Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  At the second sitting the sliding doors, usually kept shut, were opened, and Dr Wallace was allowed to sit just beyond them in the back room, from which the confederates, if such there were, would have to be introduced. So far so good. But when I asked permission to sit there with Dr W. the permission was denied. The moment the seance began a white-robed spirit came out, and did an unusual thing, namely, she drew Dr Wallace out of his seat, and into the front room, and spreading her drapery out so as to conceal the side of the doorway, and part of the cabinet, kept him there some little time. No one could see this manoeuvre without the suspicion being aroused that it was intended to conceal the passage of one or more confederates from the back room over the doorway and under the cabinet curtain, which hung loosely along side of the doorpost. At the end of the seance the same performance was repeated with Dr Wallace, who between while had been allowed to sit quietly in his place. The concealment of the side of the doorway was less perfect this time, and a lady who was one of the sitters tells me that whilst Wallace was up she distinctly saw the doorpost eclipsed from view by the passage of the curtain, or some other dark body over it. During this sitting a female form emerged from the cabinet with her white drapery caught above her knees. Her legs from the knees down were clad in black trowsers, like those in which a male spirit had the instant before appeared, and in which another male spirit appeared the instant after.

  These observations, and other implausible events at a third seance, convinced James that ‘whether mediumship was or was not an element of Mrs Ross’s performance, roguery certainly was’: ‘good carpentry can make a secret door in any wall’.23

  James’s detailed comments provide a fresh perspective on Wallace’s involvement; his reputation as a scientist, and his apparent readiness to believe in the phenomena, could only too easily be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. James himself was deeply interested in the whole range of mediumship, but knew a palpable fraud when he saw one; and his account is entirely consistent with the Ross exposure at the end of January. Wallace, however, sprang to Mrs Ross’s defence, writing to the Banner of Light from Washington. He ignored the black ‘trowsers’, or the full set of child spooks discovered in the cabinet, and relied on his own memory of the wall that he himself had inspected: ‘The wall in question is papered down to the mopboard eight inches above the carpet, and on the opposite side it is smoothly plastered down to a four-inch board. I ask Professor James to produce anywhere a secret door in such a wall…’ He even received a message about the Ross scandal at a Washington seance supporting his view. He was totally unshakeable in his beliefs, and totally lacking in objectivity: by this stage of his involvement he was no longer really interested in establishing the truth, or otherwise, of particular phenomena, but was far more intent on the philosophy and ethics promoted by spiritualism, and on the growing certainty in his mind of reunion after death. At a meeting of the Psychic Society he debated with Coues the relative merits of theosophy and spiritualism (Coues was a devotee of Madame Blavatsky): ‘I claimed for our spiritualism a higher position, good discussion – till 12 o’clock. Judge Willard talked stuff – Mrs Hibbert and I showed him up!’ He settled down to experience everything the Washington mediums could provide: solid objects passed through curtains, photographs, prophecies, and messages from his brother William.

  But the main purpose of his visit was not being fulfilled. Every quarter, he had to provide a certificate that he was still alive, in order to obtain his pension, and he would go and call on the British Ambassador to obtain the necessary signature, to send home. ‘I find I have quite forgotten to write to Mr Stanford, but I shall do so,’ he confessed – there might be royalties owing to him. Washington was delightful, and the American climate seemed to suit him, but the lecture engagements, unlike the spirits, failed to materialise: ‘Not having had one lecture here in three months I must cut,’ he wrote to Annie.24 He had been making enquiries about lectures for next season; an experienced friend told him that the failure was all owing to Williams’s bad management, ‘and the Rev. J.G.W.’s [Wood’s] having been such a stick at the lecturing business’. He was off to Cincinnati, then to Iowa and Kansas, and only perhaps, after that, to California – the journey would cost as much as the passage from England to America and back. If he had no lectures to sustain him on the way there, he would ask John to meet him in the Rockies. Meanwhile, he could report on a visit to the President – ‘a private visit but a very commonplace one. He talked about California its wines and raisins chiefly’ – and the boxes of plants he had sent off – a box to Miss Jekyll full of spring plants, and yellow dog’s-tooth violets and orchids for his father-in-law: he was combing the local woods for treasures.

  He left Washington on 6 April, travelling south-west through the Appalachians. In spite of his tight budget, he tried to see as much of the natural beauty and wonders of the country as he could. He stopped in the Shenandoah valley to see the amazing Luray caves – ‘every form of stalactite and stalagmite it is possible to conceive’; he stayed a night in Clifton Forge in the Allegheny mountains, got on the wrong train the next morning, and spent a day of enforced leisure walking – ‘fine mountain scenery range upon range like Wales but not so jagged & more wooded’; then on into the coal region of West Virginia, and the Kanawha valley, where he stayed with William Edwards – Edwards of the Amazon – whom he had not seen for forty years, when he and Bates quizzed him in London before their journey to Pará. He spent four nights with the Edwards family, inspecting Edwards’s collection of American butterflies, and cross-questioning him about the economy: he liked what he saw of the miners’ cottages – neat, nicely painted, with well-cultivated gardens; and the Irish, he learned, did very well, industrious, intelligent, enterprising. As workmen they were better than the Welsh and equal to the Germans. All these facts were grist to his land-nationalisation mill.

  Cincinnati was the next destination. Here he could follow in the steps of Lyell, inspecting the early Indian burial mounds in the Ohio valley. As always, he found a warm welcome from people who shared his interests: scientists, naturalists, spiritualists, chess enthusiasts. He recorded lots of details about rattlesnakes – to his great disappointment, he never saw one in the wild. He gave two lectures, cleared $50 at the first, but only $35 at the university, after paying $15 for a lantern and operator. On to Indiana University at Bloomington: Dr Branner, who had worked in Brazil for several years, and knew Pará and Manaos, was his host; another lecture; few flowers to be seen, but fine red maples; notes on woodpeckers’ coloration, ‘white back red head very conspicuous – powerful birds & require no concealment from prey’. Parlour car to St Louis. All wood fences, no hedges: over the river Mississippi, then sleeping car to Kansas City, and up the Missouri valley to Sioux City. Three lectures there, and accommodation with a family; trips to a pork-curing establishment, a linseed-oil and cake factory, and botanising excursions up the Great Sioux river valley; wonderful plants, Trillium nivale, Aquilegia canadensis, Viola sagittata – another consignment for Miss Jekyll. Back to Kansas City, and west to Lawrence, for a lecture, and on to Manhattan, where he talked on Darwinism. He was halfway to California, and wrote to John to say that he was definitely coming; and to his great relief he was also able to send off a cheque for $275 to the New England Trust company. He also had an invitation to stay with the Phillips in Salina, and letters about one or two possible future engagements. He bought a copy of Coulter’s Flora of the Rocky Mountains, and decided to enjoy himself: he saw a horned toad, smaller than the California species he had kept at the Dell, and had another highly successful botanising excursion. After a week in Salina, he headed at last for California, something he had been contemplating for thirty years. He stopped at Denver for a few hours, where he met James Baker, the Principal of East Denver High School, and was introduced by him to one of the teachers, Alice Eastwood. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada went by, as he noted a prairie dog, a herd of small antelope like long-legged rabbits, sandstone rocks denuded int
o strange pinnacles, sage brush, and then, after Reno, a new climate. He embarked on the ferry at Oakland, on 23 May 1887, to be reunited with his brother John.

  John had booked rooms in a ‘grand hotel’, the Baldwin – in fact, two bedrooms, and a sitting room, so that his brother could receive visitors, and conduct interviews. ‘John looks older than I remember him, and rather scruffy!’ he reported to his wife. He had put on his winter flannels again, after an attack of lumbago from sitting so long in the train.25 Wallace was well looked after. He gave two lectures on Darwinism, which were fully attended; and he made the most of an impressive set of introductions and contacts, including a trip to the redwoods in the company of his friend Dr Gibbons and John Muir, the great conservationist. He took breakfast with Adolph Sutro, and visited Palo Alto as the guest of Senator Leland Stanford and his wife, whom he had met in Washington. (The Stanfords were spiritualists; like Wallace, they had lost a much loved son.) After a week in San Francisco, he went to stay at John’s home in Stockton, where he could catch up with the rest of the family: John’s wife Mary, and their children William (married now with two sons), May and Arthur. He was still lecturing – John had arranged a further two smaller-scale engagements at Stockton, and there was a return visit to San Francisco on Sunday, 5 June, for a spiritualist lecture. There were a thousand people at the Metropolitan Theatre, to hear him speak on the subject ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’

