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WHAT DID ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE COLLECT, AND WHERE
ARE HIS SPECIMENS NOW?
George Beccaloni, PhD
(Transcript of a lecture presented online via Zoom on 1 December 2023 at the symposium "200 anni di Alfred R.
Wallace: L'evoluzionista, le colleziomi e i musei de storia naturale", Museo di Storia Naturale di Verona, Italy)
Summary: In this presentation I give a brief overview of the natural history specimens that
Wallace collected during his two great tropical collecting expeditions – first, his 4 year trip
to the Amazon, and second, his 8 year expedition to the region in Southeast Asia that he
called the Malay Archipelago. Finally, I will try to give some idea of where the huge number
of natural history specimens he collected on these expeditions are now. It may surprise some
to learn that thousands of his specimens from Brazil survive, as most people believe they
were lost when his ship home caught fire and sank.
Wallace first became interested in natural history when he was working with his brother William doing
land surveying in the countryside around Neath in Wales in 1841. He started collecting plants there, but in
1844 when he was briefly living in Leicester, England, he met amateur entomologist Henry Walter Bates, and
Bates inspired him to focus on collecting and studying beetles and butterflies instead. In 1845 Wallace moved
back to Neath and it was there that he read Robert Chambers' anonymously published controversial book
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which convinced him of the reality of evolution (then known as
transmutation), even though the book provided no insight into the mechanism which drove evolutionary
change. In late 1847/early 1848, disillusioned by his surveying job, and inspired by W. H. Edward's book A
Voyage Up the River Amazon, he suggested to Bates that they go to the Brazilian Amazon to collect insects,
birds and other animals for their private collections, selling the duplicates to collectors and museums to fund
the trip. The primary aim of the expedition as far as Wallace was concerned, was to seek evidence for evolution
and attempt to discover how it actually worked. In a letter to Bates written around this time he says, "I begin
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to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection; little is to be learnt by it. I should like to take some one
family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species..."
Bates liked the idea of a tropical collecting expedition, and the two young men (at the time Wallace was 25
and Bates 23) set off by ship from Liverpool to Pará (now called Belém) in April 1848. Here are some images
showing what they looked like at that time.
Right: Wallace aged 24; Left: Bates being attacked by a flock of aracari birds, from a woodcut in his
book about his 11 year Amazonian expedition, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
At first they worked as a team, but after 4 months we know they had a disagreement and split up to collect in
different areas. Although Wallace focused on collecting butterflies, beetles and birds, he also collected other
organisms, ranging from palms and ferns, to shells, fish and mammals. He collected most of these himself,
only occasionally helped by local people. Here are a few of the specimens he collected.
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A few of the specimens Wallace collected, including a specimen of a palm flower, now in the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.
For the first year and a half Wallace collected in the lower part of the Amazon, down river from what is now
Manaus. During this part of his trip we know he collected about 700 species of butterflies and 282 species of
birds of which approximately 11 were subsequently described as new species.
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As we will see, the specimens from the next two and a half years of his trip, up the Rio Negro and Uaupés
rivers, sadly did not make it back to England.
Early on in the trip, Wallace noticed that some animal species, for example monkeys and butterflies, were
confined to either the north or the south side of the Amazon, and he therefore carefully labelled his specimens
so he knew exactly where they had been collected. He was a early pioneer in labelling his specimens so
precisely, as most other collectors at that time, including Bates apparently, just used the general region, like
“Amazon”. This is a mistake Darwin also made, when he failed to record the islands his Galapagos birds were
collected on. Most early collectors clearly didn’t envisage that this information would be important, but
Wallace realised that the distribution patterns of animals might give a clue to how evolution operated. His later
work on this subject led to him becoming the founder of what today we know as evolutionary biogeography.
Here are examples of the labels he put on his specimens in the field. The ones he used for his vertebrates were
pre-printed before the trip. The 8mm diameter labels which he used for his insects were made from writing
paper on demand, using a hammer and wad punch, similar to the one you can see here. Such punches were
used to cut the wadding used for the muzzle loading guns of the time – their size matched the bore of the gun’s
barrel. Wallace went on to use the same labels for his specimens in the Malay Archipelago. He sent his insect
specimens back set and pinned into entomological storeboxes which he got made locally. Instead of cork they
were lined with the pith of a local palm. He also sent a proportion of the Lepidoptera back as papered
specimens, and some of the beetles in jars of spirit. In a letter written in October 1848 to one of his cousins in
Australia he wrote: “I am keeping a collection of Diurnal Lepidoptera for myself, thinking it better to confine
myself to them than to attempt a general collection. I keep one of the best specimens of every species, and
number every one to indicate locality and date of capture….We have here too a fine country for birds, which
I am also collecting and keep a series of the species for myself.” In order that he knew what species he had
already collected he kept this private collection with him for reference, and as we will see, that decision
resulted in it being destroyed.
