Infinite Tropics

Alfred Russel Wallace’s reputation has been based on the fact that at age thirty-five and stricken with malaria in the Moluccan Islands he stumbled independently upon on the theory of natural selection. Andrew Berry’s anthology rescue’s Wallace’s legacy showing Wallace to be far more than just the co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace was a brilliant and wide-ranging scientist a passionate social reformer and a gifted writer. The eloquence that has made his <i>The Malay Archipelago</i> a classic of travel writing is a prominent feature too of his extraordinarily forward-thinking writing on socialism imperialism and pacifism. Wallace’s opinions on women’s suffrage on land reform on the roles of the church and aristocracy in a parliamentary democracy on publicly funded education—to name a few of the issues he addressed—remain as fresh and as topical today as they were when they were written.