Abstract

Wallace's Malay Archipelago

The article discusses the book The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orangutan and the Bird of Paradise, by Alfred Russell Wallace. Though nominally a book of travel, Wallace's crowded chapters are arranged with reference to a scientific thesis, viz., that in the East Indian Archipelago there meet, and have only recently begun to mingle, two quite distinct races of men, the Malays and the Papuans, and that these islands are really the fragments of two continental systems, between which it is possible to draw accurately the dividing line. The author's observations, therefore, on the fauna and inhabitants of each island which he visited are directly used as an argument in establishing first its relation to the mainland, and then to its sister islands; the probable order of its dismemberment, through volcanic activity producing subsidence of the adjoining parts; and some of the vicissitudes of elevation it may have undergone in reaching its present state.