Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913) was an English naturalist who originated independently a theory of natural selection, an account of which he sent to Charles Darwin. The Linnaean Society of London published a joint paper by the two scientists in which the theory was presented, Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia.
