Summary

Alfred Russel Wallace stands on the deck of a burning ship as the crew races to get the lifeboats provisioned and lowered. Wallace knows that his last four years of work will be lost, as the fire is sure to engulf his many field notebooks along with the specimens and animals he painstakingly collected on his long expedition in the Amazon as a naturalist. Born in Wales in 1823, Wallace soon became swept up "in the midst of a great back-to-nature movement" which characterized much of Victorian culture. Natural history collecting was a popular form of recreation, but Wallace was determined to pursue biology professionally, keen to "unlock the greatest scientific mysteries of the day" on the formation and extinction of species. This is how Wallace came, in 1848, to begin his naturalist expedition in the Amazon, the fruits of which were destined to be...