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The Malay Archipelago is a work of astounding breadth and originality that chronicles the British naturalist's scientific exploration of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and New Guinea between 1854 and 1862. An intrepid explorer who earned his living by collecting bird skins, Wallace also catalogued the vast number of plant and animal species that inhabited this unique geographical area. In addition he includes numerous observations on the people, their languages, and ways of living and social organisation as well as geological insights into the nature and activity of volcanoes and the destructive force of nature. Colourful personal anecdotes based on experiences during his travels also pepper the text.
First published in 1869, The Malay Archipelago provided some of the initial evidence of the modern theory of evolution.
Please note: this work was originally published in two volumes. Since its availability in the public domain the market has unfortunately become flooded with poor-quality, scanned, OCR'ed versions that are often incomplete. Amazon has very unhelpfully lumped information and customer reviews about all these versions together, causing unnecessary confusion. We have confirmed with the publisher that this is a complete edition that was thoroughly proof-read prior to printing. It also contains the original woodcut drawings which are omitted in many of the other reprints.
Cambridge University Press have also done a facsimile reprint of this work. For those wondering about the discrepancy in page count (the CUP edition has over 1000 pages), the typesetting for this version was completely redone, reducing the page count to 531 pages.
