Where Australia Collides with Asia The epic voyages of Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and the origin

Alfred Russel Wallace – In Singapore and Borneo

The only solution was another collecting
expedition. In this he was aided by the contacts he
was making in the London scientific world. Samuel
Stevens introduced Wallace to the Entomological
Society of London and its members must have
suffered with him, when listening to his account of
the tragic loss of his specimens, and his miraculous
rescue from the mid-Atlantic. The president of the
society commended Wallace for risking his life in
his devotion to collecting and reminded its members
how they owed everything to the field collector
who ‘devotes his time, by night and by day; at all
seasons, in all weathers; at home and abroad, to the
positive capture and preservation of specimens’. The
president also organized a special general meeting
which created a new class of members as the revised
by-laws would ‘admit working entomologists to the
advantage offered by the society’s meetings, Library
and Collection’. This was in fact a major achievement
because Victorian society was such that ‘workers’
were not normally accepted into the societies formed
by the ‘gentlemen’. The president had to emphasize the value of the ‘actual collector’
compared to the ‘experts’ in the museums of London and the ‘gentlemen enthusiasts’
in the rectories and country houses of Britain:

Such men do great, permanent and continual good: they tender our science an unquestionable

service, and their motives are no more to be called in question than those of an artist or the

author, who receives the just reward for his well-directed labours.

Wallace was also invited to lecture at the Royal Geographic Society, and his maps
of the Rio Negro and the Rio Vuapés were published in the society’s journal. His
was a trained surveyor, so with only a prismatic compass and a pocket sextant he
had produced remarkably accurate maps of previously uncharted rivers – while all
the time battling rapids, waterfalls, recalcitrant Indian paddlers and suffering from
malaria.
Wallace now became interested in South-East Asia and he spent long hours in
the Natural History Museum examining their collections, making notes and sketches
of the rarer and more valuable species of birds, butterflies and beetles found in the
various islands of the Malay Archipelago:

Sketch from The Palm Trees of the

Amazon and Their Uses, Alfred Russel

Wallace

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