Development of Wallace's Perception of Biogeography, 1848-1859

Alfred Russel Wallace produced his two-volume treatise, Geographical Distribution of Animals, the first comprehensive treatment with an evolutionary perspective, in 1876. His active interest in the subject, however, began three decades earlier. In 1848, he embarked for Amazonia to seek evidence for species formation by examining the relationship between the distribution and affinity of related species. A series of papers based on his discoveries in the following decade presented not only Wallace's theory of evolution but also his concept of the regional aspects of geographical distribution as the resultant of both physiographic events and the origin and extinction of species. These conceptual papers were all published before Charles Darwin's, On the Origin of species (1859).