ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the 8th of January, 1823. He was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in his fourteenth year began the study of land-surveying and architecture under an elder brother. Quick-witted and observing, he studied a great deal more on his own account in his journeyings over England and Wales, the results of which abide in the wide range of subjects--scientific, political, and social--engaging his active pen from early manhood to the present day. About 1844 he exchanged the theodolite for the ferule, and became English master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, in which town he found a congenial friend in the person of his future fellow-traveller, Henry Walter Bates. Bates was then employed in his father's hosiery warehouse, from which he escaped, as often as the long working hours then prevailing allowed, into the fields with his collecting-box. Both schoolmaster and shopman were ardent naturalists, Mr. Wallace, as he tells us, being at that time "chiefly interested in botany," but he afterward took up his friend's favourite pursuit of entomology. The writer, when preparing his memoir of Bates (which prefaces a reprint of the first edition of the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons), learned from Mr. Wallace that in early life he did not keep letters from Bates and other correspondents. But, fortunately, among Bates's papers, there was a bundle of interesting letters from Wallace written between June, 1845, and October, 1847, from Neath, in South Wales, to which town he had removed. In one of these, dated the 9th of November, 1845, Wallace asks Bates if he had read the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and a subsequent letter indicates that Bates had not formed a favourable opinion of the book. A later letter is interesting as conveying an estimate of Darwin. "I first," Wallace says, "read Darwin's Journal three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt's Personal Narrative; as a work of general interest, perhaps supporter to it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell's views. His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour, affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought."