The man who might have been Darwin – AR Wallace – is the subject of a fascinating new exhibition at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology until February 8, 2010.

Among the many thousands of Darwin stories that have circled the globe during the bicentenary year of his birth, AR Wallace has remained something of a forgotten man.

But a new exhibition by Fred Langford Edwards at the Downing Street museum aims to cast new light on Wallace’s theories of natural selection and evolution.

July 1st, 1858, saw the first public reading of the Wallace and Darwin papers on Natural Selection in London, where Wallace and Darwin were given equal status and recognition. However, while Darwin has been almost omnipresent during 2009, Wallace has faded from the popular history of scientific thought.

Rosalyn Wade, events and outreach officer at the Museum said: “We are excited to be hosting this exhibition about Wallace, a figure so often forgotten, but who has a fascinating life story and made important contributions to our understanding of the world around us.”

In 2007, artist Fred Langford Edwards was awarded a grant by The Wellcome Trust for a 30-month project to research and promote the contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace to the theories of natural selection and evolution - generating artworks, publications and activities that will reinstate Wallace as a major contributor to the ideas and processes which explain how species gradually change to create new types of beings.

Working with Dr George Beccaloni of the Natural History Museum, the project has taken Fred to the many university and public collections of natural history. This was followed by two extended research visits to the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago. The resulting work explores the life, ideas and surviving collections of Wallace, and the physical hardships he endured during his travels. The full exhibition will be unveiled in Cambridge today.

Included in the exhibition is new material that has come to light following Fred’s research.

During his time in the Western Amazon Basin, Wallace collected in excess of eight tons of specimens and indigenous artefacts. Although most of this material was lost on his return voyage to England in 1852, Wallace did send some of the material back to Britain while he was in South America, including indigenous artefacts from the Upper Rio Negro and Rio Valpes which he instructed the naturalist Richard Spruce to give to Joseph Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a mutual friend of Charles Darwin.

In his writings, Wallace gives a precise list of this material for ‘the very interesting museum at …Kew’. When Fred made enquiries to access the material, Mark Nesbitt, Curator of the Economic Botanic Collection, was unable to find any of the material listed under Wallace in the catalogues.

Further research led Fred Edwards and Mark Nesbitt to conclude that the Wallace material had been mistakenly catalogued under Spruce. This material is to be loaned to the University Museum of Zoology to accompany the exhibition.
 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.