The stories she learned intrigued her only more. She discovered that Wallace had been born in Monmouthshire, near Wales, to middle-class parents who later fell on hard times; and that he was more or less self-educated, a surveyor by trade. As an adventurous young man, he had shipped off to various jungles over the years, and became a tireless collector of insect and bird specimens. In 1853, Wallace had published a book entitled Palm Trees of the Amazon and their Uses, which Alma had missed entirely, as she’d been traveling between Tahiti and Holland at the time. Since 1854, he had been in the Malay Archipelago, studying tree frogs and the like.
There, in the distant forests of the Celebes, Wallace had contracted malarial fever and had nearly died. In the depths of his fever, focused upon death, he’d had a flash of inspiration: a theory of evolution, based on the struggle for existence. In a mere few hours he’d written down his theory. He then mailed his hastily penned thesis all the way from the Celebes to England, to a gentleman named Charles Darwin, whom he’d met on one occasion, and whom he much admired. Wallace, quite deferentially, asked Mr. Darwin if this theory of evolution might perhaps have any value. It was an innocent question: Wallace had no way of knowing that Darwin himself had been toiling on this exact idea since approximately 1840. In fact, Darwin had already written nearly two thousand pages of what would become On the Origin of Species, but had shown his work to no one except his dear friend Joseph Hooker, of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Hooker had for years been encouraging Darwin to publish, but Darwin—in a decision that Alma could well appreciate—had held back, from lack of confidence or certainty.
Now, in one of the great coincidences in scientific history, it appeared that Darwin’s beautiful and original idea—which he had been privately cultivating for almost two decades—had just been expressed, almost word for word, by a nearly unknown, thirty-five-year-old, malaria-suffering, self-taught naturalist on the other side of the planet.
Alma’s sources in London reported that Darwin had felt compelled by Wallace’s letter to announce his theory of natural selection, afraid that he would lose ownership of the entire notion if Wallace were to publish first. Quite ironically, Alma thought, it appeared Darwin feared being out-competed over the idea of competition! Out of gentlemanly courtesy, Darwin had decided that Wallace’s letter should be presented at the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858—right alongside his own research on natural selection—while at the same time putting forth evidence that the hypothesis had belonged to him first. The publication of his Origin of Species had swiftly followed, less than a year and a half later. That rush to publish now suggested to Alma that Darwin had panicked—as well he should have! Wallace was closing in! As do many animals and plants under threat of annihilation, Charles Darwin had been forced to move, forced to take action—forced to adapt. Alma remembered what she herself had written in her own version of the theory: “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”
Reviewing this extraordinary story, there was no question in Alma’s mind: natural selection had been Darwin’s idea first. But it had not been Darwin’s idea uniquely. There was Alma, yes, but there had been somebody else, too. Alma was beyond amazed to learn of this. It seemed an utter intellectual impossibility. But it also brought her strange comfort, to know that Alfred Russel Wallace existed. She drew warmth from the knowledge that she was not alone in this. She had a peer. They were Whittaker and Wallace: comrades in obscurity—although Wallace, of course, had no idea that they were comrades in obscurity, because she was even that much more obscure than he. But Alma knew it. She felt him out there—her strange, miraculous younger brother of the mind. If she had been more religious, she might have thanked God for Alfred Russel Wallace, for it was that small sense of kinship that helped her move gracefully and safely—without debilitating resentment, despair, or shame—through all the clamoring commotion surrounding Mr. Charles Darwin and his colossal, transfiguring, world-changing theory.
Darwin would belong to history, yes, but Alma had Wallace.
And that, at least for now, was comfort enough.
The 1860s passed. Holland was quiet, while the United States was riven by an unthinkable war. Scientific discourse carried less weight for Alma during those terrible years, with the news from home of endless, appalling slaughter. Prudence lost her eldest son, an officer, at Antietam. Two of her young grandsons died of camp diseases before even seeing a battlefield. All her life, Prudence had fought to end slavery, and now it was ended, but three of her own had been lost in the fight. “I rejoice and then I grieve,” she wrote Alma. “After that, I grieve some more.” Again, Alma wondered if she should return home—and even offered to—but her sister encouraged her to remain in Holland. “Our nation is too tragic at the moment for visitors,” Prudence reported. “Stay where the world is quieter, and bless that quietness.”
Somehow, Prudence kept her school open through the entire war. She not only endured, she took on yet more children during the conflict. The war ended. The president was assassinated. The union held. The transcontinental railroad was completed. Alma thought perhaps that was what would keep the United States sewn together now—the rough, steel stitches of the mighty railroad. These days America seemed, from Alma’s safe distance, to be a place of uncontrollable, ferocious growth. She was happy not to be there. America was a lifetime ago; she did not think she would recognize the place anymore, nor would it recognize her. She liked her life as a Dutchwoman, as a scholar, as a van Devender. She read every scientific journal, and published in many of them. She had lively discussions with her colleagues, over coffee and pastry. Every summer, the Hortus granted her a month’s leave to go gathering mosses across the Continent. She came to know the Alps quite well, and came to love them, as she tramped across their majesty with her cane and her collecting kit. She came to know the fern-damp woods of Germany, too.
She had grown into a most contented old lady.
The 1870s arrived. In peaceful Amsterdam, Alma entered the eighth decade of her life, but remained committed to her work. She found it difficult to hike anymore, but she tended to her Cave of Mosses, and gave occasional lectures at the Hortus on the subject of bryology. Her eyes began to fail, and she worried that she would no longer be able to identify mosses. In anticipation of this sad inevitability, she practiced working with her mosses in the dark, to learn to identify them by touch. She became quite adept at it. (She did not need to see mosses forever, but she would always want to know them.) Fortunately, she had excellent help with her work now. Her favorite young cousin, Margaret—fondly nicknamed Mimi—revealed an innate fascination with mosses, and soon became Alma’s protégée. When the girl finished her studies, she came to work with Alma at the Hortus; with Mimi’s assistance, Alma was able to complete her comprehensive, two-volume The Mosses of Northern Europe, which was well received. The volumes were prettily illustrated, though the artist was no Ambrose Pike.
But nobody was Ambrose Pike. Nobody ever would be.
Alma watched as Charles Darwin became ever more the great man of science. She did not begrudge his success; he deserved the praise, and carried himself with dignity. He kept at his work on evolution, which she was pleased to see, with his typical blend of excellence and discretion. In 1871, he published the exhaustive The Descent of Man—in which he finally applied his principles of natural selection to humans. He was wise to have waited this long, Alma thought. By this point, the book’s final determination (Yes, we are apes) was almost a foregone conclusion. In the dozen years since Origin had first appeared, the world had been anticipating and debating “The Monkey Question.” Sides had been drawn, papers had been written, and endless rebuttals and arguments had been brought forth. It was almost as though Darwin had waited for the world to adapt to the unsettling notion that God might not have created mankind from dust, before delivering his calm, well-ordered, carefully argued verdict on the matter. Alma, once more, read the book as closely as anyone, and much admired it.