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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The History of the Malay Archipelago," Alfred Russel Wallace presents an illuminating exploration of the diverse ecosystems and cultures of Southeast Asia. Written in a meticulous, descriptive style that combines scientific observation with travel narrative, the book elucidates the region's rich biodiversity and the intricate interrelationships between species and their environments. Through detailed accounts of his travels, Wallace weaves a compelling narrative that serves not only as an ecological survey but also as a critique of contemporary natural history, situating his findings within the broader context of imperial exploration and scientific inquiry in the 19th century. Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist and co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection alongside Charles Darwin, was profoundly influenced by his fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago. His extensive travels provided him with firsthand experiences of the region's unique flora and fauna, as well as its cultural complexities. Wallace's observations were instrumental in shaping his ideas on biodiversity and environmentalism, reflecting his commitment to understanding the natural world and its preservation. This scholarly yet accessible work is highly recommended for anyone interested in natural history, ecology, or the historical intersections of science and colonialism. Wallace's vivid portrayals not only enrich our understanding of the Malay Archipelago but also challenge readers to consider the profound significance of biodiversity conservation today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The History of Malay Archipelago
Table of Contents
Introduction
A small boat slides between neighboring islands, and the living world on either shore changes as if a curtain has been pulled—an invisible boundary revealed by relentless observation. Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago captures this sensation again and again, transforming travel into a method for understanding nature’s hidden order. Through storms, forests, and markets, he pursues a central tension: the unruly abundance of the tropics and the search for patterns that make sense of it. This book begins with curiosity sharpened by hardship and ends with a new geography of life, mapped by footprints, field notes, and wings.
This work is a classic because it unites scientific discovery with literary craft, shaping how generations imagine exploration, evidence, and place. It helped define the modern genre of natural history travel writing, where narrative momentum and empirical rigor reinforce one another. Wallace’s island-by-island chronicle gave readers a template for understanding biodiversity as landscape and lineage, not merely spectacle. Later naturalists drew authority from his example of patient fieldwork; later writers drew inspiration from his vivid sense of scene and scale. The Malay Archipelago endures not as a period piece, but as a living benchmark for how to observe and describe.
Authored by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and first published in 1869, The Malay Archipelago distills nearly eight years of travel across what we now call Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and adjacent regions, including New Guinea and the Moluccas. Written in the immediate aftermath of his journeys of 1854–1862, it combines narrative, data, and reflection. Wallace’s purpose was to document the natural history, peoples, and geographies he encountered, and to explain the striking distribution of species across islands. Without revealing particulars, the book offers the foundations of biogeography and illuminates the observations that informed his thinking on evolution by natural selection.
At its heart, the book is an itinerary of attention. Wallace moves from river delta to mountain ridge, following trade winds, monsoon seasons, and the rhythms of local markets. He collects birds, insects, and plants; meets guides, porters, and boatmen; notes languages, crafts, and customs; and records geological forms, volcanic activity, and soils. Each episode is delivered as evidence and as story, reinforced by counts, comparisons, and careful contrasts between nearby islands. The result is a layered portrait of a region whose seas divide and connect in equal measure, where isolation and exchange together produce extraordinary biological variety.
Wallace wrote as a working naturalist, financing his travel by collecting and selling specimens, and as a thinker refining broad ideas through small facts. He subjects intuition to repeated tests, seeking corroboration in patterns that recur across distance. In this approach, the journey becomes a mobile laboratory, and each island is a controlled comparison. The book’s purpose is neither adventure for its own sake nor pure taxonomy; it is a sustained argument that place matters to life’s diversity, and that careful field observation can reveal the contours of nature’s logic, even when that logic hides behind deceptively narrow straits.
One of the book’s most significant contributions is its articulation of a profound faunal boundary—later known as the Wallace Line—separating Asian and Australasian assemblages across the archipelago. Wallace did not invent the region’s complexity, but he gave it a form that could be studied, debated, and tested. By connecting geography with lineage, he helped establish biogeography as a modern discipline. Readers see how subtle differences in sea depth, island history, and climate shape the distribution of birds, mammals, and insects. This is science built from observation, comparison, and restraint, where compelling ideas grow from carefully constrained claims.
The Malay Archipelago achieves its classic status not only through its insights but through its prose—clear, precise, and animated by scene and texture. Wallace’s descriptions turn data into landscape: light filtered by canopy, the weight of humidity, the suspense of waiting for a rare bird’s flight. The narrative sustains momentum without sacrificing method, drawing readers into practices of collecting and cataloging while keeping the wider argument in view. The balance is exacting: he writes as both witness and analyst, inviting the reader to participate in the act of seeing and to appreciate how disciplined attention converts experience into knowledge.
Written within the nineteenth-century networks of trade, empire, and science, the book also reveals how field knowledge depended on local expertise and global circulation. Wallace’s movements relied on sailors, guides, and suppliers; his specimens entered European collections; his ideas entered transnational debates. The pages convey the logistics of science—boats, boxes, contracts, and weather—as much as its theories. While shaped by its time, the work is attentive to the skills and knowledge of the people he encounters. It records a region as a living mosaic of cultures and ecologies, shaped by currents of exchange that move materials, names, and ideas.
Its influence radiated through natural history, ecology, and the writing of place. The book offered future researchers a field-tested model for reasoning from distribution to history, and it helped set standards for what immersive, ethically minded scientific travel can be. Educators have used it to exemplify how to form and test hypotheses outside the laboratory. Conservationists have found in it early evidence of the significance—and fragility—of island systems. For writers, it demonstrates how narrative can remain faithful to fact while achieving drama, and how a clear point of view can sharpen both observation and understanding.
For contemporary readers, The Malay Archipelago speaks to urgent questions: how diversity arises and persists, how boundaries shape possibility, and how knowledge grows from patience in the field. In an era of rapid change, the book’s method—detailed observation, repeated comparison, and humility before evidence—feels newly vital. It reminds us that to understand global patterns, one must attend to local particulars, and that meaningful insight often emerges from constraints imposed by terrain, weather, and time. The text models a disciplined curiosity that crosses languages and latitudes, showing how close looking can yield durable, transferable understanding.
The themes are enduring: curiosity guided by method, the interplay of isolation and connection, and the constant negotiation between chance encounter and systematic study. There is also the ethical lesson embedded in the work’s fabric—that knowledge is collaborative, built across cultures and generations, and accountable to the places from which it is drawn. The book celebrates wonder without surrendering to spectacle, and it presents discovery as cumulative rather than sudden. In its pages, readers experience science not as abstraction but as practice, and travel not as escape but as the deliberate pursuit of truth.
The Malay Archipelago remains compelling because it offers a rare synthesis: adventure and analysis, lyric scene and measured claim, regional portrait and global insight. Wallace’s purpose—to reveal how the shapes of islands help shape the forms of life—still guides research and resonates as a way of seeing. Readers come away with a map of questions as much as answers, and with renewed respect for observation as a creative act. Its lasting appeal lies in how it enlarges attention, inviting us to cross from the visible to the intelligible, from the crowded market to the quiet order of pattern.
Synopsis
In The Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace presents an account of eight years of travel and scientific work across the islands between the Malay Peninsula and New Guinea. He outlines his purposes: to document the region’s natural history, physical geography, and inhabitants, and to explain patterns of species distribution. The book combines itinerary-based narrative with systematic chapters summarizing observations. Wallace describes his collecting methods, reliance on local assistants, and the logistical constraints imposed by climate, disease, and transport. He frames the archipelago as a vast field laboratory where contrasting faunas meet, and he signals that later chapters will synthesize these journeys into broader biogeographical conclusions.
Wallace begins with an overview of the archipelago’s extent, monsoons, currents, and geological setting, noting volcanic arcs, coral reefs, and shallow continental shelves that shape routes and seasons. He then turns to initial stations such as Singapore and Malacca, describing markets, port activity, and the Malay communities that facilitate travel and trade. These sections set practical context: the cost and care of specimens, the influence of wet and dry monsoons on fieldwork, and the importance of boats for reaching forested interiors. Early observations on vegetation zones and insect abundance hint at the biodiversity gradients he will examine more fully after moving beyond the Straits.
In Borneo, especially around Sarawak and along the great river systems, Wallace conducts extensive collecting in lowland rainforests. He records habits of the orangutan—nest-building, diet, and growth—and compares these observations with knowledge of other apes. Accounts of Dayak longhouses, cultivation, and exchange accompany descriptions of forest structure and clearings relevant to animal distributions. The narrative emphasizes difficulties of transport, the need for skilled hunters, and the rapid decay of tropical specimens. These Bornean chapters introduce a recurring theme: closely allied species replace one another across islands, suggesting historical separations despite the close distances that link these landscapes by sea.
Java provides a contrast of dense population, developed agriculture, and prominent volcanoes. Wallace summarizes roads, plantations, and the role of Dutch administration in enabling movement and posting supplies, while noting the island’s comparatively limited large-mammal fauna. From western Java he proceeds eastward to Bali and Lombok, observing abrupt changes in birds, mammals, and butterflies despite the short sea crossing. Botanical and cultural notes appear alongside lists of characteristic species. These observations mark a shift from descriptive travel to pattern recognition: the fauna west of Lombok resembles continental Asia, whereas the fauna immediately east bears Australasian affinities, a distinction introduced through concrete collecting results.
Wallace formalizes this contrast as a biogeographical boundary, later known as the Wallace Line, which runs between Bali and Lombok and, farther north, between Borneo and Sulawesi. He presents evidence: tigers, rhinoceroses, and woodpeckers occur on the western side, while cockatoos, marsupials, and birds of paradise appear only to the east. Soundings and charts reveal shallow seas on the Sunda Shelf and deep channels in the straits, supporting the idea of former land connections and long-standing marine barriers. These chapters advance the central argument that present distributions reflect past geology, and that a clear division separates Asian and Australasian provinces within the archipelago.
In Sulawesi (Celebes), Wallace describes a highly irregular coastline, mountainous interior, and distinctive biota not wholly aligned with either side. He documents endemic forms such as the maleo, babirusa, and characteristic butterflies, and highlights unusual insect groups whose ranges do not cross surrounding deep seas. Visits to Menado and outlying districts yield series that demonstrate internal subregions and elevational replacements. Notes on Bugis seamanship and trade networks explain how specimens and information circulate between islands. The Celebes chapters reinforce the importance of depth barriers, complex island histories, and the need to consider both isolation and internal diversity when interpreting species ranges.
The narrative then moves through the Moluccas, with Ternate as a principal base beneath the active volcano Gamalama. Wallace recounts expeditions to Halmahera (Gilolo), Ambon, and Ceram, describing clove plantations, village life, and the proximity of rich primary forests. There he obtains notable birdwing butterflies and studies forest birds whose distributions exemplify eastern affinities. Frequent illness, eruptions, and storms frame logistical setbacks and periods of analysis and writing. Wallace outlines collecting routines, preservation techniques, and the role of local guides and hunters. The Moluccan chapters further document sharp faunal turnovers across adjacent islands separated by deep water, consistent with earlier patterns.
In the Aru Islands and along parts of the New Guinea coast, Wallace devotes extended time to acquiring birds of paradise, parrots, and marsupials, while recording Papuan languages, trade, and canoe travel. Detailed notes on forests, sago swamps, and reef flats accompany accounts of cuscus, cassowaries, and other eastern taxa absent from the western shelf. Later journeys to Timor and nearby Lesser Sundas reveal drier climates, limestone ridges, and additional faunal transitions. Throughout, he contrasts Malay and Papuan physical types as understood in nineteenth-century ethnography, linking cultural observations to routes and resources that influence collecting opportunities and the accessibility of different habitats.
Concluding chapters synthesize journeys, specimens, and charts into a general view of the archipelago’s natural history. Wallace correlates species limits with sea depths and proposes that the western islands once formed a peninsula of Asia, while New Guinea and its satellites were connected to Australia, the two regions long divided by deep straits. He summarizes major vertebrate and insect groups, notes rates of island endemism, and presents rules about islands, size, and isolation. Human topics return briefly in comments on trade and settlement. The work closes by emphasizing how travel-based observation supports biogeographical laws and provides a foundation for future evolutionary study.
Historical Context
Alfred Russel Wallace’s book is set in the Malay Archipelago as he found it during his expeditions from 1854 to 1862, a mosaic of polities spanning British, Dutch, and Portuguese colonial spheres and indigenous sultanates. The region included Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi (Celebes), the Moluccas (Maluku), the Aru Islands, New Guinea’s western shores, Timor, and the Lesser Sundas, with Singapore as a key entrepôt. Mid-Victorian imperial logistics—sailing ships supplemented by steam, regular mail packets, and growing port infrastructures—linked these islands to London. Wallace wrote amid intense European competition, expanding administrative grids, missionary presences, and a robust inter-island commerce long operated by Malay, Bugis, and Chinese networks.
The time was one of scientific and commercial acceleration, yet travel remained precarious, governed by monsoon seasons, volatile straits, and shifting local alliances. Political jurisdictions overlapped: Dutch Residents oversaw much of the Netherlands East Indies, British authorities managed the Straits Settlements, and Portuguese officials held East Timor. Sultanates at Ternate and Tidore retained ceremonial sovereignty under treaty. Wallace anchored for long periods at Ternate and made logistical bases in Singapore and Buitenzorg (Bogor, Java), where botanical and scientific institutions thrived. The natural and human geographies he encountered—seafaring Bugis, Dayak longhouses, Ambonese soldiers, Balinese courts—form the book’s frame for interpreting biodiversity and culture across sharply differing islands.
The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824 reorganized British and Dutch spheres in maritime Southeast Asia, transferring Malacca to Britain, Bengkulu to the Dutch, and effectively securing Singapore for Britain while consolidating Dutch claims across the Indonesian archipelago. This settlement shaped subsequent colonial administration, trade routes, and the legal regimes regulating travel, shipping, and natural resource extraction. Wallace’s movements repeatedly crossed the treaty’s boundary lines: he sailed from British Singapore into Dutch-administered islands and back, relying on permits, local passes, and colonial shipping. The treaty’s geopolitical architecture underpins the book’s observations on governance, commerce, and the contrasting conditions he recorded between British and Dutch territories.
The Dutch Cultivation System (Cultuurstelsel), introduced in 1830 by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch after the costly Java War (1825–1830), required villages in Java to devote a portion of land and labor to cash crops—coffee, sugar, indigo, tea—delivered to the state. Revenues remitted to the Netherlands (the batig slot) became a pillar of Dutch public finance in the 1840s–1850s, at times providing a substantial share of national income. The system combined compulsory deliveries, corvée labor (herendiensten), and government monopolies with a complex hierarchy of Dutch officials and indigenous aristocracies (priyayi). It created roads, sugar mills, and warehousing networks, while producing hardship, famines in some districts, and widespread contestation. Administrators in the Preanger Regencies oversaw coffee; sugar proliferated in northeast coastal Java; and the port of Batavia (Jakarta) processed exports. The Buitenzorg (Bogor) Botanical Gardens, founded in 1817, served as a scientific node supporting colonial agriculture. Critiques rose in the 1850s, and by 1870 the Agrarian Law began dismantling core features, moving toward private enterprise. When Wallace visited Java in 1861, he encountered a landscape visibly shaped by this regime: well-kept post-roads, regimented villages, experimental plantations, and scientific institutions intertwined with coercive labor arrangements. His chapters on Java’s ordered countryside, the efficiency of communications, and the pervasive state presence mirror the Cultivation System’s imprint. At the same time, he noted how forced cultivation coexisted with vibrant local markets and artisanal production, observing the tensions between imperial extraction and indigenous livelihoods. These experiences informed his comparisons with regions outside Java, where looser administration, subsistence economies, and different social contracts prevailed. Thus, the book’s depictions of prosperity and constraint in Java, set against other islands, are intelligible only within the political economy created by the Cultivation System, its bureaucratic apparatus, and its moral controversies across the mid-nineteenth century.
The Straits Settlements—Penang, Malacca, and Singapore—were consolidated under the East India Company in 1826 and converted into a British Crown Colony on 1 April 1867. Singapore’s status as a free port, established by Thomas Stamford Raffles in 1819, attracted Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Arab merchants and made it a pivotal hub for mail packets, insurance, and banking. Steam lines linked it to Calcutta and Hong Kong well before the 1869 Suez Canal. Wallace repeatedly used Singapore to recruit assistants, procure supplies, transship specimens to his London agent Samuel Stevens, and gather intelligence on regional conditions. The book reflects the city’s role as the logistical gateway to the archipelago’s interior.
In Borneo’s northwestern quadrant, the Raj of Sarawak began when James Brooke was installed as rajah by the Sultan of Brunei in 1841. Under Brooke—and later his nephew Charles Brooke—the administration pursued anti-piracy campaigns, revenue reform, and alliances with Dayak groups. British naval cooperation, diplomatic recognition, and territorial consolidation around Kuching expanded the polity’s footprint in the 1840s–1850s. Wallace resided in Sarawak in 1854–1855 and collected extensively upriver. The relative stability crafted by Brooke’s government enabled travel and scientific work in zones that had recently been contested. Wallace honored these ties by naming Trogonoptera brookiana, “Rajah Brooke’s birdwing,” after his host, embedding Sarawak’s politics into scientific nomenclature.
Maritime suppression of piracy in the Sulu and north Borneo seas marked the 1840s–1860s, with Royal Navy actions under officers like Henry Keppel (HMS Dido, 1843–1844) and subsequent joint or parallel Dutch operations. Campaigns targeted Iranun and Balangingi raiding networks and disrupted long-standing slave and plunder circuits across the Sulu Archipelago and north coast of Borneo. Although episodic, these expeditions reduced large-scale raiding in key shipping lanes. Wallace’s island-hopping depended on the relative security these operations created. In his accounts of prahu voyages and coastal settlements, he alludes to the lingering threat of raiders while acknowledging that naval patrols and local treaties had tempered dangers along his routes.
The Banjarmasin War (1859–1863) erupted in southeast Borneo after disputes over succession in the Sultanate of Banjar and intensifying Dutch interference. The Netherlands abolished the sultanate in 1860, incorporated the region into direct colonial rule, and fought guerrilla resistance along the Barito River and in the interior. The conflict disrupted commerce and movement across Kalimantan’s southeast, reshaping local authority and trade patterns. Wallace, who had earlier explored Borneo’s northwest and interior tributaries, traveled with awareness of such disturbances. He references constraints on routes, the costs of escorts, and the uneven spread of colonial power, which together explain why certain districts were accessible to him while others remained effectively closed.
