Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 1859844782, Paperback)

Alfred Russel Wallace was thirty-five and stricken with malaria in the Moluccan Islands when, in a feverish 'flash of light,' he stumbled on the theory of natural selection. It was his letter to Charles Darwin about the discovery that panicked Darwin into rushing out On the Origin of Species. Wallace was a towering figure of nineteenth-century science. Not only the co-discoverer of natural selection, he was also the founder of island biogeography, a significant contributor to the fields of evolution, glaciology and anthropology, and a great writer, author of Travels in the Amazon and The Malay Archipelago. But his international scientific reputation served also as a springboard for wide-ranging forays beyond science. A passionate socialist, he wrote on pacifism, on the environmental and social effects of imperialism, on city planning, on land nationalization, on votes for women, on public health, on spiritualism, on the possibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life, and much else besides.

Culled from his books, articles and letters, this collection comprises Wallace's best and most important writing, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Ranging from the scientific to the social, from the political to the spiritual, the selection captures the essence of a great thinker—brilliant, opinionated, often quirky, sometimes wrong, but always profoundly humane. Andrew Berry's anthology rescues Wallace's legacy, showing Wallace—through extracts from personal letters, his political writings, and scientific papers—to be far more than the co-discoverer of natural selection.