"The Malay Archipelago" is perhaps the most celebrated of all writings on Indonesia. Attracting huge public interest at the time of publication, this two-part work ranks with the nineteenth century's most important travel writing and Wallace's name continues to be inextricably linked to the area.
Wallace was best known for his discovery and description of the faunal discontinuity that now bears his name, "Wallace's Line," extending between the islands of Bali and Lombok and Borneo and Sulawesi, described here in "The Malay Archipelago." This led to his theory of natural selection, which was presented to the Linnaean Society in 1858.

"The Malay Archipelago" is perhaps the most celebrated of all writings on Indonesia. Attracting huge public interest at the time of publication, this two-part work ranks with the nineteenth century's most important travel writing and Wallace's name continues to be inextricably linked to the area.
Wallace was best known for his discovery and description of the faunal discontinuity that now bears his name, "Wallace's Line," extending between the islands of Bali and Lombok and Borneo and Sulawesi, described here in "The Malay Archipelago." This led to his theory of natural selection, which was presented to the Linnaean Society in 1858.

First published in 1925. This study examines the advances in engineering and science in the nineteenth century. The author examines topics on locomotion and sea travel, photography, chemistry, electricity amongst many other industrial and scientific developments. This title will be of interest to historians as well as scientists and engineers.

First published in 1925. This study examines the advances in engineering and science in the nineteenth century. The author examines topics on locomotion and sea travel, photography, chemistry, electricity amongst many other industrial and scientific developments. This title will be of interest to historians as well as scientists and engineers.

The eight key titles re-published in this set make important texts accessible once again, and provide a comprehensive overview of this influential Victorian phenomenon. Available as an eight-volume set or as individual volumes.

Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest - both as a beautiful, alarming, vivid and gripping account of some eight years' travel across the entire Malay world - from Singapore to the western edges of New Guinea - and as the record of a great mind. As Wallace, often under conditions of terrible hardship and sickness, battles through jungles, lives with headhunters, and collects beetles, butterflies and birds-of-paradise, he makes discoveries about the workings of biology that have shaped our view of the world ever since.

A giant of the discipline of biogeography and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace was the most famous naturalist in the world when he died in 1913. To mark the centennial of Wallace's death, James Costa offers an elegant edition of the "Species Notebook" of 1855-1859, which Wallace kept during his legendary expedition in peninsular Malaysia, Indonesia, and western New Guinea. Presented in facsimile with text transcription and annotations, this never-before-published document provides a new window into the travels, personal trials, and scientific genius of the co-discoverer of natural selection. In one section, headed "Note for Organic Law of Change"--an extended critique of geologist Charles Lyell's anti-evolutionary arguments--Wallace sketches a book he would never write, owing to the unexpected events of 1858. In that year he sent to Charles Darwin an essay announcing his discovery of the mechanism for species change: natural selection. Darwin's friends Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker proposed a "delicate arrangement": a joint reading at the Linnean Society of his essay with Darwin's earlier private writings on the subject. Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, to much acclaim; pre-empted, Wallace's first book on evolution waited two decades, but by then he had abandoned his original concept. On the Organic Law of Change realizes in spirit the project Wallace left unfinished, and asserts his stature as not only a founder of biogeography and the preeminent tropical biologist of his day but as Darwin's equal among the pioneers of evolution.

Alfred Russel Wallace's reputation has been based on the fact that, at age thirty-five and stricken with malaria in the Moluccan Islands, he stumbled independently upon on the theory of natural selection. Andrew Berry's anthology rescue's Wallace's legacy, showing Wallace to be far more than just the co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace was a brilliant and wide-ranging scientist, a passionate social reformer and a gifted writer. The eloquence that has made his The Malay Archipelago a classic of travel writing is a prominent feature too of his extraordinarily forward-thinking writing on socialism, imperialism and pacifism. Wallace's opinions on women's suffrage, on land reform, on the roles of the church and aristocracy in a parliamentary democracy, on publicly funded education-to name a few of the issues he addressed-remain as fresh and as topical today as they were when they were written.