WALLACE, Alfred Russel.

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Island Life: or, the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras, First edition of one of the author's major works, which includes the first theory of continental glaciation based on a combination of geographical and astronomical causes, a discussion of island classification, and a survey of worldwide island floras and faunas.Wallace (1823-1913) is best known for his work on natural selection alongside Darwin; he was also a significant tropical naturalist and the father of bio- and zoogeography. Wallace undertook extensive fieldwork, travelling on several expeditions, including to the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago, in order to gather observations on their natural environments. In particular, Island Life contains discussions of islands such as the Galápagos and Madagascar and the differences in the species that inhabit them. It supplements Wallace's earlier work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), the standard text on zoogeography of the 19th and early-20th centuries.Provenance: with the bookplate on the front free endpaper of David Cabot, a professor of ornithology and one of Ireland's foremost wildlife experts.

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