By means of his explorations in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and one or two visits to North Wales, Darwin’s experimental knowledge of geology and allied sciences was considerably increased.  In his zeal for collecting beetles he employed a labourer to “scrape the moss off old trees in winter, and place it in a bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds were brought from the fens, and thus ... got some very rare species.”

During the summer vacation of 1831, at the personal request of Henslow, he accompanied Professor Sedgwick on a geological tour in North Wales.  In order, no doubt, to give him some independent experience, Sedgwick sent Darwin on a line parallel with his own, telling him to bring back specimens of the rocks and to mark the stratification on a map.  In later years Darwin was amazed to find how much both of them had failed to observe, “yet these phenomena were so conspicuous that ... a house burnt down by fire could not tell its story more plainly than did the valley of Cwm Idwal.”

This tour was the introduction to a momentous change in his life.  On returning to Shrewsbury he found a letter awaiting him which contained the offer of a voyage in H.M.S. Beagle.  But owing to several objections raised by Dr. Darwin, he wrote and declined the offer; and if it had not been for the immediate intervention of his uncle, Mr. Josiah Wedgwood (to whose house he went the following day to begin the shooting season), who took quite a different view of the proposition, the “Journal of Researches during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle,” by Charles Darwin, would never have been written.

At length, however, after much preparation and many delays, the Beagle sailed from Plymouth on December 27th, 1831, and five years elapsed before Darwin set foot again on English soil.  The period, therefore, in Darwin’s life which we find covered by his term at Edinburgh and Cambridge, until at the age of 22 he found himself suddenly launched on an entirely new experience full of adventure and fresh association, was spent by Wallace in a somewhat similar manner in so far as his outward objective in life was more or less distinct from the pursuits which gradually dawned upon his horizon, though they were followed as a “thing apart” and not as an ultimate end.

With Wallace’s removal into Bedfordshire an entirely new life opened up before him.  His health, never very good, rapidly improved; both brain and eye were trained to practical observations which proved eminently valuable.  His descriptions of the people with whom he came in contact during these years of country life reveal the quiet toleration of the faults and foibles of others, not devoid of the keen sense of humour and justice which characterised his lifelong attitude towards his fellow-men.