The Signature of All Things

she also felt frustrated by Darwin’s reserve. Sometimes she wanted to shake him and make him fight. In his position, she would have come out swinging like Henry Whittaker. She would have had her nose bloodied in the process, to be sure, but she would have bloodied some noses along the way, too. She would have fought to her stumps to defend their theory (she could not help but think of it as “their” theory) . . . ifshe had published the theory at all, that is. Which, of course, she had not done. So she had no prerogative to fight. Therefore, she said nothing.
    It was all most vexing, most engrossing, most confusing.
    What’s more—Alma could not help but notice—nobody had yet solved the Prudence Problem to her satisfaction.
    As far as she could see, there was still a hole in the theory.
    It was still incomplete.
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    B ut soon enough, Alma grew distracted, then increasingly captivated, by something else.
    Dimly and incrementally, as the entire Darwin debate raged on, shebecame cognizant of another figure concealed along its shadowy margins. In the same way that Alma—when she was young—would sometimes catch a glimpse of something moving on the periphery of her microscope slide and struggle to focus on it (suspecting, before she knew what it was, that it might be important), now, too, she could see something strange and perhaps significant hovering in the corner. Something was out of place. Something existed in the story of Charles Darwin and natural selection that should not exist. She twiddled the knobs and raised the levers and aimed her complete attention upon the mystery—and that is how she learned of a man named Alfred Russel Wallace.
    Alma first saw Wallace’s name when, out of curiosity, she went back to explore the first official mention of natural selection—which had been on July 1, 1858, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London. Alma had missed the notes of that meeting’s proceedings when they’d originally been published, owing to her period of mourning, but now she went back and studied the record quite carefully. Immediately, she noticed something peculiar: another essay had been presented that day, just after the introduction of Darwin’s thesis. That other essay was titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” and it had been written by one A. R. Wallace.
    Alma tracked down the essay and read it. It said exactly the same thing Darwin had said, in his theory of natural selection. In fact, it said exactly the same thing Alma had said, in her theory of competitive alteration. Mr. Wallace argued that life was a constant struggle for existence: that there were not enough resources for all; that population was controlled by predators, illness, and food scarcity; and that the weakest would always die first. Wallace’s essay went on to say that any variation in a species that affected the outcome of survival might eventually change that species forever. He said that the most successful variations would proliferate, while the least successful would be rendered extinct. This was how species arose, transmuted, thrived, and vanished.
    The essay was short, simple, and—to Alma’s mind—extremely familiar.
    Who was this person?
    Alma had never before heard of him. This was unlikely in and of itself, for she made an effort to be aware of everyone in the scientific world. She wrote letters to a few colleagues in England, asking, “Who is Alfred RusselWallace? What are people saying about him? What happened in London in July 1858?”
    The stories she learned intrigued her only more. She discovered that Wallace had been born in Monmouthshire, near Wales, to middle-class parents who later fell on hard times; and that he was more or less self-educated, a surveyor by trade. As an adventurous young man, he had shipped off to various jungles over the years, and became a tireless collector of insect and bird specimens. In 1853, Wallace had published a book entitled Palm Trees of the Amazon and their Uses , which Alma had missed entirely, as she’d been traveling between Tahiti and Holland at the time. Since 1854, he had been in the Malay Archipelago, studying tree frogs and the like.
    There, in the distant forests of the Celebes, Wallace had contracted malarial fever and had nearly died. In the depths of his fever, focused upon death, he’d had a flash of inspiration: a theory of evolution, based on the struggle for existence. In a mere few