FIRST EDITION of the first book by Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection. Based on drawings and notes made by Wallace during his expedition to the Amazon in search of the origin of species, and a direct reflection of his investigations into evolution. 

During his return journey from the Amazon, Wallace was shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic: a tin box with his drawings from the Amazon of fishes and palms was one of the sole items he was able to rescue. The plates in Palm Trees are based on these rescued drawings. These are accompanied by descriptions of each species, ethnobotanical notes on their uses by indigenous peoples (including the manufacture of blow-pipes and blow-pipe darts), and details from Wallace’s travels in the Amazon. The descriptions pay particular attention to geographical distribution, a key element of Wallace’s investigations into the origin of species. 

SHIPWRECK AND THE RESCUE OF THE PALM DRAWINGS. 

After four years exploring the Amazon and Rio Negro, Wallace set sail for England on the 12th of July 1852. Three weeks into the Atlantic his ship caught fire and sank. Apart from a few items of clothing and some personal possessions, Wallace lost everything, including his entire personal natural history collection and journals. 

“My collections, however, were in the hold, and were irretrievably lost ... All my private collection of insects and birds since I left Para was with me, and comprised hundreds of new and beautiful species, which would have rendered (I had fondly hoped) my cabinet, as far as regards American species, one of the finest in Europe” (Wallace 1905 p. 305). 

The loss could scarcely have been more catastrophic, as he recalled in his Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, published the following year: “It was ... when the danger appeared past, that I began to feel fully the greatness of my loss ... How many times, when almost overcome by the ague, had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species! How many places, which no European foot but my own had trodden, would have been recalled to my memory by the rare birds and insects they had furnished to my collection!” (Wallace 1853 p. 401). 

Amongst the few items he managed to retrieve from the burning ship, however, was a tin box, containing his drawings of Amazonian fishes and palms, drawn from life during his years of travel from the mouth of the Amazon to the upper reaches of the Uaupes and Rio Negro, and carefully assembled for long-cherished book projects. It is these drawings that furnished the illustrations in the present volume. 

“In the small tin box which I had saved from the wreck I fortunately had a set of careful pencil drawings of all the different species of palms I had met with, together with notes as to their distribution and uses” (Wallace 1905 p. 314). 

Back in England, Wallace pressed ahead with his book on palms, using the rescued drawings: “I determined to publish, at my own expense, a volume on the “Palms of the Amazon and Rio Negro,” with an account of their uses and distribution, and figures of all the species from my sketches ... I arranged with Mr. Walter Fitch of Kew, the first botanical artist of the day, to draw them on stone, adding a few artistic touches to give them life and variety ... I arranged with Mr. Van Voorst to publish this small volume, and it was not thought advisable to print more than 250 copies, the sale of which just covered all expenses” (Wallace 1905 p. 321). 

Of Wallace’s palm and fish drawings from the Amazon, only the palms were published during his lifetime. The original drawings are now held at the Linnean Society in London, scene of the joint announcement in 1858 by Wallace and Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, just five years after the publication of the present book. 

PALM TREES AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 

At some point before or during his travels in the Amazon, Wallace had become convinced of the importance of the geographical distribution of species in solving the origin of species. He therefore began to make systematic observations of the distributions of different plants and animals in the Amazon Basin. “Wallace was apparently convinced that geographical distribution somehow held the key to the species question” (Costa p. 25). 

Meanwhile, entirely independently (and unknown to Wallace), Darwin had also become convinced of the importance of geographical distribution. In November 1845 Darwin wrote to his close friend J D Hooker: “Geographical distrib: will be the key which will unlock the mystery of species” (Darwin Correspondence 924). 

Like Wallace, Darwin first began to take note of species distribution in the field—specifically the Galapagos Islands. The restricted ranges of particular species took Darwin completely by surprise: so much so that he had in fact mixed up collections from different islands before he realised the differences between them. In the third edition of his account of the Beagle voyage, published in 1845, he added the following paragraph: 

“I have not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago; it is, that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands, about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted” (Darwin 1845 p. 394). 

In the Amazon Basin, Wallace encountered a functional equivalent to the Galapagos: islands of forest separated by rivers of immense size. As Darwin was astonished to find that different species inhabited the different islands of the Galapagos, so Wallace was astonished to discover that different species inhabited the opposite banks of the rivers of the Amazon Basin. In particular, different species inhabited the left and right banks of the Amazon itself. So unexpected was this that it was not until he had ascended the Amazon as far as Manaus that he began to realise that this was the case: again just as Darwin had mixed up collections from different islands of the Galapagos, so Wallace mixed up collections from the left and right bank of the river Amazon, until he realised that the species inhabiting the two banks frequently differed. 

“During my residence in the Amazon district I took every opportunity of determining the limits of species, and I soon found that the Amazon, the Rio Negro and the Madeira formed the limits beyond which certain species never passed. The native hunters are perfectly acquainted with this fact, and always cross over the river when they want to procure particular animals, which are found even on the river’s bank on one side, but never by any chance on the other. On approaching the sources of the rivers they cease to be a boundary, and most of the species are found on both sides of them” (Wallace 1852 p. 110). 

In his studies of species distribution, one of the groups of animals and plants Wallace focused on in particular was palms: “The large size [of palms] and immobility of the individuals make such species far more favourable for distributional studies than most animal groups” (Brooks p. 44). Palm Trees publishes the results of Wallace’s investigations into the distributions of palms: the book describes 43 species, and in each case describes their distribution, frequently in great detail. His description of the distribution of the Piassava (Leopoldiana piassaba), for example, begins: 

“The distribution of this tree is very peculiar. It grows in swampy or partially flooded lands on the banks of black-water rivers. It is first found on the river Padauarí, a tributary of the Rio Negro on its northern side, about 400 miles above Barra [Manaus], but whose waters are not so black as those of the Rio Negro. The Piassaba is found from near the mouth to more than a hundred miles up, where it ceases. On the banks of the Rio Negro itself not a tree is to be seen. The next river, the Darahá, also contains some. The next two, the Maravihá and the Cababurís, are white-water rivers, and have no Piassaba. On the S. bank, though all the rivers are black water, there is no Piassaba till we reach the Marié, not far below San Gabriel ...” (p. 19). 

Just as Darwin had discovered anomalous distributions of species in the Galapagos, so did Wallace in the Amazon, and subsequently in the Malay Archipelago. They posed an obvious problem. Orthodox thinking at the time understood that God created species in each part of the earth, adapted to their local physical conditions. But Wallace and Darwin found that neighbouring islands (and opposite river banks), with identical physical conditions, were frequently inhabited by different species. Why? The answer, of course, was not the actions of a capricious God, but evolution. 

A PIONEERING WORK OF ETHNOBOTANY. 

While in the field in the Amazon, in addition to his observations on the distribution of palms, Wallace had systematically gathered data from indigenous peoples on their knowledge and uses of the different species. He included this data in Palm Trees, which is an early and significant contribution to ethnobotany. The description of each species is accompanied by ethnobotanical notes, frequently very extensive, which are then summarised, together with a listing of indigenous names, in an appendix at the end of the book. The uses Wallace describes include the manufacture of blow-pipe darts from Oenocarpus batawa, blow-pipe tubes from Iriartea setigera, and hammocks from Mauritia flexuosa (Wallace’s nomenclature). 

“When [Wallace] examined his first palms in the Amazon, he was unable to distinguish closely allied species. But, like the Spanish inhabitants of the Galapagos Islands, who could identify the island a tortoise came from, the Indian guides knew the differences, which were subtle and “permanent.” In his appendix, Wallace created a useful table, listing the various palms, giving their botanical and colloquial names, and summarising their uses. Few naturalists before him had paid much attention to such native lore. Along with Henry Bates and Richard Spruce, Wallace pioneered this ethnographic field, which bridged the gap between the biological and anthropological sciences” (Slotten p. 96).