Alfred Wallace. Portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), British naturalist. Wallace organised expeditions to the Amazon and Malaysia and was the first European to see orang-utans in the wild. Wallace collected many specimens and founded the study of the geographical distribution of animals (zoogeography). He thought that variation in the wild was due to the survival of the fittest" (a phrase he invented) and sent a paper outlining his ideas to Charles Darwin in 1858. Darwin had been working on the same theory and they published their papers jointly; this formed the basis of Darwin's Origin of Species. Wallace's reputation was ruined in later life due to his spiritualism."