 16 in all, by his own count. But his baby he pampered. He even made plans to take her back home with him. Sometimes, the little orang appeared to make efforts to learn to walk:  

Sadly, despite all that he did, Wallace’s little daughter of the woods did not survive. Rice water turned out to be a poor substitute for milk. Try as he might, Wallace, hairy whiskers and all, could not replace the long-haired “mad woman” he had shot—her real mother. 

In this deeply absorbing book, James T. Costa seeks to establish Alfred Russel Wallace as the fully vested co-creator of what he feels we should once again call the “Darwin-Wallace Theory” of evolution by natural selection. That Wallace had a part in the history of evolutionary theory is, of course, well known. While he was collecting in Malaysia, the basic facts of natural selection occurred to him with the kind of beautiful clarity most of us experience only in dreams (and Wallace was indeed suffering from malaria at the time). He sent his account to Charles Darwin, catapulting the more senior naturalist into a period of frenzied writing, at the end of which stood the magnificent achievement of The Origin of Species (1859), a massive tome Darwin persisted in calling an “abstract” only. 

The book’s appearance was heralded, the year before, by a mix of papers presented to the Linnean Society into which Darwin’s colleagues had cleverly incorporated Wallace’s letter—a smart move that saved Darwin from looking like a jerk in the eyes of posterity but also established him as the primary agent in the evolution business. For, as Andrew Berry points out in his lucid introduction to this study, even if you’re a Victorian gentleman, you want to be first. Since he was still in Southeast Asia, Wallace didn’t even know about the Linnean Society presentation, which, tragically, happened on the very same day that Darwin’s infant son Charles was buried. In later years, as Darwin reaped both the scorn and then, increasingly, the admiration of the rest of the world, Wallace watched from the sidelines, apparently without rancor. His own big book on species he never wrote.

But we have his field notes from those years, and we also have Professor Costa, editor of an annotated edition of Wallace’s “Species Notebook” and the best possible guide to Wallace’s meandering mind. Wallace’s notebook, now sitting on a shelf at the Linnean Society in London, traveled some 14,000 miles across Southeast Asia in the pockets of its author. Costa evokes it with poetic fervor, asking us to imagine wafting from its marbled boards and well-worn pages the lingering scent of “orangutan, durian, arrack, the spice islands, sago cakes, gunpowder, camphor, the spray of the Coral Sea.” For a moment, at least, Wallace’s poor little orphan orang and her jungle world come alive again, if only in our imagination. 

Drawing extensively on that fragrant volume, Costa sets out to prove that Wallace and Darwin followed analogous paths as they painstakingly assembled evidence in favor of natural selection. As he shows, the convergence of their ideas manifested itself even in the words they chose to express those ideas. Some fascinating parallels do emerge, even beyond the obvious resemblances in their 1858 papers, which Costa, every bit as indefatigable as the busy Wallace, subjects to minute scrutiny.  

I, for one, will never read Darwin’s famous definition of natural selection as a kind of machine scrutinizing, rejecting, and preserving, “silently and insensibly working,” without hearing, somewhere in the background, Wallace’s own selection machine churning away, a steam engine checked by a “centrifugal governor,” whose task it is to correct all irregularities even before they become evident. And I know, too, that I won’t be able to admire, as I have done many times before, the famous ending of Origin of Species, where natural selection is represented as one of the immutable laws of nature that make the planets spin, without remembering that Wallace, four years earlier, had already offered such a comparison: 

Charles Darwin began traveling down the path towards evolutionary theory somewhat earlier than Alfred Russel Wallace, a fact that his generous colleague always acknowledged. And curiously, Darwin had had his own ape epiphany 20 years before Wallace, in the zoo at Regent’s Park, where he encountered a young, newly acquired orang named Jenny. Darwin was entranced and came back several times. Orang Jenny had entered Darwin’s life at a particularly opportune time: He had just fully embraced the idea of a common origin of all living things—and there Jenny was, in her cage, pouting and crying like a human child. In his notebook, Darwin charged those who didn’t believe him to go and watch Jenny in action and then still insist on the “proud preeminence” of humans. 

Queen Victoria went, and shrank back in horror. But where the queen beheld something “disagreeably human” in Jenny’s countenance, Darwin found cause for liberating irony: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.” (Note that Darwin’s orang had a name, while Wallace’s did not; at least, he never mentions one.) 

Fascinatingly, Costa, in comparing Wallace’s observations with Darwin’s, also discovers the root of their later disagreements. Writing about birds’ nests, for example, Wallace takes issue with the concept of instinct in helping us separate humans from animals. Birds are said to construct their nests, year after year, spring after spring, according to the same plan, while humans, exercising their reason, vary the style of the homes they build. 

Not true! snorts Wallace, who had seen too many different nests to endorse such nonsense. If Darwin thought that instinct ruled both human and nonhuman animals, and that variations in the appearance of bird’s nests were due to variations in the expression of inherited traits, Wallace had a more uplifting take on the situation. His view allowed for the role of learning and experience in acts normally thought to be instinctive: Birds, just like humans, will change their behavior over time in response to circumstances and as a result of information-sharing.  

This makes sense. Today we know (to use a different example) that birds will modify their vocalizations in response to their environments, with some of them even adopting the songs of alien species. But Wallace, when he reached the end of his notebook, as if daunted by his own daring, backtracked again and clarified that, in his view, humans displayed no instinctive behavior at all: “What are very commonly called instincts in man”—such as the suckling of newborns—“are only habits.” If Wallace had started out by implying that humans and animals were part of an organic continuum, he ended by asserting that they were, after all, different.  

The ghost of that little orang from Borneo, helplessly resistant to her adoptive father’s efforts to make her human—and thus, perchance, presentable to friends back in England—still casts her shadow over Wallace’s theorizing. Whining, gasping, screaming, she extends her arms, searching for her mother’s fur, and finds nothing to hold onto but a man’s scraggly whiskers.

Christoph Irmscher, provost professor of English at Indiana University, is the author, most recently, of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.