Wallace Line

<p>For instance, besides discovering natural selection, he laid the foundations of biogeography — why you find particular plants and animals here, but not there. In the islands of Indonesia, for example, Wallace noticed that fauna and flora on one side of the deep Lombok Strait were mostly Asian, whereas those on the other side were related to Australian organisms. He reasoned correctly that this was a result of the difficulty organisms had in crossing the Strait; the discontinuity is now known as the Wallace Line.</p>

<p>from NYT blog by Olivia Judson, 1/1008</p>