January 8, 1823

Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823, to November 7, 1913) was a Victorian explorer and scientist. The idea of evolutionary change occurred to him about the same time it was devised by Charles Darwin. As a result of their scholarly correspondence, Darwin realized their ideas were congruent and Darwin hastened his own publication schedule. At the first public discussion Darwin made sure the audience understood Wallace had come up with the same idea independently.

Wallace wrote many books and the evolutionary model of biological change he devised was not the most amazing. Of course as as explorer in the southeast Asia his books are filled with interesting details. he collected the first example of a "bay cat." This feline he encountered on Borneo and it is now listed as endangered. His example was found there in 1855 and acquired by the British Museum in 1856.

Nothing to me is as amazing as the geographical demarcation we now call Wallace's Line: "the boundary that separates the fauna of Australia from that of Asia". According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

'Wallace's Line, [is a] boundary between the Oriental and Australian faunal regions, proposed by the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The line extends from the Indian Ocean through the Lombok Strait (between the islands of Bali and Lombok), northward through the Makassar Strait (between Borneo and Celebes), and eastward, south of Mindanao, into the Philippine Sea. Although many zoogeographers no longer consider the Wallace Line to be a regional boundary, it does represent an abrupt limit of distribution for many major animal groups. Many fish, bird, and mammal groups are abundantly represented on one side of the Wallace Line but poorly or not at all on the other side.'

From his Britannica article:

'Wallace returned to England in 1862 an established natural scientist and geographer, as well as a collector of more than 125,000 animal specimens. He married Annie Mitten (1848–1914), with whom he raised three children (Herbert died at age 4, whereas Violet and William survived their father), published a highly successful narrative of his journey, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise (1869), and wrote Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870). In the latter volume and in several articles from this period on human evolution and spiritualism, Wallace parted from the scientific naturalism of many of his friends and colleagues in claiming that natural selection could not account for the higher faculties of human beings.'