By mid 1852 Wallace was in poor health, so he decided to return to England, and began the long trip back
down the Rio Negro and Amazon to Pará. Passing through Barra (now called Manaus), he found to his dismay
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that most of his specimens from the preceding two and a half years collecting on the Rio Negro and Uaupés,
which he had been sending down river to be shipped to England, had been delayed by the officials there
because they suspected that the boxes might contain contraband goods. After satisfying them that they didn't,
he collected the six large crates, adding them to the 14 cases and packages he already had with him, and set
off for Britain on the sailing brig Helen on the 12 July.
Tragically, twenty-six days into the voyage when they were in the middle of the Atlantic, his ship caught fire,
but Wallace and the crew managed to get into the lifeboats before it sank. In an article he wrote about the
shipwreck published later that year, he wrote: “The only things which I saved [from his smoke filled cabin]
were my watch, my drawings of fishes, and a portion of my notes and journals. Most of my journals, notes on
the habits of animals, and drawings of the transformations of insects, were lost.”
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He continues: “My collections were mostly from the country about the sources of the Rio Negro and Orinooko
[Orinoco], one of the wildest and least known parts of South America, and their loss is therefore the more to
be regretted.
I had a fine collection of the river tortoises…consisting of ten species, many of which I believe were new. Also
upwards of a hundred species of the little known fishes of the Rio Negro: of these last, however, and of many
additional species, I have saved my drawings and descriptions…I had also a number of curious Coleoptera,
several species of ants in all their different states, and complete skeletons and skins of an ant-eater and cow-
fish…the whole of which, together with a small collection of living monkeys, parrots, macaws, and other birds,
are irrecoverably lost.” He lamented elsewhere that “…even all this might have gone with little regret had not
by far the richest part of my own private collection gone also. All my private collection of insects and birds
since I left Para was with me, and comprised hundreds of new and beautiful species, which would have
rendered (I had fondly hoped) my cabinet, as far as regards American species, one of the finest in Europe.”
Wallace and the crew struggled to survive in a pair of badly leaking lifeboats, and very, very luckily, after 10
days drifting on the open sea they were picked up by a passing cargo ship making its way back to England.
After a slow and harrowing journey, during which they ran out of food and the ship nearly sank in a storm,
they landed at Deal in England on the 1st of October 1852. Luckily, Stevens, Wallace’s agent, had had the
foresight to insure his collection for £200. Wallace estimated it had been worth £500, but it was certainly a lot
better than nothing.
In the year after his return Wallace was very busy - writing two books: one on the palm trees of the Amazon
and their uses by local people, and another one about his travels, which he had to write largely from memory
since most of his notes had been destroyed. He also published an important paper on the monkeys of the
Amazon in which he noted that big rivers were barriers to monkey species – one species was found on one
bank of the river, a closely related species on the other bank. To Wallace, this biogeographical pattern indicated
that populations separated by water barriers had diverged from each other and evolved into different species.
Wallace's "riverine barrier" hypothesis is still a topic of research today.
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Shortly after he returned to England Wallace had vowed never to travel on a boat at sea again, but good
resolutions soon fade and just over a year later in March 1854 he left Britain on a collecting expedition to
what he called the Malay Archipelago - the area which is now Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, East Timor and
Indonesia.
Map from Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago. The thick black lines show his route.
He spent nearly eight years in the region, undertaking sixty or seventy separate journeys and visiting every
major island at least once - resulting in a total of around 14,000 miles of travel.
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In contrast to his Amazon expedition, his trip to South-East Asia was a resounding success. He and his paid
assistants collected almost 126,000 specimens, including 13,100 Lepidoptera, 83,200 beetles, 13,400 other
insects, 7,500 shells, 8,050 bird skins, and 410 mammal and reptile specimens.
Wallace personally collected about 80% of them. He focused on the delicate specimens such as insects, while
his assistants collected many of the vertebrates. His collection included about five thousand species new to
science, and he personally named 295 of them in 21 scientific papers. Around 200 of the others were named
after him by other naturalists, usually as wallacei. As to how many species were represented in his collections,
he said that he collected about 1000 species of birds, 2203 species of Lepidoptera, 11406 species of beetles,
and 2000 species of other insects, so together with the shells, mammals, ferns and other species, he probably
collected around 17,000 species in total. Wallace kept about 18% of the specimens that he and his assistants
collected for his private collection, amounted to 3,000 bird skins of about 1000 species, at least 20,000 beetles
and butterflies of about 7,000 species, plus some vertebrates and land-shells. He sold the bulk of his private
collections once he had finished studying them and because he needed money, beginning around 1867, to what
is now the London Natural History Museum and a number of private collectors.
