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Article: A brothers' reunion: evolution's champion Alfred Russel Wallace and Forty-niner John Wallace.(Biography)
- Article from:
- California History
- Article date:
- September 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 California Historical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On May 23, 1887, two brothers who had not seen each other for nearly forty years reunited at a ferry dock in Oakland. (1) Since their last meeting in their native England, their lives had taken extraordinarily different paths. In 1848, Alfred Russel Wallace had sailed from London to the Amazon to collect rare species of plants and animals. The following year, his older brother John had joined the hordes seeking gold in California.
When the brothers next greeted one another, Alfred had become the most famous living naturalist of his era, the man whose published contribution to the concept of natural selection sparked Charles Darwin to finally issue his epochal ...