An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, Smith Charles H., Costa James, Collard David A.

Wallace declared his eight years of exploration in southeast Asia to be the central and controlling incident of his life. As 2019 marks one hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Malay Archipelago, Wallaces canonical work chronicling his epic voyage, this collaborative book gathers an interdisciplinary array of writers to celebrate Wallaces remarkable life and diverse scholarly accomplishments. Wallace left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-taught, a voracious curiosity and appetite for learning sustaining him throughout his long life. After years as a surveyor and builder, in 1848 he left Britain to become a professional natural history collector in the Amazon, where he spent four years. Then, in 1854, he departed for the Malay Archipelago. It was on this voyage that he constructed a theory of natural selection similar to the one Charles Darwin was developing, and the two copublished papers on the subject in 1858, some sixteen months before the release of Darwins On the Origin of Species.