  The certainty of life after death was Wallace’s crucial complement to his exposition of Darwinism; he believed that Darwinism without a spiritual dimension, at least in the interpretation of many of its exponents, presented an incomplete and inadequate picture of human life. In Cincinnati, he recorded of one of his meetings: ‘Dr Myers became a sceptic through Darwinism & is recovering belief through Spm [spiritualism].’ The answer to the question ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ was not only, Wallace believed, the question of questions: its answer, in the negative or the affirmative, was calculated to determine the future welfare or unhappiness of mankind:

  If all men, without exception, come to believe that there is no life beyond this life – if children are all taught that the only happiness they can ever reach is certainly limited to their lives upon this earth, – then, it seems to me, the condition of man would be altogether hopeless, because there would cease to be any adequate motive for justice, for truth, for unselfishness, and no sufficient reason could be given to the poor man, to the bad man, or to the selfish man, why he should not systematically seek his own personal welfare at the cost of others.

  To leave the matter to the teaching of contemporary science would be disastrous; doubly so, because, firstly, science taught that the world would eventually come to an end, and that the human race was doomed to destruction, and secondly, because the present hereditary influences of religious belief would gradually be eroded. The prospect was terrible: might alone would constitute right, and ‘the unbridled passions of the strongest and most selfish men would dominate the world’. Happily, this hell-upon-earth would never occur, because it was founded on a falsehood. There were causes now at work to forbid ‘the further spread of disbelief in man’s spiritual nature’ – and Wallace proceeded to set out the nature of those causes and influences, and even to explain why scientific seekers after truth were so often the advocates of disbelief, for the next hour and a half.26 The lecture was widely reported in the San Francisco papers, and published as a pamphlet in San Francisco, Boston and Manchester, England.

  His duty done, Wallace could relax, and after one more remarkable seance – ‘Father and William sent message to Violet to sit – & they will communicate through her’ – he headed for Yosemite with John and his niece May. There he was among the grand processes of nature, and the noble trees. He loved it all – the falls, perhaps the most beautiful in the world, the pines and firs, the flowers (he collected a great many). He went on alone to the Calaveras grove of sequoias. Of all the natural wonders he saw in America, nothing impressed him so much as these glorious trees: just as he had found at Niagara, ‘their majesty grows upon one by living among them’. He spent three days, examining and measuring them, marvelling at their clean, straight stems and the brilliant orange-brown tint and silky or plush-like glossy surface characteristic of their beautiful bark. If only he could have had the management of Epping Forest … The big trees were like an epiphany to him, the equivalent of the jaguar in the Venezuelan forest or the birds of paradise in Waigiou. He had seen his vision, and could go home.

  He returned satisfied to Stockton. There was another seance, a further visit to Senator Stanford, and a trip to Santa Cruz to marvel once more at the ‘grand forest group’ of redwoods. The majestic redwood and the giant sequoia were his two great wonders of the Western world, and he made them the centrepiece of a powerful plea for conservation:

  Neither the thundering waters of Niagara, nor the sublime precipices and cascades of Yosemite, nor the vast expanse of the prairies, nor the exquisite delight of the alpine flora of the Rocky Mountains – none of these seem to me so unique in their grandeur, so impressive in their display of the organic forces of nature, as the two magnificent ‘big trees’ of California. Unfortunately these alone are within the power of man totally to destroy, as they have been already partially destroyed. Let us hope that the progress of true education will so develop the love and admiration of nature that the possession of these altogether unequalled trees will be looked upon as a trust for all future generations, and that care will be taken, before it is too late, to preserve not only one or two small patches, but some more extensive tracts of forest, in which they may continue to flourish, in their fullest perfection and beauty, for thousands of years to come, as they have flourished in the past, in all probability for millions of years and over a far wider area.27

  Wallace may have recalled his day in the redwoods with John Muir, who would write:

  Any fool can destroy trees … It took more than 3,000 years to make some of the trees in these western woods … Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time – and long before that – God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, levelling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that.

