Wallace Line genus of plants which does not cross the Line is the Australasian genus "Eucalyptus". Antonio Pigafetta had recorded the biological contrasts between the Philippines and the Maluku Islands (Spice Islands) (on opposite sides of the line) in 1521 during the continuation of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, after Magellan had been killed on Mactan. Moreover, as noted by Wallace himself, the observations in faunal differences between the two regions had already been made earlier by English navigator George Windsor Earl. In Earl's pamphlet "On the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia", published in 1845, he described how shallow seas
Alfred Russel Wallace Alfred Russel Wallace Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 18237 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in "On the Origin of Species." Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: