article_snippet.sent: When Wallace and Henry Bates met in Leicester in 1844, apparently at the public library, Wallace and Bates immediately realised Wallace and Bates were kindred spirits.
article_snippet.sent: (Henry Bates preferred to stay in one place for months at a time, while Wallace liked to go wherever Wallace more impulsive nose led Wallace.)
article_snippet.sent: Sad to say, in the port of Bélem where they landed, the biggest difference from England that Wallace and Bates noticed was the comparative lack of drunkenness.
article_snippet.sent: Once Wallace and Bates headed inland, though, Wallace and Bates were in another world entirely.
article_snippet.sent: In another, Wallace was both shocked and delighted by a cheerfully dissolute priest.
article_snippet.sent: After Wallace shot part of Wallace own hand off, Wallace confessed to feeling 'rather miserable'.
article_snippet.sent: The biggest loss, in fact, came when the boat on which Wallace was travelling home in 1852 caught fire, destroying Wallace notebooks and the live animals Wallace'd brought with Wallace.
article_snippet.sent: Happily, Wallace was rescued after only a week in an open boat 700 miles from land.
article_snippet.sent: Yet within two years, Wallace was off again, this time for eight years of collecting in Asia.
article_snippet.sent: There, Wallace also developed a theory of natural selection that Charles Darwin realised was virtually the same as the one Wallace had been sitting on for two decades - and so quickly set about writing The Origin Of Species. '
article_snippet.sent: I could never have approached the completeness of Wallace book,' Wallace generously declared when his book was published.