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 the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. His observations of the marked zoological differences across a narrow strait in the archipelago led to his proposing the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line. Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago (more than 80,000 beetles alone). Several thousand of them represented species new to science. One of his better-known species descriptions during this trip is that of the gliding tree frog "Rhacophorus nigropalmatus", known as Wallace's flying frog. While he was exploring the archipelago, he refined his thoughts about evolution and had his famous insight on natural selection.