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

SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY WORK 211interest of my own accounts of the manners andcharacter of the people, and by means of a tolerablyfull journal and the various papers I had written, Ihad no difficulty in going steadily on with my work.As my publishers wished the book to be well illustrated,I had to spend a good deal of time in decidingon the plates and getting them drawn, either frommy own sketches, from photographs, or from actualspecimens, and having obtained the services of thebest artists and wood engravers then in London, theresult was, on the whole, satisfactory.The book was published in 1869, but during itsprogress, and while it was slowly passing through thepress, I wrote several important papers, among whichwas one in the Quarterly Review for April, 1869, on" Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,"which was in large part a review and eulogy of SirCharles Lyell's great work, "The Principles ofGeology," which greatly pleased him as well asDarwin. A considerable part of this article wasdevoted to a discussion of Mr. Croll's explanation ofthe glacial epoch, and, by a combination of his viewswith those of Lyell on the great effect of changeddistribution of sea and land, or of differences inaltitude, I showed how we might arrive at a betterexplanation than either view by itself could give us.As the article was too long, a good deal of it had tobe cut out, but it served as the foundation for mymore detailed examination of the whole questionwhen writing my "Island Life," twelve yearslater.As soon as the proofs of the " Malay Archipelago "were out of my hands, I began the preparation of asmall volume of my scattered articles dealing withvarious aspects of the theory of Natural Selection.