arly in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Alfred Russel Wallace reached Asia. He had decided that he would make the first and the best collection of the flora and fauna of the Malay Archipelago that it was possible to make.
White men had skirted the coast of many of the islands, but information as to what there was inland was mostly conjecture and guesswork.
Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before trod by the foot of a white man.
The city of Singapore served him as a base or headquarters, because from there he could catch trading-ships that plied among the islands of the Archipelago; and to Singapore he could also ship and there store his specimens. From Singapore he made sixty separate voyages of discovery. In all he sent home over one hundred twenty-five thousand natural-history specimens, including about ten thousand birds, which, later on, were all stuffed and mounted under his skilful direction.
On returning to England, Wallace took six years in preparation of his book, "The Malay Archipelago," a most stupendous literary undertaking, which covers the subjects of botany, geology, ornithology, entomology, zoology and anthropology, in a way that serves as a regular mine of information and suggestion for natural-history workers.
The book in its original form, I believe, sold for ten pounds (fifty dollars), and was issued to subscribers in parts. It was bought, not only by students, but by a great number of general readers, there being enough adventure mixed up in the science to spice what otherwise might be rather dry reading. For instance, there is a chapter about killing orang-utans that must have served my old friend, Paul du Chaillu, as excellent raw stock in compiling his own recollections.
Wallace states that the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his prime, the orangs will often locate a big crocodile, and jumping on his back beat him with clubs; and when he opens his gigantic mouth, the female orangs will fill the cavity with sticks and stones, and keep up the fight until the crocodile succumbs and quits this vale of crocodile tears.
The orang is distinct and different from the chimpanzee and gorilla, which are found only in Western Africa.
In Borneo, the "man-ape" is quite numerous. This is the animal that has given rise to all those tales about "the wild man of Borneo," which that good man, P. T. Barnum, kept alive by exhibiting a fine specimen. Barnum's original "wild man" lived at Waltham, Massachusetts, and belonged to the Baptist Church. He recently died worth a hundred thousand dollars, which money he left to found a school for young ladies.