My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

210 MY LIFEforms, which in the few cases recorded are quite distinctfrom each other, without intermediate gradations.This brief outline of the paper will, perhaps, enablemy readers to understand the intense interest I felt inworking out all these strange phenomena, and showinghow they could almost all be explained by that lawof " Natural Selection " which Darwin had discoveredmany years before, and which I had also been sofortunate as to hit upon.The series of papers on birds and insects nowdescribed, together with others on the physicalgeography of the archipelago and its various racesof man, furnished me with the necessary materialsfor that general sketch of the natural history of theislands and of the various interesting problems whicharise from its study, which has made my "MalayArchipelago " the most popular of my books. At thesame time it opened up so many fields of research asto render me indisposed for further technical work inthe mere description of my collections, which I shouldcertainly never have been able to complete. I thereforenow began to dispose of various portions of myinsects to students of special groups, who undertookto publish lists of them with descriptions of the newspecies, reserving for myself only a few boxes ofduplicates to serve as mementoes of the exquisite orfantastic organisms which I had procured during myeight years' wanderings.Having thus prepared the way by these preliminarystudies, I devoted the larger portion of my time in theyears 1867 and 1868 to writing my "Malay Archipelago."I had previously read what works I couldprocure on the islands, and had made numerousextracts from the old voyagers on the parts I myselfwas acquainted with. These added much to the