Wallace was not a believer in revealed religion of any kind, but he did believe in spiritualism. This has puzzled biographers, who struggle to think why such a man would believe in spirits. Early in his life, he experimented with hypnosis, which was then doubted and criticised. He used some of his students in Leicester as subjects, with considerable success. Apparently, this persuaded him not to reject ideas which were doubted. Even when Huxley told him that one of his favourite mediums was a proven fraud, he refused to believe it. He preferred the evidence of his own experience.
Wallace's public support of spiritualism, and his defence of spiritualist mediums against allegations of fraud, damaged his scientific reputation. It strained his relationships with friends such as Bates, Huxley and Darwin, who felt he was overly credulous. Others became openly hostile to Wallace over the issue. Wallace and other scientists who defended spiritualism were subject to much criticism from the press, with "The Lancet", the leading English medical journal, being particularly harsh. The controversy affected the public's idea of Wallace for the rest of his career, though he was always respected in other ways.
Wallace had a wide range of interests, and wrote books about all of them. He wrote against vaccination, for phrenology, for spiritualism, for land nationalisation, against the moon having canals, and for social change and the progress and improvement of mankind. He did not believe in religion, but he did believe in spiritualism. He was a radical in politics, economics and social reform. He was a kind and honourable person, but he could be a tough opponent if he thought something unfair was going on. Even the titles of some of his books were sensational, as for example:
Wallace wrote about 22 books, depending on how one counts them.
His greatest works include:
Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (25 November 1887 – 26 January 1943) was a Russian botanist and geneticist. He is best known for showing how and where crop plants evolved. He devoted his life to agriculture: the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops.
By 1940, Vavilov had accumulated a collection of 200,000 plant seeds from the Soviet Union and from abroad. He was widely admired, but his life came to a terrible end. Vavilov repeatedly criticised a powerful but poor scientist, Trofim Lysenko. As a result, Vavilov was arrested, and died of starvation in a prison in 1943. Today Vavilov's name stands high. The "Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry" in St. Petersburg is named after him. It maintains one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic material.
This is mimicry in plants where a weed comes to look like a crop plant. Before herbicides, weeds were plucked by hand. This has been done for thousands of years. The weeds come to look like the crop because the weeders pick those weeds which look most different. Vavilovian mimicry is caused by unintentional selection by humans. The weeds that survive pass on their genes. Gradually, all the weeds look more like the crop plant.
An example is rye, a common Mediterranean species. Rye was originally just a weed growing with wheat and barley. Weeding made it like the crop. Like wheat, it came to have larger seeds and more rigid spindles to which the seeds are attached.
Rye is a tougher plant than wheat: it survives in harsher conditions. Having become a crop like the wheat, rye was able to become a crop plant in harsh areas, such as hills and mountains.
Gilbert White
Gilbert White (18 July 1720 – 26 June 1793) was a pioneering English naturalist and ornithologist.
White was born in his grandfather's vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. He was educated by a private tutor in Basingstoke before going to Oriel College, Oxford University. He obtained his deacon's orders in 1746, being fully ordained in 1749.
Then he held several curacies in Hampshire and Wiltshire, including Selbourne. White also held the office of Junior Proctor at Oxford and was Dean of Oriel College. In 1784 he became curate of Selborne for the last time, remaining so until his death.
White is best known for "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne" (1789). This was a collection of his letters to Thomas Pennant, the leading British zoologist of the day, and the Hon. Daines Barrington, an English barrister and Fellow of the Royal Society. These letters contained White's discoveries on local birds, animals and plants. White believed in observing birds rather than collecting specimens. He was one of the first people to separate the similar-looking Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler and Wood Warbler by means of their song.
White is regarded by many as England's first ecologist and one of the founders of modern respect for nature.
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a British geologist. He was the foremost geologist of his day, and an influence on the young Charles Darwin. His work was rewarded with a knighthood, and later he was created a hereditary baronet.
The house of his birth is in the Scottish Lowlands. it is in the valley of the Highland Boundary Fault, one of the great features of Scottish geology. Round the house is farmland, but within a short distance to the north-west are the Grampian Mountains in the Scottish Highlands.
Charles would have seen this view from his house as a child. He was also fortunate that his family's second home was in a completely different area: at Bartley Lodge in the New Forest, England. Both these places lit his interest in the natural world.
Lyell was a rich man, and earned more money as an author. He came from a prosperous family, and worked briefly as a lawyer in the 1820s. He held was a Professor of Geology at King's College London in the 1830s. From 1830 onward his books gave him both income and fame.
Lyell's "Principles of Geology" was his most famous and most important book. It was first published in three volumes, in 1830–33. The book was about the ideas of James Hutton, but with many additions, improvements and examples. The book made Lyell to be known as an important geological theorist. It was a work of synthesis, backed by his own personal observations on his travels.
The central argument in "Principles" was that "the present is the key to the past". This was called by William Whewell 'uniformitarianism'. Geological remains from the distant past are explained by processes we can see operating now. Lyell's interpretation of geologic change as the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time was a big influence on his young friend, Charles Darwin.
John Ray
John Ray (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Ray was the son of a village blacksmith who got to Cambridge University on a scholarship. This was in 1644, when the Puritans were making war against Charles I. When he got his bachelor's degree in 1648, he continued as a Fellow of Trinity College.
Ray was a Protestant dissenter who had accepted the return of Charles II. He was ordained as a priest of the Church of England, in London in 1660. By then, Charles II insisted that all priests sign an affadavit against the Puritan party. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 made the Book of Common Prayer compulsory in religious services, which was opposed by those of Puritan beliefs. Ray would not sign the affidavit, so he was forced to resign his Fellowship, and could not work as a priest.