  ‘I have wandered for days in the glorious pine forests where grow the majestic sequoias,’ he wrote to Meldola. ‘Amid all the exaggerations of guidebooks & popular writers, they remain one of the living wonders of the world, perhaps more than anything else to a lover of nature, worth a journey across America to see.’28

  Wallace’s last days in California were made uncomfortable by illness: a swollen upper lip had to be lanced, and kept him in the house for a week. He caught up on his correspondence. There was another certificate to be sent off so that Annie could collect his pension, and one or two requests for lectures back in England to be answered. His health, and the lack of lucrative engagements in America, helped him make up his mind; and he found the drought, the heat and the dust of California as wearing as the long Eastern winters and springs, ‘unendurable in their severity and changeability’. His final conclusion was: ‘England with all thy faults I love thee still.’29 But first he was determined to explore the Rockies properly. He had hoped that his father-in-law would come out and botanise with him; all the same, he had three weeks before he was due to speak at the Michigan Agricultural College in Chicago. He said his farewells, gave May a writing case and an amber brooch, and set off for his first stop, in the Sierra Nevada.

  For this short period, Wallace reverted to field naturalist, but this time he was collecting exclusively botanical specimens. He noted the occasional animal or insect – a skunk, a parnassus butterfly – but his quarry consisted largely of flowers and mosses. The Sierra Nevada was rich in Penstemons, and he also found Gentiana calycosa, which he sent back to Surrey. He marvelled at the large-scale landscape, and the evidence of the ‘powers of fire, water, & ice, all manifested together & bea
utifully illustrating their respective shares in modelling the earth’s surface’; but his eyes were more occupied in scanning the plant life. He travelled east, first to Colorado Springs, from where he visited the Garden of the Gods and the Rainbow Falls, and then north to Denver. He then spent a week in the area around Gray’s Peak, walking and collecting. His companion was Alice Eastwood, whom he had met on his way west. This remarkable woman, then twenty-eight, was a largely self-taught botanist, and later became Curator at the California Academy of Science.30 From an early age, she had spent her summers in the Rockies, armed with a Flora of Colorado and Asa Gray’s Botany, riding astride in a denim outfit she designed for her own comfort. Wallace’s age and reputation, and the scientific purpose, gave guarantees of total respectability; it was, all the same, a slightly unconventional arrangement, as the two of them were often eating in remote miners’ houses, and sleeping in mountain huts: ‘Slept in clothes in dirty miner’s bedding. Up at 5 fire lighting, breakfast – putting away yesterday’s plants. At 7 a.m. started for Gray’s Peak.’ The two had a natural intellectual affinity, beyond their common love of botany: ‘Consistency’, Alice Eastwood would say, ‘is the bane of small minds.’ Here they were high in the Rockies in the alpine flowering season, and it took them two and a half hours to reach the summit, 14,300 feet: ‘Magnificent day, no clouds, saw Holy Cross Mtn. Back slowly – plant collecting’ – a long list of treasures. Then over a pass into a fine alpine valley with abundance of flowers, and down through woods – no path, innumerable fallen trees – in a descent of two thousand feet or so to another hut, owned by an English mining engineer. More parcelling up – some species to Gertrude Jekyll, some to Backhouse’s of York. ‘Tired,’ Wallace noted; but there was no hint of his asthma, or of anything other than delight at the riches around him. The next day they were exploring the wonderfully flowery slopes in the main Grizzly Gulch valley, and their finds included Bryanthus empetriformis, new to the flora of Colorado. ‘Columbine superb! Arnica cordifolia – in yellow sheets in the woods.’ The next morning they rose at six to collect Gentiana affinis, Mertensia alpina, Parnassia fimbriata – two more parcels for Miss Jekyll – before walking to Graymount to catch the train back to Denver. It had been a wonderful week.