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Here [above] are a few of Wallace’s field labels, and as you can see they are the same as those he used during
his Amazon trip. The red stripe on the top of the bird label indicates that the specimen was intended for his
private collection, so when he sent his collections back, Stevens would know not to sell specimens marked in
this way and put them aside for him when he returned to England.
When he was in Amazonia it appears he lacked books with which to identify the animals he collected.
However, during his trip to the Malay Archipelago he was able to identify the birds he collected using Charles
Lucien Bonaparte's book Conspectus Generum Avium, two pages of his personal copy are shown here (above).
Rather incredibly it contains only brief Latin descriptions of the species and lacks any illustrations. Wallace
must have had a good knowledge of Latin and a remarkable grasp of the distinguishing characteristics of birds,
since using the brief descriptions in this book he was able to visualize exactly what the species looked like.
He later claimed that thanks to this book he “…could almost always identify every bird already described, and
if I could not do so, was pretty sure that it was a new or undescribed species”. For insects all he had was a
book by Boisduval, which described the known species of two families of butterflies: Pieridae and
Papilionidae. It was in French and like the Conspectus it had no illustrations, yet as with his Bonaparte's book,
he was able to identify most of the species of these families of butterflies he collected. For other insects, he
decided that instead of carrying a reference collection with him like he did on the Amazon, which as we have
seen proved to be a big mistake, he relied on notes he had made in England, or notes and drawings he made
in the field in his specimen notebooks. Once he had finished his collecting work on a particular island he
would send all the specimens which had collected there back to Stevens, rather than risk travelling with them.
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Here are two pages from Wallace field notebooks [below]. When he started to collect in a new locality (usually
an island), he made numbered lists of the species of each group that he collected, and put these number on the
data label of the specimens he kept for his private collection. If he couldn’t name the species, he sometimes
made notes and drawings to enable him to recognise the species again.
Another thing that Wallace did differently on this trip was to take an assistant with him. Before he left England
he hired a 14 year old English boy called Charles Allen, whose father was a carpenter. Wallace wrote “He
remained with me about a year and a half, and learned to shoot and to catch insects pretty well, but not to
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prepare them properly.” In a letter to his sister in June 1855 he complained: “Charles has now been with me
more than a year & every day some such conversation as this ensues - "Charles work at these butterflies that
you set at yesterday" "Yes sir" "look at that one, is it set out evenly" "No Sir." "Put it right then & all the others
that want it" In five minutes he brings me the box to look at. "Have you put them all right" "Yes sir." - "There's
one with the wing uneven. There's another with the body on one side - There another with the pin crooked. Set
them all right this time. It most frequently happens that they have to go back a third time. Then all is right…In
every thing it is the same what ought to be straight is always put crooked. This after 12 months constant
practice & constant teaching! And not the slightest sign of improvement, I believe he never will improve - Day
after day I have to look over every thing he does & tell him of the same faults."
Allen decided to stay in Sarawak when Wallace left, but about five years later in January 1860, when Wallace
was in the Moluccas, he rejoined him and worked for him collecting birds, insects and other animals until
Wallace returned to England in 1862. During this period Allen worked independently, travelling to several
islands, including New Guinea, where he went in search of Birds-of-paradise.
Before he left Sarawak Wallace hired a 15 year old Malay boy named Ali [above] as a personal assistant and
cook, who agreed to accompany him on his travels. Wallace wrote: that Ali “…soon learnt to shoot birds, to
skin them properly, and latterly even to put up the skins very neatly…He accompanied me through all my
travels, sometimes alone, but more frequently with several others, and was then very useful in teaching them
their duties, as he soon became well acquainted with my wants and habits. During our residence at Ternate
he married, but his wife lived with her family, and it made no difference in his accompanying me wherever I
went till we reached Singapore on my way home. On parting, besides a present in money, I gave him my two
double-barrelled guns and whatever ammunition I had, with a lot of surplus stores, tools, and sundries, which
made him quite rich. He here, for the first time, adopted European clothes, which did not suit him nearly so
well as his native dress, and thus clad a friend took a very good photograph of him. I therefore now present
his likeness to my readers as that of the best native servant I ever had, and the faithful companion of almost
all my journeyings among the islands of the far East."
