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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
THE MALAYAN AKCHIPELAGO.* 
E never remember to Lave taken up a book which gave us more 
pleasure, nor to have finished reading one with more regret than this 
of Mr. Wallace’s. Books of travel are generally wearily prolonged land-logs, 
with details of unimportant incidents and tedious dialogues. Of quite 
another stamp is this one. Mr. Wallace has been for eight years minutely 
exploring one of the most unknown, most distant, and yet most interest- 
ing portions of the world, and he has written us a romance, which is, never- 
theless, plain matter of fact, of its natural history. If we had only space 
to give a number of extracts from the work, we should be able to do the 
author some little justice ; as it is, we can barely give the rudest outline 
of one of the most fascinating, and withal important, contributions to 
physical and biological knowledge which has for some years, at least, been 
published. The author — who we may mention brought home from the 
Malayan Archipelago nearly 126,000 specimens — has of course given very 
gi’aphic accounts of the general features of the myriad of islands through 
which he travelled, of the natives and their habits, of the colonists and 
their labours, and so forth. These descriptions make up the great bulk 
of two handsomely illustrated volumes. But it is not to them we would 
refer especially, but to the very admirable manner in which Mr. Wallace, 
uniting the philosopher to the observer, has generalised on the facts pre- 
sented to him during his researches. It is unhappily too much the case 
that travellers think they have nothing more to do than shoot a multitude 
of birds, and collect a quantity of insects, and then send them home and 
describe them. It is from this impression that writers of books of travel 
produce such dry and useless volumes. What Mr. Wallace has done, 
however, will render his work not less significant as a contribution to 
physical geography than it is attractive as a well written record of a re- 
markable exploration. The joint originator of the Darwinian theory, has 
examined both the human and the animal productions of the wonderful 
group of islands he visited, and his study of them has led him to a conclusion 
of the highest interest to naturalists and geologists. He has established a 
distinction of origin and association between the component parts of the 
Archipelago. Without the good map which accompanies the volumes, 
we could not explain the direction of the line of division which Mr. Wallace 
lays down, but we may state it generally. 
From a series of carefully taken soundings, Mr. Wallace, following up 
Mr. Earl’s enquiries, has shown that the large islands on the Asiatic 
side are separated from Asia by a very shallow ocean ; he has found that, 
similarly. New Guinea and its group arc separated from Australia by a cor- 
responding shallow sea; blithe has seen also that these two halves as it 
were of the Archipelago are separated from each other by comparatively 
deep w’atcr. From this circumstance, and from a comparison of the natural 
products, and from a study of the resemblances between the fauna of Asia 
and the north-western Malayan Islands, and of the Australian fauna and 
• “The Malayan Archipelago, the land of the Orang-utan and the 
Bird of Paradise : a Narrative of Travel; with Studies of Man and Nature.” 
By A. B. Wallace. 2 vols. Macmillan, 180‘J. 
