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

SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY WORK 205years after its publication, its sale is equal to that ofany of the others.During the succeeding five years I continued thestudy of my collections, writing many papers, of whichmore than a dozen related to birds, some being ofconsiderable length and involving months of continuousstudy. But I also wrote several on physicaland zoological geography, six on various questions ofanthropology, and five or six on special applicationsof the theory of natural selection. I also beganworking at my insect collections, on which I wrotefour rather elaborate papers. As several of thesepapers discussed matters of considerable interest andnovelty, I will here give a brief summary of themore important of them in the order in which theywere written.The first of these, read in January, 1863, at ameeting of the Zoological Society, was on my birdsfrom Bouru, and was chiefly important as showingthat this island was undoubtedly one of the Moluccangroup, every bird found there which was not widelydistributed being either identical with or closely alliedto Moluccan species, while none had special affinitieswith Celebes. It was clear, then, that this islandformed the most westerly outlier of the Moluccangroup.My next paper of importance, read before thesame society in the following November, was on thebirds of the chain of islands extending from Lombokto the great island of Timor. I gave a list of onehundred and eighty-six species of birds, of whichtwenty-nine were altogether new; but the specialimportance of the paper was that it enabled me tomark out precisely the boundary line between theIndian and Australian zoological regions, and to trace