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This year I have seen articles by several very poorly informed and politically motivated people, lamenting that
Wallace named the Standardwing Bird-of-Paradise, Semioptera wallacii, (see illustration above, to the right
of Ali) after himself, when it was actually Ali who discovered it. This is completely false – so let me briefly
explain:
Firstly, when Ali shot the first specimen and brought it to Wallace, he knew it was new to them, but he certainly
did not know that it was a species new to science. He was not a taxonomist and had no idea which bird-of-
paradise species had been named and which had not. He was in fact illiterate, could not speak English or read
Latin, and had no scientific education, so to say he discovered a species such as Wallace's Standardwing Bird-
of-paradise is simply incorrect! Wallace, however, knew from the Conspectus which species had already been
described, and he immediately recognised it was a new species, so it was Wallace who discovered the species,
not Ali. Local people must have discovered this bird for themselves thousands of years ago, but we are talking
here about discovery in the context of science and taxonomy, not personal discovery. In addition, Wallace had
no input in choosing the scientific name for the species. That decision was made by George Gray of the British
Museum, who named the species wallacii in 1859. Gray probably did not know who had collected the first
specimen and probably chose to honour Wallace, because Wallace was an ornithologist and had recognised
that the species was new. Ironically, there is some doubt as to whether it was really Ali who collected the first
specimen in the first place, as the notes Wallace made about this in his Malay Archipelago Journal at the time,
do not mention Ali. It is entirely possible that Wallace misremembered the event in question and falsely
credited Ali when he published an account of it 11 years later in his book The Malay Archipelago.
I have also seen recent articles that Wallace did not adequately credit the many collectors he employed plus
all the other people that helped him during his expedition. This is also untrue, as he mentions the names of
many of his helpers in his book The Malay Archipelago. Wallace mentioned Ali no less than 29 times in his
book, yet Darwin in contrast, didn’t mention his servant Syms Covington even once in his book Voyage of the
Beagle, yet Covington collected many, if not most, of Darwin’s biological specimens. The saying that “no
man or woman is an island” is true – no one is self-sufficient, we all survive because of teamwork and it is
usually impossible to document and credit all the people that make our endeavours possible.
I would like to conclude my talk by showing you this very, very rough and incomplete list of organisations
around the world which have one or more Wallace specimens in their collections [below]. This partly answers
the question in the title of my talk “where are his specimens now?”
All we really know is that the bulk of them are in these organisations, but sadly in most cases we do not have
lists of exactly what specimens they have. This may change in the future as their collections are digitised. You
will find more details about the specimens that these organisations hold if you go to the “Wallace’s
Collections” page on my Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund website
[https://wallacefund.myspecies.info/wallaces-specimens] – an image of part of the page is on the right. Many
of the other facts I have presented in this talk can also be found on that page.
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I will finish by making a few remarks about his pre-Amazon, his Amazon, and his Malay Archipelago
collections:
We have no idea what happened to his early collection of beetles and Lepidoptera which he made before he
left for the Amazon, or how he labelled these specimens, although there is evidence he donated the collection
to the Mechanics Institute in Neath, Wales, before he departed for Brazil. It is possible that they may have
ended up in the Swansea Museum in Wales, but so far they have not been found. In 1848 Wallace donated two
specimens of a species of beetle from a salt marsh near Swansea to London's Natural History Museum. They
should bear a museum label with the accession number "BM 48.33", but unfortunately they haven’t been
located.
With regard to the many thousands of specimens that Wallace managed to send back during the first one and
a half years of his Amazon trip, I believe that nearly all of them are somewhere in the London Natural History
Museum’s vast collection of 80 million specimens, but so far few have been found. Interestingly, some of the
palm specimens that he sent to Kew Gardens were rediscovered a few years ago.
With regard to his huge collection from the Malay Archipelago I believe that most (perhaps 70%) of the
specimens are also in London’s Natural History Museum, having been purchased directly from Stevens and
Wallace, or having come to the museum later as part of collections formed by private collectors in the UK and
Europe. The Museum is slowly digitising its collection and Wallace’s specimens are gradually being found.
About 1000 or so can now be seen on the Museum’s online Data Portal [https://data.nhm.ac.uk/search/rapidly-
minute-saffron?view=gallery]. The Oxford Museum of Natural History has the world’s second largest
collection of his specimens, but I have no idea how to rank the other museums in terms of numbers of Wallace
specimens they contain, as details are sketchy, especially for the very large European museums such as Paris,
Berlin etc, which may have hundreds, or even thousands of his specimens.