WALLACE, Alfred Russel

Well known naturalist who proposed a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin. Born in Usk the third son of Thomas Vere Wallace. Educated at the Grammar School, Hertford, where he became a pupil teacher in 1836-37. Early in 1844 he was appointed English teacher at the Collegiate School in Leicester where he met Henry Bates who interested him in entomology and particularly Coleoptera. Together they planned a collecting trip to the Amazon where they eventually arrived in 1848. Bates remained for 11 years but Wallace returned to England in 1852. Unfortunately, the ship in which he was travelling burned and sank with the loss of all his collections as is graphically described in the account he subsequently published under the title Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. The only specimens to survive were those which he had previously sent to England. From 1854 to 1862 he travelled through the Malay Peninsula and the East Indies amassing collections of no fewer than 109,700 insects. He wrote of part of this trip: ‘My first crew ran away; two men were lost for a month on a desert island; we were ten times aground on coral reefs; we lost four anchors; our sails were devoured by rats; the small boat was lost astern; we were thirty eight days on the voyage home which should have taken twelve; we were many times short of food and water; we had no compass lamp owing to their not being a drop of oil... and to crown it all, during the whole of our voyage, occupying in all seventy eight days, we had not a single day of fair wind’. This voyage led directly to his writing On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species and to his sending to Darwin in 1858 the famous essay On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, which would lead Darwin to write The Origin of Species. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Dublin and Oxford, and the Order of Merit in 1908. His writing desk was presented to the RESL after his death and is now used by the Chairman at all Council and Committee meetings. Many of Wallace’s entomological publications on his return concerned Lepidoptera, but he did write ‘A Catalogue of the Cetoniidae of the Malayan Archipelago, with Descriptions of the New Species’ in Trans.ESL 4, 1868, pp.519-601. Many foreign Coleoptera collected by Wallace are now in the HDO purchased both directly and through other collections (detailed in Smith (1986) pp.157-58). These include many insects from the Malay Archipelago eg. his complete collections of Melolonthidae, Rutelidae, Trogidae, Aphodiidae, Pselaphidae, Scydmaenidae, Cleridae, Staphylinidae, and other collections of Carabidae, Anthribidae, Brenthidae, etc. The last two alone amounted to 1080 and 605 specimens respectively. The HDO also holds collections of his letters to Westwood 1865-71 and to E,B.Poulton 1886-1913, and other ms material. Further correspondence with Frederick Birch 1900-1906 and with Frederick Godman, Karl Jordan and William Kaye, amongst others, is in the NHM (Harvey et.al.,(1996)) The auctions of Wallace’s insects did not include beetles. Corresponding member ESL 1854, and full member 1863 (President 1870-71, Vice President 1864, 1869, Council 1864, 1866, 1869 and 1872). RSL 1893. (MD 12/04)