This coming week is the 154th anniversary of the publication of Alfred Russel Wallace's classic travel account, "The Malay Archipelago." Wallace (1823-1913) was a contemporary of Darwin and, in fact, conceived of natural selection independently of Darwin, who nevertheless had been thinking about it longer. Wallace spent eight years, 1854-1862, exploring the region of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and East Timor, where he collected thousands of samples of flora and fauna and discovered thousands of species previously unknown to science. Another discovery of Wallace's was the biogeographical line among the islands, where flora and fauna on one side is characteristic of Asia, and on the other side, characteristic of Australia and the Pacific Islands. Wallace signed the contract with the publisher Macmillan on March 3, 1869, and the official publication date was March 9. Dedicated to Darwin, it is considered one of best accounts of its kind and influenced many, including novelist Joseph Conrad.
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