The 35-Year-Old British Specimen Collector Who Independently Discovered Natural Selection While Lying in a Fever in the Spice Islands in February 1858
Alfred Russel Wallace, a self-funded specimen-collecting naturalist, was lying in a malarial fever on the island of Ternate in the eastern Dutch East Indies in February 1858 when he worked out the theory of natural selection. He wrote it up in two days and posted the manuscript to Charles Darwin. Darwin had been refining the same theory privately for twenty years. The two papers were read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.
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