Dutch expeditions to Bali in 1846, 1848, and 1849 dismantled northern Balinese states (notably Buleleng), citing issues like wreck-plundering (tawang karang) and regional instability. Lombok remained outside direct Dutch control during Wallace’s travels, ruled by a Balinese dynasty over Sasak populations. These interventions altered tributary relations and maritime policing across the Lombok and Bali Straits. Wallace crossed this zone in the 1850s, observing striking cultural distinctiveness and recording the abrupt faunal turnover between Bali and Lombok that helped crystallize the “Wallace Line.” The book’s juxtaposition of Balinese courtly society and Lombok’s contrasting social order relies on a political landscape recently reshaped by Dutch arms and diplomacy.
In the Moluccas, the sultanates of Ternate and Tidore persisted under Dutch contracts dating to the post-VOC era, their rulers retaining ceremonial prerogatives while Resident officials controlled trade and governance. After the VOC’s dissolution in 1799, the Dutch state reasserted authority in 1816, maintaining forts and a military presence in Ambon, Ternate, and Banda. The old clove monopoly had withered, and spice profits no longer dominated policy, but these islands remained strategic nodes for patrols and provisioning. Wallace used Ternate (1858–1861) as base and depot, treating with local elites and colonial officials. His descriptions of tribute patterns, court ceremonies, and volcano-shadowed towns reflect this layered sovereignty.
Dutch claims in New Guinea’s west were proclaimed in 1828 with the establishment of Fort Du Bus at Triton Bay, abandoned in 1835, then renewed through surveying voyages such as the Etna expedition of 1858 along Geelvink (Cenderawasih) Bay and Humboldt Bay. These missions mapped coasts, gathered ethnographic data, and signaled sovereignty against British and German interests. Wallace lived at Dorey (near Manokwari) in 1858–1859, collecting birds-of-paradise and noting Tidore’s suzerainty ties inland. The tenuous nature of Dutch presence—sporadic, naval-led, reliant on Papuan intermediaries—shaped his provisioning difficulties and his portrayal of Papuan trade, kinship, and mobility in a frontier only nominally under colonial control.
The 1859 Treaty of Lisbon between the Netherlands and Portugal settled long-disputed claims in Timor and nearby islands, transferring Portuguese rights in Flores, Solor, and Pantar to the Dutch while confirming Portuguese sovereignty over East Timor (including enclaves like Oecusse). Administrative consolidation followed on both sides of the island. Wallace visited Timor in 1857, when borders and allegiances remained fluid, journeying mainly through the Dutch sphere around Kupang and observing arid landscapes, sandalwood trade, and mixed Portuguese-Malay cultural influences across the island. The book’s attention to Timor’s hybrid polities and constrained commerce echoes a frontier stabilized diplomatically only after his departure.
Nineteenth-century Chinese migration and commerce transformed the archipelago’s towns and extractive frontiers. In the Straits Settlements and Dutch ports, Chinese kongsi associations organized labor and credit; Chinese merchants dominated retail and provisioning; and Chinese miners worked tin deposits in Bangka and Billiton under government or concessionary regimes from the 1850s. These networks provisioned inland expeditions, mediated local produce, and linked remote coasts to Singapore’s markets. Wallace repeatedly encountered Chinese shopkeepers and transporters in Sarawak, Borneo’s river posts, and the Moluccas, relying on their stores for supplies and shipping. His descriptions of bazaar economies, credit practices, and skilled artisans mirror the archipelago’s mid-century sinophone commercial infrastructure.
The Victorian specimen trade and museum boom formed a powerful socio-economic backdrop. London dealers such as Samuel Stevens, Wallace’s agent, financed collectors through advances and sales to the British Museum, private patrons, and continental institutions like Leiden’s Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie. In the Indies, scientific gardens and herbaria at Buitenzorg, along with colonial post networks, eased packing, preservation, and dispatch. This market incentivized the pursuit of rare birds-of-paradise, beetles, and butterflies, standardizing labels, localities, and notes that later anchored biogeographic theory. The Malay Archipelago’s narrative of camps, carriers, and consignments is inseparable from that metropolitan demand, which shaped routes, seasonality, and the risks Wallace accepted.
On 1 July 1858, the Linnean Society of London heard a joint reading of papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace—Wallace’s essay posted from Ternate in February 1858—announcing the principle of natural selection. The event crystallized ongoing debates in British science and redirected attention to biogeographic evidence. Wallace’s island-by-island comparisons, especially across Lombok–Bali and Borneo–Sulawesi, became exemplary. In The Malay Archipelago (1869), he recounts the circumstances and provides the observational scaffolding for evolutionary inference, embedding a landmark scientific episode within the concrete histories of sailing schedules, colonial offices, and the collecting labor of Malay and Papuan assistants.
The book functions as a social critique by juxtaposing systems of rule—coercive cultivation in Java, treaty-bound sultanates in the Moluccas, Brooke’s paternalistic Sarawak, and relatively ungoverned Papuan shores—and measuring their effects on everyday life. Wallace records forced labor, requisitions, and official monopolies alongside market dynamism and indigenous reciprocity. He challenges racial hierarchies by crediting Malay pilots, Bugis traders, and Papuan hunters with expertise indispensable to science. His contrasts between Singapore’s laissez-faire prosperity and Java’s state-managed abundance highlight the costs of extraction. By portraying administration through roads, passes, and taxes, he exposes how power configured mobility, subsistence, and access to nature.
Politically, Wallace’s attention to treaties, naval patrols, and punitive expeditions reveals a regime policing trade under the banner of order while enabling metropolitan enrichment. He notes how piracy suppression improved safety yet entailed collateral violence and reconfigured coastal economies; how spice monopolies’ legacies lingered in Maluku; and how border treaties like Lisbon (1859) stabilized claims more than they aided local welfare. Social injustices appear in debt bondage, slavery’s late abolition in the Dutch East Indies (1860), and exploitative intermediaries. Without polemic, the book’s empirical method indicts inequity: it uncovers class divides between officials and cultivators and questions imperial moral claims through measured, comparative observation.
Author Biography
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, and theorist whose independent conception of natural selection stands alongside Charles Darwin’s, reshaping biology in the mid-nineteenth century. Through arduous fieldwork in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago, he linked careful observation with bold generalization, helping found biogeography and advancing ideas on species formation, mimicry, and geographical distribution. A prolific writer, he combined travel narrative with theoretical synthesis, and later became a public intellectual engaged with science, society, and ethics. Although often paired with Darwin, Wallace’s voice remained distinct, emphasizing environmental barriers, variation, and geographic patterns as engines of evolutionary change, and sustaining a career that bridged Victorian science and modern evolutionary thought.
