Alfred Russel Wallace 



optera poseidon. ^' It is one thing," he says, *^ to see 

 such beauty in a cabinet, and quite another to feel it 

 struggling between one's fingers, and to gaze upon its 

 fresh and living beauty, a bright -green gem shining out 

 amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest. The 

 village of Dobbo held that evening at least one contented 

 man." 



These thrills of joy may be considered as some compensa- 

 tion for such experiences as those contained in his graphic 

 account of a single journey in a *^ prau," or native boat. 

 ** My first crew," he wrote, ^* ran away; two men w^ere 

 lost for a month on a desert island; we were ten times 

 aground on coral reefs ; we lost four anchors ; our sails 

 were devoured by rats; the small boat was lost astern; 

 we were thirty -eight days on the voyage home which 

 should have taken twelve; we were many times short of 

 food and water; we had no compass-lamp owing to there 

 not being a drop of oil in Waigiou when we left; and to 

 crown it all, during the whole of our voyage, occupying 

 in all seventy-eight days (all in what was supposed to be 

 the favourable season), we had not one single day of fair 

 wind." 



The scientific discoveries arising out of these eight years 

 of laborious work and physical hardship were first — with 

 the exception of the memorable Essay on Natural Selec- 

 tion — included in his books on the Malay Archipelago, the 

 Geographical Distribution of Animals, Island Life, and 

 Australasia, besides a number of papers contributed to 

 various scientific journals. 



A bare catalogue of the places visited and explored 

 includes Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, 

 Timor, New Guinea, the Aru and K6 Islands. Compar- 

 ing this list with that given by Darwin at the close of the 

 ** Journal," we find that though in some respects the 



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