Product Description

Racked with fever, virtually broke and earning a precarious living through sending back to London the plumes of beautiful birds, Wallace (1823-1913) ultimately became one of the most heroic and admirable of all scientist-explorers. Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115469 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) was a Welsh naturalist, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. Having worked with Walter Henry Bates in the Amazon (and lost all his collections in a catastrophic fire at sea), Wallace spent 1854 to 1862 wandering across the East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia) from Sumatra in the west to New Guinea in the east, earning his living as a bird-skin collector. It was while he was in the Aru Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, that (quite independently of Darwin) Wallace realised the true 'origin of the species'.

Customer Reviews

A time capsule of attitudes
Alfred Russel Wallace's little tome is not for the squeamish or the faint hearted. It was written long before the cloying, sentimental modern view of wildlife came into fashion.

His account of hunting orang utans can be startling to a generation reared on idiotic television shows such as Big Cat, where the ferocious killers of the jungle and savannah are referred to as if they were something out of Beatrix Potter.

It's quite refreshing to read this particular account from a time when wildlife was seen as just that, wildlife. In spite of his atavistic impulses this book is a fascinating glimpse into British Victorian attitudes.