In a recent project, 125,660 Specimens ³, we attempted to raise questions about collecting and environmental violence by investigating a single natural history collection, perhaps the largest one ever assembled by any naturalist. Alfred Russel Wallace collected 125,660 specimens for European institutions and elites during his expedition in Nusantara, the Indonesian archipelago, from 1854 to 1862. One of the first things we learnt was the organisational logic that distinguishes ethnographic and zoological collections: in the latter, specimens are recorded in existing taxonomic orders rather than stored according to their collector. Still, field biologists studying Wallace's legacy soon emphasised the underestimated singularity of this fantastic aggregation. A younger contemporary of Charles Darwin, Wallace played an important role in the formulation and publication of the theory of evolution by natural selection in the 1860s. Although he was primarily a commercial specimen collector, rather than a scientist working for the academy, it was on the basis of his own gigantic collection that Wallace managed to draw groundbreaking conclusions about the origin of species hastily co-published with Darwin in 1859. Wallace's Malay collection is both the material evidence for a revolutionary scientific theory and the point of departure for the modern natural history museum as we know it – an institution whose early mission was to popularise the idea of evolution, and therefore of human exceptionalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Asma 2001).