Alfred Russel Wallace
Mostly self-taught with scant education, he struggled in tropical jungles both for his own survival and for his own intellectual interest. His paper written either in Ternate or in Jilolo and sent to Darwin caused one of the most intriguing incidents in the history of science---the "joint paper" on Natural Selection at the Linnean Society in London, July 1858 (this was done without notifying Wallace).
Wallace never complained about this, and Darwin was persistently good to Wallace, often saving Wallace from financial disasters. But some crucial documents related to the preceding incident were lost, and Wallace did not forget to write this down privately.
[Wallace wrote that his manuscript was lost, on the envelope in which he kept the first 8 letters from Darwin. From J. Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Remiscences, vol. 1, 1916, p. 128. Photo by S. Uchii.]
Actually, Darwin was completing his "principle of divergence" when he received Wallace's manuscript, and this principle was not contained in Wallace's theory. (For this, see the abstract of my "Darwin and Wallace on the principle of divergence" (1993).)
Although Wallace was faster (and clearer) than Darwin in writing and publishing papers both on natural selection and on the evolution of man, they disagreed on the evolution of man, and it seems Darwin's view is more persistent, consistent, and deeper.
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