The Malay Archipelago is a book by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace which chronicles his scientific exploration, during the eight-year period 1854 to 1862, of the southern portion of the Malay Archipelago including Malaysia, Singapore, the islands of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, and the island of New Guinea. It was published in two volumes in 1869, delayed by Wallace's ill health and the work needed to describe the many specimens he brought home. The book went through ten editions in the nineteenth century; it has been reprinted many times since, and has been translated into at least twelve languages.
The book describes each island that he visited in turn, giving a detailed account of its physical and human geography, its volcanoes, and the variety of animals and plants that he found and collected. At the same time, he describes his experiences, the difficulties of travel, and the help he received from the different peoples that he met. The preface notes that he travelled over 14,000 miles and collected 125,660 natural history specimens, mostly of insects though also thousands of molluscs, birds, mammals and reptiles.
The work was illustrated with engravings, based on Wallace's observations and collection, by the leading illustrators Thomas Baines, Walter Hood Fitch, John Gerrard Keulemans, E. W. Robinson, Joseph Wolf and T. W. Wood.
The Malay Archipelago attracted many reviews, with interest from scientific, geographic, church and general periodicals. Reviewers noted and sometimes disagreed with various aspects of his theories, especially the division of fauna and flora along what soon became known as the Wallace line, natural selection and uniformitarianism. Nearly all agreed that he had provided an interesting and comprehensive account of the geography, natural history, and peoples of the archipelago, which little was known about to readers at the time, in addition to the extensive breadth of specimens collected. The book is much cited, and is Wallace's most successful, both commercially and as a piece of literature.
Context
In 1847, Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates, both in their early twenties, agreed that they would jointly make a collecting trip to the Amazon "towards solving the problem of origin of species". (Charles Darwin's book on the Origin of Species was not published until 11 years later, in 1859. It was based on Darwin's own long collecting trip on HMS Beagle, its publication precipitated by a famous letter from Wallace, sent during the period covered by The Malay Archipelago while he was staying in Ternate, which described the theory of evolution by natural selection in outline.) Wallace and Bates had been inspired by reading the American entomologist William Henry Edwards's pioneering 1847 book A Voyage Up the River Amazon, with a residency at Pará.Edwards, 1847. Bates stayed in the Amazons for 11 years, going on to write The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863); however, Wallace, ill with fever, went home in 1852 with thousands of specimens, some for science and some for sale. The ship and his collection were destroyed by fire at sea near the Guianas. Rather than giving up, Wallace wrote about the Amazon in both prose and poetry, and then set sail again, this time for the Malay Archipelago.
Overview
The preface summarises Wallace's travels, the thousands of specimens he collected, and some of the results from their analysis after his return to England. In the preface he notes that he travelled over 14,000 miles and collected 125,660 specimens, mostly of insects: 83,200 beetles, 13,100 butterflies and moths, 13,400 other insects. He also returned to England 7,500 "shells" (such as molluscs), 8,050 birds, 310 mammals and 100 reptiles.Wallace, 1869. p. xiv.
The book is dedicated to Charles Darwin, but as Wallace explains in the preface, he has chosen to avoid discussing the evolutionary implications of his discoveries. Instead he confines himself to the "interesting facts of the problem, whose solution is to be found in the principles developed by Mr. Darwin",Wallace, 1869. p. xii. so from a scientific point of view, the book is largely a descriptive natural history. This modesty belies the fact that while in Sarawak in 1855 Wallace wrote the paper On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species, concluding with the evolutionary "Sarawak Law", "Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species", three years before he fatefully wrote to Darwin proposing the concept of natural selection.
The first chapter describes the physical geography and geology of the islands with particular attention to the role of volcanoes and earthquakes. It also discusses the overall pattern of the flora and fauna including the fact that the islands can be divided, by what would eventually become known as the Wallace line, into two parts, those whose animals are more closely related to those of Asia and those whose fauna is closer to that of Australia.Wallace, 1869. Volume 1, pp. 1–30.
The following chapters describe in detail the places Wallace visited. Wallace includes numerous observations on the people, their languages, ways of living, and social organisation, as well as on the plants and animals found in each location. He talks about the biogeographic patterns he observes and their implications for natural history, in terms both of the movement of species and of the geologic history of the region. He also narrates some of his personal experiences during his travels.Wallace, 1869. The final chapter is an overview of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions among the people who live in the region and speculation about what such divisions might indicate about their history.Wallace, 1869. Volume 2, pp. 439–464.
