From November, 1854, the year of his arrival in the East, until January
or February, 1856, Sarawak was the centre from which Wallace made his
explorations inland, including some adventurous excursions on the Sadong
River. During the wet season--or spring--of 1855, while living in a
small house at the foot of the Santubong Mountains (with one Malay boy
who acted as cook and general companion), he tells us how he occupied
his time in looking over his books and pondering "over the problem which
was rarely absent from [his] thoughts." In addition to the knowledge he
had acquired from reading such books as those by Swainson and Humboldt,
also Lucien Bonaparte's "Conspectus," and several catalogues of insects
and reptiles in the British Museum "giving a mass of facts" as to the
distribution of animals over the whole world, and having by his own
efforts accumulated a vast store of information and facts direct from
nature while in South America and since coming out East, he arrived at
the conclusion that this "mass of facts" had never been properly
utilised as an indication of the way in which species had come into
existence.
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