Wallace, Alfred Russel

Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913), accompanied the naturalist Henry Walter Bates on a trip to the Amazon in 1848, an expedition described in Wallace's Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853). A further voyage to the Malay archipelago is described in The Malay Archipelago (1869). In 1858, during an attack of fever at Ternate in the Moluccas, the idea of natural selection as the solution to the problem of evolution flashed upon him, and he at once communicated it to C. Darwin. The outcome, a testimony to the generosity of both, was the famous joint communication to the Linnean Society on the theory of evolution. He published numerous other works and scientific papers and in 1905 his autobiography, My Life.