Island Life

Islands, Wallace argues, are the closest thing biology has to a controlled experiment. Working through cases from the Azores to New Zealand, he separates oceanic islands, which rose from the sea and were stocked only by what could fly, float or drift there, from continental islands, which kept the animals and plants of the land they broke away from. The strange gaps and riches in their fauna and flora follow from that history. Along the way he takes on the glacial epoch and its causes, since ice ages pushed species around and left the odd distributions naturalists were puzzling over. Darwin read it closely and praised it warmly, and it still sits near the foundation of biogeography. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.