Raised with modest means and limited formal schooling, Wallace left school in his teens and trained as a surveyor, a trade that honed his eye for landscape and pattern. He educated himself through public lectures and voracious reading, especially works that married travel with natural history. Alexander von Humboldt’s narratives, Charles Lyell’s geology, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle helped shape his scientific outlook. While working in the English Midlands, he met the young naturalist Henry Walter Bates; their friendship incubated a plan to seek tropical biodiversity firsthand. That blend of practical field skills, self-instruction, and intellectual curiosity became the foundation of Wallace’s method and enduring confidence as an independent investigator.
Wallace and Bates sailed to the Amazon in the late 1840s, pursuing insects, birds, and plants while learning riverine routes and local knowledge. Wallace explored the Rio Negro and upper Amazon, compiling field notes and collecting extensively. Disease, logistics, and the sheer scale of the forest tested his resolve, yet he refined observational habits that would define his science. Disaster struck during his homeward voyage when a shipboard fire destroyed most of his specimens and notes. Back in Britain, he rebuilt his career through memory and surviving materials, publishing A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, which established him as a credible field naturalist and clear-eyed writer.
Undeterred, Wallace embarked for the Malay Archipelago in the mid-1850s, ranging from Borneo and Celebes to the Moluccas and New Guinea. Over years of travel he amassed tens of thousands of specimens, including birds of paradise, orangutans, and vividly patterned butterflies, carefully recording localities and habits. He discerned a sharp faunal break between islands now separated by deep-water channels, a boundary later termed “Wallace’s Line,” and used it to argue that geography constrains evolution. His celebrated book The Malay Archipelago combined ethnography, adventure, and biology, while papers on mimicry and warning coloration demonstrated how natural selection could craft intricate adaptations, especially in insects, across distinct ecological settings.
During a feverish interval in the East, Wallace grasped the principle of natural selection and articulated it in an essay he sent to Charles Darwin. In the late 1850s their ideas were jointly presented at the Linnean Society of London, an event that framed the emerging theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace maintained collegial relations with Darwin while developing his own emphases on variation, environmental barriers, and biogeographic evidence. He later gathered key essays in Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, clarifying points of agreement and difference, including his skepticism about some uses of sexual selection and his interest in how isolation fosters the formation of new species.
Wallace’s mature syntheses cemented his reputation as a founder of biogeography. The Geographical Distribution of Animals mapped zoogeographical regions and their histories, while Island Life examined colonization, extinction, and the effects of glaciation. In Darwinism he defended and elaborated natural selection with abundant empirical examples. Beyond science, he engaged vigorously in public debates, advocating spiritualism, criticizing aspects of compulsory vaccination policy, and arguing for land reform and broader social equity. However contested, these positions reflected a consistent moral concern for evidence, fairness, and the welfare of ordinary people. His range was striking, extending from taxonomy to planetary habitability and technology, conveyed in accessible prose for general readers.
In later years Wallace continued to write widely, reflecting on science and society and offering retrospection in his autobiography, My Life. Living into the early twentieth century, he saw evolutionary biology secure a durable place in public discourse and enjoyed broad esteem as a veteran field naturalist. He died in 1913. His legacy is twofold: as co-discoverer of natural selection and as the principal architect of modern biogeography. The faunal boundary bearing his name remains a teaching touchstone, and his travel books retain their vividness. Contemporary scholarship has restored attention to his distinct perspective, situating him as a creative, ethically engaged voice in Victorian and modern science.
The History of Malay Archipelago
VOLUME 1
Table of Contents
PREFACE.
My readers will naturally ask why I have delayed writing this book for six years after my return; and I feel bound to give them full satisfaction on this point.
When I reached England in the spring of 1862, I found myself surrounded by a room full of packing cases containing the collections that I had, from time to time, sent home for my private use. These comprised nearly three thousand bird-skins of about one thousand species, at least twenty thousand beetles and butterflies of about seven thousand species, and some quadrupeds and land shells besides. A large proportion of these I had not seen for years, and in my then weakened state of health, the unpacking, sorting, and arranging of such a mass of specimens occupied a long time.
I very soon decided that until I had done something towards naming and describing the most important groups in my collection, and had worked out some of the more interesting problems of variation and geographical distribution (of which I had had glimpses while collecting them), I would not attempt to publish my travels. Indeed, I could have printed my notes and journals at once, leaving all reference to questions of natural history for a future work; but, I felt that this would be as unsatisfactory to myself as it would be disappointing to my friends, and uninstructive to the public.
Since my return, up to this date, I have published eighteen papers in the "Transactions" or "Proceedings of the Linnean Zoological and Entomological Societies", describing or cataloguing portions of my collections, along with twelve others in various scientific periodicals on more general subjects connected with them.
Nearly two thousand of my Coleoptera, and many hundreds of my butterflies, have been already described by various eminent naturalists, British and foreign; but a much larger number remains undescribed. Among those to whom science is most indebted for this laborious work, I must name Mr. F. P. Pascoe[1], late President of the Entomological Society of London, who had almost completed the classification and description of my large collection of Longicorn beetles (now in his possession), comprising more than a thousand species, of which at least nine hundred were previously undescribed and new to European cabinets.
The remaining orders of insects, comprising probably more than two thousand species, are in the collection of Mr. William Wilson Saunders, who has caused the larger portion of them to be described by good entomologists. The Hymenoptera alone amounted to more than nine hundred species, among which were two hundred and eighty different kinds of ants, of which two hundred were new.
The six years' delay in publishing my travels thus enables me to give what I hope may be an interesting and instructive sketch of the main results yet arrived at by the study of my collections; and as the countries I have to describe are not much visited or written about, and their social and physical conditions are not liable to rapid change, I believe and hope that my readers will gain much more than they will lose by not having read my book six years ago, and by this time perhaps forgotten all about it.
I must now say a few words on the plan of my work.
My journeys to the various islands were regulated by the seasons and the means of conveyance. I visited some islands two or three times at distant intervals, and in some cases had to make the same voyage four times over. A chronological arrangement would have puzzled my readers. They would never have known where they were, and my frequent references to the groups of islands, classed in accordance with the peculiarities of their animal productions and of their human inhabitants, would have been hardly intelligible. I have adopted, therefore, a geographical, zoological, and ethnological arrangement, passing from island to island in what seems the most natural succession, while I transgress the order in which I myself visited them, as little as possible.
