Alfred Russel Wallace's 1886–1887 Travel Diary The North American Lecture Tour

About this book

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) is best known as the man who sent an essay on natural selection to Charles Darwin in 1858, prompting the older naturalist to drop plans for his multi-volume work on the subject and produce a shortened version – On the Origin of Species – only a little over a year later. Wallace, however, additionally had a long and expansive career extending to many natural and social science fields (and, it should be noted, he was one of his era's most vocal supporters of spiritualism). among his other associations he is remembered as one of history's foremost naturalist-explorers for his twelve years of collecting activities in South America and the East Indies circa 1848 to 1852 and 1854 to 1862, but in the present volume the last of his wanderings is detailed: a transcontinental ten-month lecture tour to North America in 1886-1887. Wallace kept a journal for the entire length of his trip which is filled both with natural history observations, and impressions of the people he met along the way (including many of the most famous Americans from that period). Here, this journal is fully transcribed and annotated; also presented are some of his published writings from this period.

Contents

Frontispiece
Preface by Michael Shermer
Map of Wallace’s Route
List of Figures
Image Credits
Introduction
Wallace’s Itinerary, October 1886 to August 1887
Notes

Appendices
1. Final Words on America (from My Life)
2. List of Lectures Given in North America, 1886–87
3. Some Published Works ca. 1886–87
Letter from Dr. Alfred R. Wallace, In Re Mrs. Ross
American Museums. The Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
American Museums. Museums of American Pre-historic Archaeology
The Antiquity of Man in North America
English and American Flowers
Flowers and Forests of the Far West
Land Lessons from America
4. List of, and Mini-Biographies for, Identified Persons
5. List of Places Seen/Visited
6. List of Plants Seen/Collected

Customer Reviews

Biography

Charles H. Smith has been studying Wallace's work for thirty years and has several other books on him to his credit; he also maintains the research website the alfred russel Wallace Page at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, where he is Science Librarian and Professor of Library Public Services. Megan Derr has degrees in Broadcasting and Computer Science from the same institution, and is currently employed as a junior developer at Emergint Technologies in Louisville, Kentucky.