A rediscovery of Alfred Russel

Alfred Russel Wallace spent eight years in South-East Asia studying the biodiversity of the region in the course of visits to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. His collections, extensively and scrupulously acquired in the Malay Archipelago, include zoological specimens such as insects, birds, reptiles and mammals. In addition, Wallace collected botanical and ethnological material. The bulk of his zoological collection is deposited in the Natural History Museum, London, and other specimens are to be found in a variety of British museums, for example insects in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and in private collections. Wallace’s collection is made up primarily of insects (of which he obtained nearly 110 000 specimens), birds (8050 specimens), mammals and other vertebrates (410 specimens), marine and land shells (7500 specimens) and plants. Wallace tried, with remarkable success, to collect specimens in perfect condition and with several duplicates. Owing to the immense number of samples, his collection has not received the attention it deserves. Moreover, even though most of his collection is in the Natural History Museum, the fact that it was sold to several buyers means that it has been difficult to study it in its entirety. Wallace is acknowledged as the founder of biogeography as a scientific discipline. It is in recognition of this that the boundary between the Oriental and Australian regions, Wallace’s Line, bears his name. He was an extraordinary observer and a prolific writer who published more than 10 books on natural history. He collected in areas where few or no Europeans had set foot before and was the first European to observe birds of paradise alive in their natural habitat. His enormous accumulation of data and field notes on species distribution and morphological variation enabled him to address questions on the evolution, as well as the distribution, of species in South-East Asia. The biogeographic approach is still valid today, with importance for the study of organism diversity and distribution in the region. Wallace’s plant collection is divided between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (herbarium identification code K), and the Cambridge University Herbarium (identification code CGE). Part of the collection at K consists of palm samples collected by Wallace in the Amazon in 1848. Most of what he collected there was destroyed when his ship sank in the midAtlantic Ocean on his voyage back to England in 1852; fortunately Wallace and the crew were picked up 10 days later by a passing cargo ship. This paper describes the materials from Wallace’s collection that are deposited at CGE, consisting of fern specimens from the Malaysian part of Borneo, Sarawak. I accompany