Athena Review Image Archive ™
Alfred Russell Wallace, portrait (1848)
Portrait of Alfred Russell Wallace at age 25 (photo: 1848).
Alfred
Russell Wallace, the British naturalist and explorer (1823 -1913),
is shown in this 1848 daguerrotype at age 25. After extensive
fieldwork in the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago, Wallace became
famous for independently conceiving the theory of evolution
through natural selection, almost at the same time as Charles Darwin.
In 1858 Wallace published some of his papers jointly with others by
Darwin, which prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Wallace
(1859) identified the faunal divide which divides the Indonesian
archipelago into a western portion where animals are largely of Asian
origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna are from Australasia.
This barrier is now called the Wallace Line. He was highly
knowledgable on the geographical distribution of animal species (1876),
and developed original theories on many aspects of animal adaptations,
including the concept of protective coloration.
References:
Wallace, A.R. 1858: On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.
Wallace, A.R. 1859: On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago.
Wallace, A.R. 1869. The Malay Archipelago. Harper.
Wallace, A.R. 1876. The Geographical Distribution of Animals Harper & Bros.
Wallace, A.R. 1889. Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. Ward, Lock.
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