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The Natural History Museum in London has created this handsome facsimile from Wallace's personal copy of the 10th edition, which includes a number of handwritten annotations made by Wallace himself.
The Malay Archipelago is a vivid, momentous and far-reaching account of Alfred Russel Wallace's eight-year exploration of South East Asia in the 1850s and 60s.
Wallace's travels led him to conceive of evolution through natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, and his and Darwin's theories were jointly proposed in a paper to the Linnean Society in 1858.
During his travels he accumulated an astonishing 125,660 specimens, including more than 5,000 species new to western science, establishing his reputation as the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and the 'father of biogeography'.
This edition was published in 1890, 28 years after the first, and has additional information from subsequent collectors and footnotes in which Wallace corrects some earlier errors. It features illustrations by contemporary artists Thomas Baines, Walter Hood Fitch, John Gerrard Keulemans, E. W. Robinson, Joseph Wolf and T. W. Wood, and includes two fold-out colour maps of the archipelago, one showing the routes he took and the other the volcanic belts in the region.