I divide the Archipelago into five groups of islands, as follows:
I. THE INDO-MALAY ISLANDS: comprising the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra.
II. THE TIMOR GROUP: comprising the islands of Timor, Flores, Sumbawa, and Lombock, with several smaller ones.
III. CELEBES: comprising also the Sula Islands and Bouton.
IV. THE MOLUCCAN GROUP: comprising Bouru, Ceram, Batchian, Gilolo, and Morty; with the smaller islands of Ternate, Tidore, Makian, Kaióa, Amboyna, Banda, Goram, and Matabello.
V. THE PAPUAN GROUP: comprising the great island of New Guinea, with the Aru Islands, Mysol, Salwatty, Waigiou, and several others. The Ke Islands are described with this group on account of their ethnology, though zoologically and geographically they belong to the Moluccas.
The chapters relating to the separate islands of each of these groups are followed by one on the Natural History of that group; and the work may thus be divided into five parts, each treating one of the natural divisions of the Archipelago.
The first chapter is an introductory one, on the Physical Geography of the whole region; and the last is a general sketch of the races of man in the Archipelago and the surrounding countries. With this explanation, and a reference to the maps which illustrate the work, I trust that my readers will always know where they are, and in what direction they are going.
I am well aware that my book is far too small for the extent of the subjects it touches upon. It is a mere sketch; but so far as it goes, I have endeavoured to make it an accurate one. Almost the whole of the narrative and descriptive portions were written on the spot, and have had little more than verbal alterations. The chapters on Natural History, as well as many passages in other parts of the work, have been written in the hope of exciting an interest in the various questions connected with the origin of species and their geographical distribution. In some cases I have been able to explain my views in detail; while in others, owing to the greater complexity of the subject, I have thought it better to confine myself to a statement of the more interesting facts of the problem, whose solution is to be found in the principles developed by Mr. Darwin in his various works. The numerous illustrations will, it is believed, add much to the interest and value of the book. They have been made from my own sketches, from photographs, or from specimens—and such, only subjects that would really illustrate the narrative or the descriptions, have been chosen.
I have to thank Messrs. Walter and Henry Woodbury, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making in Java, for a number of photographs of scenery and of natives, which have been of the greatest assistance to me. Mr. William Wilson Saunders has kindly allowed me to figure the curious horned flies; and to Mr. Pascoe I am indebted for a loan of two of the very rare Longicorns which appear in the plate of Bornean beetles. All the other specimens figured are in my own collection.
As the main object of all my journeys was to obtain specimens of natural history, both for my private collection and to supply duplicates to museums and amateurs, I will give a general statement of the number of specimens I collected, and which reached home in good condition. I must premise that I generally employed one or two, and sometimes three Malay servants to assist me; and for nearly half the time had the services of an English lad, Charles Allen. I was just eight years away from England, but as I travelled about fourteen thousand miles within the Archipelago, and made sixty or seventy separate journeys, each involving some preparation and loss of time, I do not think that more than six years were really occupied in collecting.
I find that my Eastern collections amounted to:
310 specimens of Mammalia. 100 specimens of Reptiles. 8,050 specimens of Birds. 7,500 specimens of Shells. 13,100 specimens of Lepidoptera. 83,200 specimens of Coleoptera. 13,400 specimens of other Insects. 125,660 specimens of natural history in all.
It now only remains for me to thank all those friends to whom I am indebted for assistance or information. My thanks are more especially due to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, through whose valuable recommendations I obtained important aid from our own Government and from that of Holland; and to Mr. William Wilson Saunders, whose kind and liberal encouragement in the early portion of my journey was of great service to me. I am also greatly indebted to Mr. Samuel Stevens (who acted as my agent), both for the care he took of my collections, and for the untiring assiduity with which he kept me supplied, both with useful information and with whatever necessaries I required.
I trust that these, and all other friends who have been in any way interested in my travels and collections, may derive from the perusal of my book, some faint reflexion of the pleasures I myself enjoyed amid the scenes and objects it describes.
CHAPTER I. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.
From a look at a globe or a map of the Eastern hemisphere, we shall perceive between Asia and Australia a number of large and small islands forming a connected group distinct from those great masses of land, and having little connection with either of them. Situated upon the Equator, and bathed by the tepid water of the great tropical oceans, this region enjoys a climate more uniformly hot and moist than almost any other part of the globe, and teems with natural productions which are elsewhere unknown. The richest of fruits and the most precious of spices are Indigenous here[1q]. It produces the giant flowers of the Rafflesia[3], the great green-winged Ornithoptera (princes among the butterfly tribes), the man-like Orangutan, and the gorgeous Birds of Paradise. It is inhabited by a peculiar and interesting race of mankind—the Malay, found nowhere beyond the limits of this insular tract, which has hence been named the Malay Archipelago[2].
To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travellers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored, being divided between Asia and the Pacific Islands. It thus happens that few persons realize that, as a whole, it is comparable with the primary divisions of the globe, and that some of its separate islands are larger than France or the Austrian Empire. The traveller, however, soon acquires different ideas. He sails for days or even weeks along the shores of one of these great islands, often so great that its inhabitants believe it to be a vast continent. He finds that voyages among these islands are commonly reckoned by weeks and months, and that their several inhabitants are often as little known to each other as are the native races of the northern to those of the southern continent of America. He soon comes to look upon this region as one apart from the rest of the world, with its own races of men and its own aspects of nature; with its own ideas, feelings, customs, and modes of speech, and with a climate, vegetation, and animated life altogether peculiar to itself.
From many points of view these islands form one compact geographical whole, and as such they have always been treated by travellers and men of science; but, a more careful and detailed study of them under various aspects reveals the unexpected fact that they are divisible into two portions nearly equal in extent which differ widely in their natural products, and really form two parts of the primary divisions of the earth. I have been able to prove this in considerable detail by my observations on the natural history of the various parts of the Archipelago; and, as in the description of my travels and residence in the several islands I shall have to refer continually to this view, and adduce facts in support of it, I have thought it advisable to commence with a general sketch of the main features of the Malayan region as will render the facts hereafter brought forward more interesting, and their bearing upon the general question more easily understood. I proceed, therefore, to sketch the limits and extent of the Archipelago, and to point out the more striking features of its geology, physical geography, vegetation, and animal life.
