Fifth Edition of Alfred Russel Wallace's  classic book "The Malay Archipelago." Originally published in 1869, this rare fifth edition is from 1874 and has been updated by the author.

The book is a chronicle of Wallace's eight year journey through the Indies and is part scientific endeavour and part travel diary. Celebrated by the scientific community for its contributions to natural history it is also rich in cultural and geographic details. The book is extensively illustrated and comes with maps of the islands. Appendices include some of the first ever written examples of native languages from the eastern part of the Indies.

xvi, 653 pages. Backmatter includes advertisements from publisher.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species.

Like Darwin, 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.