Alfred Russel Wallace, English naturalist, born Usk, Monmouthshire 1823 and died Broadstone, Dorset, 1913. Originator of the idea of the survival of the fittest, which he came to while recalling Malthus' Essay on Population". Wallace wrote to Darwin in June 1858 from Borneo where he was collecting specimens, expressing his ideas of evolution by natural selection. He was unaware that Darwin was working on the same theory. On 1st July 1859 the letter was read to the Linnean Society as a joint paper with Darwin's views added. Wallace later became an enthusiast for spiritualism, socialism, and women's rights, and was also a founder of zoogeography."