Definition and Boundaries.—For reasons which depend mainly on the distribution of animal life, I consider the Malay Archipelago to include the Malay Peninsula as far as Tenasserim and the Nicobar Islands on the west, the Philippines on the north, and the Solomon Islands, beyond New Guinea, on the east. All the great islands included within these limits are connected together by innumerable smaller ones, so that no one of them seems to be distinctly separated from the rest. With but few exceptions all enjoy an uniform and very similar climate, and are covered with a luxuriant forest vegetation. Whether we study their form and distribution on maps, or actually travel from island to island, our first impression will be that they form a connected whole, all the parts of which are intimately related to each other.
Extent of the Archipelago and Islands.—The Malay Archipelago extends for more than 4,000 miles in length from east to west, and is about 1,300 in breadth from north to south. It would stretch over an expanse equal to that of all Europe from the extreme west far into Central Asia, or would cover the widest parts of South America, and extend far beyond the land into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It includes three islands larger than Great Britain; and in one of them, Borneo, the whole of the British Isles might be set down, and would be surrounded by a sea of forests. New Guinea, though less compact in shape, is probably larger than Borneo. Sumatra is about equal in extent to Great Britain; Java, Luzon, and Celebes are each about the size of Ireland. Eighteen more islands are, on the average, as large as Jamaica; more than a hundred are as large as the Isle of Wight; while the isles and islets of smaller size are innumerable.
The absolute extent of land in the Archipelago is not greater than that contained by Western Europe from Hungary to Spain; but, owing to the manner in which the land is broken up and divided, the variety of its productions is rather in proportion to the immense surface over which the islands are spread, than to the quantity of land which they contain.
Geological Contrasts.—One of the chief volcanic belts upon the globe passes through the Archipelago, and produces a striking contrast in the scenery of the volcanic and non-volcanic islands. A curving line, marked out by scores of active, and hundreds of extinct, volcanoes may be traced through the whole length of Sumatra and Java, and thence by the islands of Bali, Lombock, Sumbawa, Flores, the Serwatty Islands, Banda, Amboyna, Batchian, Makian, Tidore, Ternate, and Gilolo, to Morty Island. Here there is a slight but well-marked break, or shift, of about 200 miles to the westward, where the volcanic belt begins again in North Celebes, and passes by Siau and Sanguir to the Philippine Islands along the eastern side of which it continues, in a curving line, to their northern extremity. From the extreme eastern bend of this belt at Banda, we pass onwards for 1,000 miles over a non-volcanic district to the volcanoes observed by Dampier[4], in 1699, on the north-eastern coast of New Guinea, and can there trace another volcanic belt through New Britain, New Ireland, and the Solomon Islands, to the eastern limits of the Archipelago.
In the whole region occupied by this vast line of volcanoes, and for a considerable breadth on each side of it, earthquakes are of continual recurrence, slight shocks being felt at intervals of every few weeks or months, while more severe ones, shaking down whole villages, and doing more or less injury to life and property, are sure to happen, in one part or another of this district, almost every year. On many of the islands the years of the great earthquakes form the chronological epochs of the native inhabitants, by the aid of which the ages of their children are remembered, and the dates of many important events are determined.
I can only briefly allude to the many fearful eruptions that have taken place in this region. In the amount of injury to life and property, and in the magnitude of their effects, they have not been surpassed by any upon record. Forty villages were destroyed by the eruption of Papandayang in Java, in 1772, when the whole mountain was blown up by repeated explosions, and a large lake left in its place. By the great eruption of Tomboro in Sumbawa, in 1815, 12,000 people were destroyed, and the ashes darkened the air and fell thickly upon the earth and sea for 300 miles around. Even quite recently, since I left the country, a mountain which had been quiescent for more than 200 years suddenly burst into activity. The island of Makian, one of the Moluccas, was rent open in 1646 by a violent eruption which left a huge chasm on one side, extending into the heart of the mountain. It was, when I last visited it in 1860, clothed with vegetation to the summit, and contained twelve populous Malay villages. On the 29th of December, 1862, after 215 years of perfect inaction, it again suddenly burst forth, blowing up and completely altering the appearance of the mountain, destroying the greater part of the inhabitants, and sending forth such volumes of ashes as to darken the air at Ternate, forty miles off, and to almost entirely destroy the growing crops on that and the surrounding islands.
The island of Java contains more volcanoes, active and extinct, than any other known district of equal extent. They are about forty-five in number, and many of them exhibit most beautiful examples of the volcanic cone on a large scale, single or double, with entire or truncated summits, and averaging 10,000 feet high.
It is now well ascertained that almost all volcanoes have been slowly built up by the accumulation of matter—mud, ashes, and lava—ejected by themselves. The openings or craters, however, frequently shift their position, so that a country may be covered with a more or less irregular series of hills in chains and masses, only here and there rising into lofty cones, and yet the whole may be produced by true volcanic action. In this manner the greater part of Java has been formed. There has been some elevation, especially on the south coast, where extensive cliffs of coral limestone are found; and there may be a substratum of older stratified rocks; but still essentially Java is volcanic, and that noble and fertile island—the very garden of the East, and perhaps upon the whole the richest, the best cultivated, and the best governed tropical island in the world—owes its very existence to the same intense volcanic activity which still occasionally devastates its surface.
The great island of Sumatra exhibits, in proportion to its extent, a much smaller number of volcanoes, and a considerable portion of it has probably a non-volcanic origin.
To the eastward, the long string of islands from Java, passing by the north of Timor and away to Banda, are probably all due to volcanic action. Timor itself consists of ancient stratified rocks, but is said to have one volcano near its centre.
Going northward, Amboyna, a part of Bouru, and the west end of Ceram, the north part of Gilolo, and all the small islands around it, the northern extremity of Celebes, and the islands of Siau and Sanguir, are wholly volcanic. The Philippine Archipelago contains many active and extinct volcanoes, and has probably been reduced to its present fragmentary condition by subsidences attending on volcanic action.
All along this great line of volcanoes are to be found more or less palpable signs of upheaval and depression of land. The range of islands south of Sumatra, a part of the south coast of Java and of the islands east of it, the west and east end of Timor, portions of all the Moluccas, the Ke and Aru Islands, Waigiou, and the whole south and east of Gilolo, consist in a great measure of upraised coral-rock, exactly corresponding to that now forming in the adjacent seas. In many places I have observed the unaltered surfaces of the elevated reefs, with great masses of coral standing up in their natural position, and hundreds of shells so fresh-looking that it was hard to believe that they had been more than a few years out of the water; and, in fact, it is very probable that such changes have occurred within a few centuries.
