"The events which formed a turning-point in my life were, first, my acquaintance with Bates, and second, my reading Malthus."
— Alfred Russel Wallace
The Events Which Formed A Turningpoint
The events which formed a turning-point in my life were, first, my acquaintance with Bates, and second, my reading Malthus.
About this quote
Alfred Russel Wallace wrote this reflection in his autobiography My Life (1905), identifying the two intellectual encounters that set the course of his career. Henry Walter Bates was a fellow naturalist who became his companion on the Amazon expedition of 1848; Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population provided the demographic framework that, years later on Ternate, would crystallize into Wallace's independent discovery of natural selection — the same mechanism Charles Darwin had been quietly developing since the 1830s.
Source
My Life, Volume 1, 1905