Scientific treasure
comes down from the attic By Roger Highfield, Science
Editor (Filed:
11/02/2006)
These are the priceless, long-lost
treasures of Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the greatest
scientists of his day, whose
contribution to scientific understanding of
evolution rivals that of Charles Darwin. A newly
discovered collection owned by Wallace, perhaps the best
known scientist in the world when he died in 1913, has
been given to the Natural History Museum in London.
Wallace had sold his private collection
around 1870 and kept a few boxes of "showy things" as
mementos of his tropical adventures.
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A member of NHM staff studies the restored
collection |
Last September, Wallace's grandson
Richard rediscovered them, badly damaged by insect
pests, in his attic where they had been stored for
decades.
A museum curator, Dr George Beccaloni,
has meticulously glued the specimens back together and
he believes they are now 90 per cent intact. They will
be available to researchers who want to study them.
Wallace is widely credited as being the
co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection with
Darwin. They jointly wrote the 1858 paper On the
Tendency of Species to Form Varieties and On the
Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means
of Selection, which preceded by one year Darwin's
seminal work On the Origin of Species.
When the men were alive, it was called
the Darwin-Wallace theory. But few people today have
heard of Wallace and the theory is now always attributed
to Darwin, said Dr Beccaloni. In fact, he said, Wallace
could have usurped Darwin because he was the first to
have his ideas ready for publication.
The four drawers hold 219 specimens,
including beetles, bugs and stick insects, which Wallace
collected in the 1850s and 1860s as he travelled through
the Malay Archipelago and East Indies (now Malaysia and
Indonesia).
The collection features some of the most
spectacular insect species that Wallace discovered, such
as the huge longhorn beetle Batocera wallacei, plus
several of the specimens illustrated by woodcuts in
Wallace's famous travel book The Malay Archipelago,
published in 1869 and still in print.
Dr Beccaloni said: "It is incredible that
these historically important specimens have now been
rediscovered. This collection is a major acquisition for
the Natural History Museum and it will be of
considerable interest to the many people fascinated by
this great man."
The find forms a kind of Rosetta Stone, a
reference for identifying other Wallace specimens and
decoding his system of labelling, he said.
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