The united lengths of these volcanic belts is about ninety degrees, or one-fourth of the entire circumference of the globe. Their width is about fifty miles; but, for a space of two hundred miles on each side of them, evidences of subterranean action are to be found in recently elevated coral-rock, or in barrier coral-reefs, indicating recent submergence. In the very centre or focus of the great curve of volcanoes is placed the large island of Borneo, in which no sign of recent volcanic action has yet been observed, and where earthquakes, so characteristic of the surrounding regions, are entirely unknown. The equally large island of New Guinea occupies another quiescent area, on which no sign of volcanic action has yet been discovered. With the exception of the eastern end of its northern peninsula, the large and curiously-shaped island of Celebes is also entirely free from volcanoes; and there is some reason to believe that the volcanic portion has once formed a separate island. The Malay Peninsula is also non-volcanic.
The first and most obvious division of the Archipelago would therefore be into quiescent and volcanic regions, and it might, perhaps, be expected that such a division would correspond to some differences in the character of the vegetation and the forms of life. This is the case, however, to a very limited extent; and we shall presently see that, although this development of subterranean fires is on so vast a scale—has piled up chains of mountains ten or twelve thousand feet high—has broken up continents and raised up islands from the ocean—yet it has all the character of a recent action which has not yet succeeded in obliterating the traces of a more ancient distribution of land and water.
Contrasts of Vegetation.—Placed immediately upon the Equator and surrounded by extensive oceans, it is not surprising that the various islands of the Archipelago should be almost always clothed with a forest vegetation from the level of the sea to the summits of the loftiest mountains. This is the general rule. Sumatra, New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines and the Moluccas, and the uncultivated parts of Java and Celebes, are all forest countries, except a few small and unimportant tracts, due perhaps, in some cases, to ancient cultivation or accidental fires. To this, however, there is one important exception in the island of Timor and all the smaller islands around it, in which there is absolutely no forest such as exists in the other islands, and this character extends in a lesser degree to Flores, Sumbawa, Lombock, and Bali.
In Timor the most common trees are Eucalypti of several species, also characteristic of Australia, with sandalwood, acacia, and other sorts in less abundance. These are scattered over the country more or less thickly, but, never so as to deserve the name of a forest. Coarse and scanty grasses grow beneath them on the more barren hills, and a luxuriant herbage in the moister localities. In the islands between Timor and Java there is often a more thickly wooded country abounding in thorny and prickly trees. These seldom reach any great height, and during the force of the dry season they almost completely lose their leaves, allowing the ground beneath them to be parched up, and contrasting strongly with the damp, gloomy, ever-verdant forests of the other islands. This peculiar character, which extends in a less degree to the southern peninsula of Celebes and the east end of Java, is most probably owing to the proximity of Australia. The south-east monsoon, which lasts for about two-thirds of the year (from March to November), blowing over the northern parts of that country, produces a degree of heat and dryness which assimilates the vegetation and physical aspect of the adjacent islands to its own. A little further eastward in Timor and the Ke Islands, a moister climate prevails; the southeast winds blowing from the Pacific through Torres Straits and over the damp forests of New Guinea, and as a consequence, every rocky islet is clothed with verdure to its very summit. Further west again, as the same dry winds blow over a wider and wider extent of ocean, they have time to absorb fresh moisture, and we accordingly find the island of Java possessing a less and less arid climate, until in the extreme west near Batavia, rain occurs more or less all the year round, and the mountains are everywhere clothed with forests of unexampled luxuriance.
Contrasts in Depth of Sea.—It was first pointed out by Mr. George Windsor Earl, in a paper read before the Royal Geographical Society in 1845, and subsequently in a pamphlet "On the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia", dated 1855, that a shallow sea connected the great islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo with the Asiatic continent, with which their natural productions generally agreed; while a similar shallow sea connected New Guinea and some of the adjacent islands to Australia, all being characterised by the presence of marsupials[5].
We have here a clue to the most radical contrast in the Archipelago, and by following it out in detail I have arrived at the conclusion that we can draw a line among the islands, which shall so divide them that one-half shall truly belong to Asia, while the other shall no less certainly be allied to Australia. I term these respectively the Indo-Malayan and the Austro-Malayan divisions of the Archipelago.
On referring to pages 12, 13, and 36 of Mr. Earl's pamphlet, it will be seen that he maintains the former connection of Asia and Australia as an important part of his view; whereas, I dwell mainly on their long continued separation. Notwithstanding this and other important differences between us, to him undoubtedly belongs the merit of first indicating the division of the Archipelago into an Australian and an Asiatic region, which it has been my good fortune to establish by more detailed observations.
Contrasts in Natural Productions.—To understand the importance of this class of facts, and its bearing upon the former distribution of land and sea, it is necessary to consider the results arrived at by geologists and naturalists in other parts of the world.
It is now generally admitted that the present distribution of living things on the surface of the earth is mainly the result of the last series of changes that it has undergone. Geology teaches us that the surface of the land, and the distribution of land and water, is everywhere slowly changing. It further teaches us that the forms of life which inhabit that surface have, during every period of which we possess any record, been also slowly changing.
It is not now necessary to say anything about how either of those changes took place; as to that, opinions may differ; but as to the fact that the changes themselves have occurred, from the earliest geological ages down to the present day, and are still going on, there is no difference of opinion. Every successive stratum of sedimentary rock, sand, or gravel, is a proof that changes of level have taken place; and the different species of animals and plants, whose remains are found in these deposits, prove that corresponding changes did occur in the organic world.
Taking, therefore, these two series of changes for granted, most of the present peculiarities and anomalies in the distribution of species may be directly traced to them. In our own islands, with a very few trifling exceptions, every quadruped, bird, reptile, insect, and plant, is found also on the adjacent continent. In the small islands of Sardinia and Corsica, there are some quadrupeds and insects, and many plants, quite peculiar. In Ceylon, more closely connected to India than Britain is to Europe, many animals and plants are different from those found in India, and peculiar to the island. In the Galapagos Islands, almost every indigenous living thing is peculiar to them, though closely resembling other kinds found in the nearest parts of the American continent.
