THE SIXTH CONTINENT
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist who did extensive field
work in the Malay archipelago (nowadays called Indonesia) where he
identified the Wallace line, dividing the flora, fauna and human
specificities of the Eastern part of Indonesia from that of Asia.Wallace even expressed the hypothesis that the Eastern part of Indonesia was formerly part of another continent now partly sunk beneath the ocean: a sixth continent.
From 1854 to 1862 he travelled through the Malay archipelago to collect specimens and to study Nature. His observations of the marked biological and zoological differences accross a narrow zone in the archipelago led him to the hypothesis of a zoogeographical boundary now known as “the Wallace line”.
His studies and adventures there were published in 1869.
This is the scientist's look of Wallace upon the nature of the archipelago and his words, sometimes cold, which my pictures attempt to illustrate.
Here the Wallace line is materialized by a dotted line, on the left side are pictures frop the western part of the archipelago, whereas on the right side only species from the eastern part are displayed.
All citations are extracted from The Malay Archipelago.