" Of the
latter, reference may be drawn to his account of the "Pigeons of
the Malay Archipelago" and his paper on the "Passerine Birds," in
which he proposed an important new arrangement of the families of
that group (used later in his "Geographical Distribution") based
on the feathering of their wings. Without a lengthy search through
the zoological records, it would be impossible to say how many
species Wallace added to science; but the constant recurrence in
the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum of "wallacei" as the
name bestowed on various new species by other systematists, and of
"Wallace" succeeding those scientifically named by himself, is an
excellent gauge of their very large number.
In the field of anthropology Wallace could never be an
uninterested spectator. He took a deep interest, he tells us, in
the study of the various races of mankind. His accounts of the
Amazonian tribes suffered greatly by the loss of his journals; but
of the peoples of the Malay Archipelago he has given us a most
interesting narrative, detailing their bodily and mental
characteristics, and showing how their distribution accorded with
that of the fauna on the opposite sides--Malays to the West,
Papuans to the East--of Wallace's Line. If fuller investigation of
the New Guinea tribes requires some modification in regard to
their origin, his observations, as broadly outlined then, remain
true still.
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