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

—1 86 MY LIFEin Borneo and Bates's at Ega. Yet it may be thecase that many areas of about a hundred miles squarein the Andes and in the Himalayas actually containa larger number of species than any similar area inthe lowlands of the Amazon or of Borneo. In otherparts of this letter I refer to the work I hoped to domyself in describing, cataloguing, and working outthe distribution of my insects. I had in fact beenqitten by the passion for species and their description,and if neither Darwin nor myself had hit upon" Natural Selection," I might have spent the bestyears of my life in this comparatively profitless work.But the new ideas swept all this away. I have forthe most part left others to describe my discoveries,and have devoted myself to the great generalizationswhich the laborious work of species-describers hadrendered possible. In this letter to Bates I encloseda memorandum of my estimate of the number ofdistinct species of insects I had collected up to thetime of writing—three years and a half, nearly oneyear of which had been lost in journeys, illnesses, andvarious delays. The totals were as follows :Butterflies