Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)
was a naturalist and biogeographer who co-founded the principle of
Natural Selection with Darwin. Unlike Darwin, Wallace came from a
working class family, had limited formal education, and started out
as a paid collector of exotic specimens from South America and
Southeast Asia. It was during a malarial illness in Ternate, the
Molluccas Islands, that he came upon the idea of the role of
natural selection in bringing about descendant species from parent
species. On June 18, 1858, he put his ideas down in a short paper
that he enclosed in a letter to Darwin that prompted Darwin to
begin finally writing On the Origin of
Species.
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