Alfred Russel Wallace, OM FRS, was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator. He independently developed the theory of evolution by natural selection; his 1858 work on the subject was published that year, along with excerpts from Charles Darwin's earlier papers on the subject. It inspired Darwin to lay aside the "big species book" he was working on and rapidly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species. He was regarded as the 19th century's foremost authority on the geographical distribution of animal species, and he is frequently referred to as the "father of biogeography," or more specifically, zoogeography. Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire. Mary Anne Wallace and Thomas Vere Wallace had nine children, and he was the eighth. His mother was English, and his father was of Scottish descent. His family claimed to be related to William Wallace, a Scottish army commander during the 13th-century Wars of Scottish Independence.
