George Windsor Earl the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia", published in 1845, described how shallow seas connected islands on the west (Sumatra, Java, etc.) with the Asian continent and with similar wildlife, and islands on the east such as New Guinea were connected to Australia and were characterised by the presence of marsupials. This formed the insipiration for Alfred Russel Wallace to propose the faunal boundary line now known as the Wallace Line. He published a paper in 1850 that invented the term 'Indu-nesians', for a quaint racial classification, derived from the Latin for India and island. He published a seminal
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: