Darwin wrote that “what strikes me most about Mr. Wallace is the absence of jealousy towards me: he must have a really good honest & noble disposition. A far higher merit than mere intellect.” Wallace’s extraordinary achievement in deducing the role of evolution through natural selection has been largely forgotten. But his relentless attention to the geographic distribution of species—enabled by meticulous details on specimen tags—eventually shored up his legacy as the founder of a new field of scientific inquiry: biogeography.
