WALLACE, Alfred Russel.
The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature.
"THE FINEST SCIENTIFIC TRAVEL BOOK EVER WRITTEN": Rare First Edition of Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago
London: Macmillan and Co, 1869.
$12,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-149865
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
First edition of one of the greatest travel narratives of the nineteenth century and one of the most important early contributions to the theory of evolution. Octavo, 2 volumes, original publisher's gilt-decorated green cloth with gilt central vignette of an orangutan to each front panel, tissue-guarded wood-engraved frontispiece to each volume, pictorial vignette to each title page, illustrated with six engraved plates, nine lithographed maps (2 folding) tracing Wallace's journey, and numerous illustrations, 2pp. and 52pp. publisher's ads at end of vol. I dated December 1868. In very good condition, remnants of bookplate removal to each pastedown, ownership names to each title page. Rare and desirable, "one of the nineteenth century's best scientific travel books" (Smith).
"Since he had not solved the perplexing question of how species evolve while in the Amazon region [1848-52], Wallace decided to venture once more to the tropics, this time to Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago. Securing passage on a government vessel, Wallace departed in 1854 for explorations that lasted eight years and covered between 14,000 and 15,000 miles. The boundaries of the range of his explorations were the Aru Islands to the east; Malacca, Malaya, to the west; the northern tip of Celebes to the north; and as far south as southern Timor. The enormous quantity of materials gathered there—about 127,000 specimens of natural history—enabled him to publish scores of fundamental scientific papers on a broad range of topics. These works alone would have established him as one of the greatest English naturalists of his age, but his classic natural history book, The Malay Archipelago, earned him an international reputation that has endured to this day. On the basis of artistic format, literary style, and scientific merit, it is clearly one of the finest scientific travel books ever written. From his first arrival in the Malayan region Wallace had decided to gather precise scientific data on groups of animals in order to work out their geographical distribution and consequently to throw light on their origins through evolutionary processes. He kept a notebook on evolution, here designated as his 'Species Notebook.' His first explicit, published evolutionary statements drew on those materials" (DSB).
The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature.
$12,500.00
In Stock
