Wallace's Royal Medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund
1868. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 17: 148
"A Royal Medal has been awarded to Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in recognition of the value of his many contributions to theoretical and practical zoology, among which his discussion of the conditions which have determined the distribution of animals in the Malay archipelago (in a paper on the zoological geography of that region, published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society for 1859) occupies a prominent place.
The case may be briefly stated thus : — The strait separating the islands of Baly and Lombok is only fifteen miles wide; nevertheless the animal inhabitants of the islands are widely different, the fauna of the western island being substantially Indian, that of the eastern as distinctly Australian.
Mr. Wallace has described, in a far more definite and complete manner than any previous observer, the physical and biological characters of the two regions which come into contact in the Malay archipelago; he has given an exceedingly ingenious and probable solution of the difficulties of the problem, while his method of discussing it may serve as a model to future workers in the same field.
Another remarkable essay, "On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Types," published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society for 1858, contains an excellent statement of the doctrine of Natural Selection, which the author, then travelling in the Malay archipelago, had developed independently of Mr. Darwin; and, apart from its intrinsic merits, this paper will always possess an especial interest in the history of science, as having been the immediate cause of the publication of the 'Origin of Species.'
Mr. Wallace's ability as an observer and describer of animal forms is shown in his numerous and valuable contributions to our knowledge of the animals, and especially the Pigeons, Parrots, and Butterflies, of the Malayan region.
It must not be forgotten that a knowledge of the circumstances under which the majority of these contributions to the higher branches of zoological science were made must greatly enhance our respect for the author. Mr. Wallace has spent the greater part of his life amidst the exhausting and often dangerous fatigues of a traveller in tropical countries rarely explored by Europeans ; and some of his most valuable papers are dated from places which some might consider so little favourable to study as Ternate and Sarawak."