THE SARAWAK LAW

No, the Sarawak Law is not about the legal processes or about policemen, judges and lawyers in a Court of Law in Sarawak, but is the name given to a piece of work done by British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, Alfred Russel Wallace while he was in Sarawak in the 1850s. 

Alfred Russel Wallace

  

In 1855, while as a guest of James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak from 18 Aug 1842 to 11 Jun 1868, Wallace wrote a paper while staying at a government lodge in Santubong, entitled ‘On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species’. This was later known as the ‘Sarawak Law’ and was published in Sep 1855 in ‘The Annals and Magazine of Natural History in London’. In this paper, he discussed observations regarding the geographic and geologic distribution of both living and fossil species, what would become known as biogeography. He declared that, “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with closely allied species.”  Wallace frequently led expeditions along the Sarawak River to Santubong and into the Chinese-owned goldfields and coalfields near Bau and Simunjan.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources/nature-online/collections-at-the-museum/wallace/images/

See if you can find Santubong, Bau and Simunjan on a map of Sarawak and how far they are from Kuching, where we will be.

http://www.theborneopost.com/2013/07/14/wallace-and-the-sarawak-law/#ixzz30Lil117h