Publication
The Malay Archipelago was largely written at Treeps, Wallace's wife's family home in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex. It was first published in Spring 1869 in two volumes by Macmillan (London), with a reprint (also in two volumes) marked 'second edition' the same year. The first US edition year by Harper & Brothers (New York) appeared in 1869 in a single volume. Wallace returned to England in 1862, but explains in the Preface that given the large quantity of specimens and his poor health after his stay in the tropics, it took a long time. He noted that he could at once have printed his notes and journals, but felt that doing that would have been disappointing and unhelpful. Instead, therefore, he waited until he had published papers on his discoveries, and other scientists had described and named as new species some 2,000 of his beetles (Coleoptera), and over 900 Hymenoptera including 200 new species of ant.Wallace, 1869. pp. vii–ix. The book went through 10 editions, with the last published in 1890. It has been translated into at least twelve languages.
Illustrations
The illustrations are, according to the Preface, made from Wallace's own sketches, photographs, or specimens. Wallace thanks Walter and Henry Woodbury for some photographs of scenery and native people. He acknowledges William Wilson Saunders and Mr Pascoe for horned flies and very rare longhorn beetles: all the rest were from his own enormous collection.
The original drawings were made directly on to the wood engraving blocks by leading artists Thomas Baines, Walter Hood Fitch, John Gerrard Keulemans, E. W. Robinson, Joseph Wolf, and T. W. Wood, according to the List of Illustrations. Wood also illustrated Darwin's The Descent of Man, while Robinson and Wolf both also provided illustrations for The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863), written by Wallace's friend Henry Walter Bates.See Commons Category:E. W. Robinson
Contents
Volume 1
1 Physical Geography Wallace sets out the scope of the book, describing what "To the ordinary Englishman" is "perhaps the least known part of the globe."Wallace, 1869. Volume 1, p. 2. The archipelago, he explains, stretches more than 4,000 miles east to west, and about 1,300 miles north to south, with over twenty sizeable islands and innumerable isles and islets.
Indo-Malay Islands
2 Singapore Wallace gives a lively description of the people of the town, and of the wildlife of the island. He finds the Chinese the most noticeable of the people, while in one square mile of forest he found 700 species of beetles including 130 longhorns.
3 Malacca and Mount Ophir. He finds an attractive old Portuguese town, and beautiful birds such as the blue-billed gaper. The flora includes pitcher plants and giant ferns. There are tigers and rhinoceros, but the elephants had already disappeared.
4 Borneo—The Orang-Utan He stays in Sarawak, and finds the Simunjon coal-works convenient, as the workers are happy to be paid a little for insects they find, including locusts, stick insects and about 24 new species of beetles each day. In all he collects 2000 species of beetle in Borneo, nearly all at the coal mine site; he also found a flying frog and orang-utans in the same place.
5 Borneo—Journey in the Interior Wallace returns to Sarawak, where he stays in the circular 'head-house' of a Dyak village, travels upriver, and describes the Durian, praising it as the king of fruits with exquisite and unsurpassed flavour,Wallace, 1869. Volume 1, pp. 117–119. and the Dyak's slender bamboo bridges,Wallace, 1869. Volume 1, pp. 123–124. as well as ferns and Nepenthes pitcher plants. On a mountain he finds the only place in his entire journey where moths are abundant; he collected 1,386 moths on a total of 26 nights, but over 800 of these were caught on four very wet and dark nights. He attributes the reason to having a ceiling that effectively trapped the moths; in other houses the moths at once escaped into the roof, and he recommends naturalists to bring a verandah-shaped tent to enable them to catch moths.Wallace, 1869. Volume 1, pp. 132–136.
6 Borneo—The Dyaks Wallace describes the Dyak people, expressing surprise that despite Thomas Malthus's predictions for the human population of the world, and the lack of any obvious restraints, the Dyak population appeared to be stable.
7 Java Wallace stayed three and a half months in Java, where he admires the system of government and the contented people. The population is, he notes, rapidly increasing, from 3.5 million in 1800 to 5.5 million in 1826 and 14 million in 1865. He enjoys the fine Hindu archaeological sites, and the flora of the mountain tops which have plants resembling those of Europe, including the royal cowslip, Primula imperialis, endemic to one mountain top.
8 Sumatra He visits Sumatra while the coastal forest of Nipa palms is flooded to a distance of several miles from the sea. The river houses at Palembang are built on rafts moored to piles, rising and falling with the tide. He admires the traditional houses of the villages, but had difficulty getting any food there, the people living entirely on rice through the rainy season. He discovers some new species of butterfly including Papilio memnon which occurs in different forms, some being Batesian mimics of Papilio coon. He admires the camouflage of a species of dead leaf butterfly, Kallima paralekta. He is pleased that one of his hunters brings him a male hornbill, shot at its nest hole while feeding the female.
9 Natural History Of The Indo-Malay Islands. Wallace sketches the natural history of the islands to the West of the Wallace line, noting that the flora is like that of India, as described by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in his 1855 Flora Indica. Similarly the mammals are similar to those of India, including the tiger, leopard, rhinoceros and elephant. The bird species had diverged, but the genera were mainly the same, and some species of (for example) woodpecker, parrot, kingfisher and pheasant were found from India to Java and Borneo, while many more were found both in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula.
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