Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace was an old soul who climbed the ladder of knowledge one patient rung at a time, and his Sun in Capricorn is the very signature of that disciplined, dependable ascent. Saturn-ruled Capricorn shines through work, endurance and the slow building of a lasting reputation, and here it fell in the third house of the hands and the mind, where one shines by writing, observing and doing. From his own labour, without patrons, he became the century's foremost authority on the geographical spread of animals, the father of biogeography, and independently conceived evolution by natural selection, his 1858 paper prompting Darwin to rush On the Origin of Species into print.

His Moon in Sagittarius is the philosopher-wanderer's psyche, at peace only through freedom, travel and the open road. It sat right on the ascendant in the first house, so that restless, questing spirit was worn openly, radiating from the surface of the man. Fittingly he spent years in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago, drawing the faunal boundary we call the Wallace Line. Scorpio rising gave him the penetrating, all-or-nothing mask of one who sees to the depths of things. Naturalist, explorer and social reformer, Wallace let the whole living world become his teacher.