Everybody knows of Charles Darwin's big idea. But few people know that Alfred Russel Wallace had the same idea, and that the first paper to describe evolution by natural selection, published in 1858, was written by the two men jointly.

Wallace was a professional naturalist who earned his living by collecting exotic flora and fauna - in Victorian times the rich collected stuffed animals, pinned butterflies and pressed plants. It was while travelling through Indonesia that Wallace had his insight.

The natural histories of Asia and Australasia are very different. Asia has tigers, Australasia kangaroos etc. Indonesia is the archipelago that bridges the two regions and Wallace had supposed that, as he travelled southeast, the flora and fauna would gradually shift from Asian-like to Australasian-like. Instead he found that the natural history as far as Bali was wholly Asian-like, but that the natural history of the next island along, Lombok, was wholly Australasian-like.

Wallace concluded that the straits between Bali and Lombok were a line across which species could not pass (it is still known as the Wallace Line) and that the plants and animals of Australasia must have evolved in isolation. Thus was he propelled towards his great idea.

Wallace is one of the great unknowns of biology, so I was intrigued when Stanfords, the Covent Garden travel bookshop, recently reprinted his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, which describes his eight years in Indonesia.

Gratifyingly, Wallace wrote well. Scientists, being of a muscular disposition, generally do. But they can be ruthless. The book's cover carries a photograph of an orang-utan, as well it might. Wallace loved these friendly primates, who were so curious and trusting. Nonetheless he shot every one he encountered, 17 in all.

People wonder why Wallace was overshadowed by Darwin, and one answer is provided by The Malay Archipelago. Wallace was Mr Pooter. In his complaints over his assistants or his huts or his food, he emerges as an obsessive who worried away at his thoughts, logically but pedantically. His ideas were not sung to him by a muse. Darwin, frankly, was simply brighter and, in his extensive scholarship that ranged over sexual as well as natural selection, the deeper thinker.

Yet Wallace continually surprises. He believed that the Indonesians led more fulfilled lives than did Europeans, that free trade allowed the West to destroy native cultures, and that the Dutch were better colonialists than the British.

Stanfords, though, are rotten publishers. The book is littered with typos, it lacks an introduction or index, and the original illustrations have been omitted. Yet there is a gap in science publishing today. Too few of science's great books are readily available, and one of the large foundations such as the Royal Society should republish them, lovingly and accessibly.

Terence Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University

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