The Wonderful Century

Wallace, Alfred Russel. The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1898).

"The attempt has been made to give short, descriptive sketches of those great material and intellectual achievements which especially distinguish the Nineteenth Century from any and all of its predecessors, and to show how fundamental is the change they have effected in our life and civilization. A comparative estimate of the number and importance of these achievements leads to the conclusion that not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it, but that it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress." [from the Preface]

". . .the more important of these are not mere improvements upon, or developments of, anything that had been done before, but that they are entirely new departures, arising out of our increasing knowledge of and command over the forces of the universe. Many of these advances have already led to developments of the most startling kind, giving us such marvelous powers, and such extensions of our normal senses, as would have been incredible, and almost unthinkable even to our greatest men of science, a hundred years ago." [p.3]

Described are Nineteenth Century innovations in modes of traveling (the railway and ocean-going steamship), labor-saving machinery (the sewing machine, typewriter, and combined reaping, thrashing and winnowing machine), the conveyance of thought (the electric telegraph, trans-Atlantic cable, and telephone) and numerous other scientific advances (friction phosphorus matches, gas-lighting, electric lighting, photography, the phonograph, Rontgen or X-rays, spectrum analysis, and anesthetics).

"We men of the Nineteenth Century have not been slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish. . . the rich and the poor alike swell the chorus of admiration for the marvelous inventions and discoveries of our own age which remind us every hour of our immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers." [p.1]

". . . there have been equally striking Failures, some intellectual, but for the most part moral and social. . . No doubt it will be objected that I have devoted far too much space to them--more than half the volume. But this was inevitable, for the very obvious reason that, whereas the success are universally admitted and had only to be described, the failures are either ignored or denied, and therefore required to be proved." [from the Preface]

Wallace discusses the following topics at length: Phrenology (35 pages), Mesmerism (18 pages), and Vaccination (over 100 pages not including 12 fold-out diagrams at the end of the book illustrating disease mortalities) in a chapter titled "Vaccination A Delusion--It's Penal Enforcement a Crime."

Wallace outlines the history of Phrenology beginning with its discovery in the last years of the Eighteenth Century by German physician Dr. Francois Joseph Gall who, after over 20 years of observation of the "diseased brain" as physician to a lunatic asylum in Vienna, began lecturing in 1796. Gall's most distinguished pupil, Dr. Johann Gaspar Spurzheim visits Great Britain in 1813 where George Combe takes up the study becoming "entirely emancipated from religious dogma, and became the best exponent of a well-reasoned system of natural religion."

Meanwhile, the religious community raised objections to Phrenology, deeming it "contrary to Scripture and dangerous to morality." Metaphysicians of the day "recognized no connection between the mind and the organism." The increase of itinerant uneducated phrenological lecturers damaged the overall reputation, and phrenology's association with mesmerism or hypnotism was "virulently opposed at the time by doctors against painless operations during the mesmeric trance."

The final death-blow to phrenology came in 1870 with experimentation on the brains of animals by excitation with galvanic currents. The findings were said to show conclusively that "portions of the brain which the phrenologists had alleged to be the organ of mental faculties are really only organs of muscular movements." Wallace documents prior experiments which "demonstrate that the stimulation of many parts of the cerebrum of man did excite both sensation and motion" and states: "Phrenology is a science of observation as truly as is geology itself." [p182]

In a chapter titled "Militarism--The Curse of Civilization" Wallace discusses crime and punishment with particular attention to the "Lunacy Laws" of his time. Writing about "The Vampire of War" he describes the expense involved in maintaining "the paraphernalia of war" by "nations armed to the teeth, and watching stealthily for some occasion to use their vast armaments for their own aggrandisement and for the injury of their neighbors."

The closing chapters address "The Demon of Greed" and "The Plunder of the Earth" by "a reckless destruction of the stored-up products of nature." Wallace admonishes: "Not only have forest-growths of many hundreds of years been cleared away, often with disastrous consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of the earth's surface, the slow products of long-past eons of time and geological change, have been and are still being exhausted, to an extent never before approached, and probably not equaled in amount during the whole preceding period of human history." [p. 367] One can only wonder how Wallace might react to the total destructive disregard of the environment which is perpetuated today!

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and is credited with having independently discovered natural selection and writing a letter that panicked Darwin into rushing publication of his Origin of Species. But Wallace has been relegated and consigned to an obscure historical position in comparison to that of Darwin. From what I have read about Wallace's background, there are a number of factors that contributed to the disparity. The Darwin family was richly endowed financially and well positioned socially. Because his father lost the family fortune, Wallace suffered from a middle class upbringing and a limited childhood education.

Wallace was interested in a broad range of disciplines. His failure to specialize caused him to be taken less seriously by his peers than the more focused Darwin. Indeed, Wallace became interested in a number of topics discredited by the strict scientist. Wallace embraced spiritualism and was a strong advocate for Phrenology, even as its popularity was waning. At eighty-one years of age, Wallace was described by G.K. Chesterton as the second (after Walt Whitman) greatest man of his time, stating "he has been the leader of a revolution, and the leader of a counter-revolution." [English Illustrated Magazine, vol. 30, 1914.]

My copy originally came from Newbold's Bookshop in New Zealand. (If you have an interest in Book Trade Labels, be sure to visit the Seven Roads Gallery to see their amazing collection.)

A number of copies of The Wonderful Century are available on the Internet Archive if you would like to explore it more for yourself. For a contemporary view of Wallace I recommend Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology edited by Andrew Berry (London & NY: Verso, 2002). Here are collected a sampling of his writing in many areas of science (evolution, biogeography, natural history, conservation, geology, glaciology, and eugenics) as well as topics of concern in spiritualism and social reform.