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There are actually people who know very little about natural history who think that Wallace had an easy time, that he sort of just picked out the insects that flew into his hair as he wandered around. In reality, how Wallace went about collecting was an incredibly skilled practice that very few people in the world could do as well as him, even today. He was primarily gathering specimens for his private collections. He always made that very clear, both in his work in the Amazon and in the Malay Archipelago. He was very interested in geographic distribution from early on, and wanted specimens of many species of insects and birds so that he could study them back in Britain. Whenever he collected a species for the first time, he would keep the first specimen or two for his private collection, and only when he had duplicate specimens would he sell them. We know he didn’t collect many of the same species because it wouldn’t have made sense financially. He must have had an incredibly good memory, and not having a camera he had to remember each and every species he collected so he wouldn’t collect them over and over again. He was able to identify most of the bird species he collected using a book he had with him: Lucien Bonaparte’s Conspectus. [Fig. 02.] Rather incredibly, this book has no pictures in it, only brief Latin descriptions of the birds. Even today a top bird specialist would find it incredibly difficult to use a book like that to identify species in the field. But Wallace obviously had a remarkable grasp of the distinguishing characteristics of birds, and using the brief descriptions in this book, he was able to visualize exactly what the species looked like. Even if you have a modern bird book with photographs or illustrations, it is difficult enough to determine what you’ve seen. Yet we know that Wallace accurately identified many birds and realized which were yet unnamed species. He named and described a lot of the new species himself, and sent off others he believed were new with instructions for Stevens. Often Stevens would then contact the bird people at the museum and they would buy and name them. For insects, all he had was a book that described the known species of two families of butterflies: Pieridae and Papilionidae. It was in French and had no illustrations, yet as with his bird book he was able to identify most of the butterfly species he collected. With all the other insects, he memorized what they looked like when he collected them. I have a good memory for that too, and can remember nearly all of the insects I have ever seen—the interesting ones at least! Because Wallace had a photographic memory, he could remember all the species of insects from each island without having to assign scientific names to them. Since most of the insects he was collecting didn’t yet have scientific names anyway, Wallace would just need to know whether he had them yet or not. He assigned a number to each of the species he collected in a particular place and listed the numbers in his collecting notebooks, sometimes with a few notes about the species—two of these notebooks are in our museum here, and one in the Linnean Society’s library.

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How would you describe Wallace’s reliance on local knowledge of the species he was collecting? In a way, he was completely out on his own, with one or two books to guide him; so, did he depend on knowledge from local inhabitants on the islands?

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Yes, and no! He certainly depended on local people to collect specimens for him, and they often had valuable knowledge about the habits of the species they were collecting, especially if they were useful to them for food, customs, etc. However, the local people were obviously not scientists, and they certainly didn’t know stuff like which species had so far been given scientific names. Wallace’s assistant, Ali, for example, was about as far from being a scientist as one could be. He was illiterate and had no scientific education, so to say he “discovered” a species such as Wallace’s standardwing bird-of-paradise is simply incorrect! Knowing that a species is new to science requires an in-depth knowledge of the published descriptions of the species in the groups that have already been named, and these descriptions are often difficult to interpret, even for specialists. Ali had no knowledge of these and couldn’t even read them. When he collected the first specimen of the standardwing on Batchian island, it was new to him, but he had no way of knowing whether or not it was new to science. Only Wallace knew that the species had not yet been described and named by ornithologists, so it was Wallace who discovered the species, not Ali. Local people must have discovered this bird hundreds of years ago, but we are talking here about discovery in the context of science, not personal discovery.

There’s a much more complicated relationship between the scientific descriptions and the species collected than might first appear to certain historians of science. Some tend to be rather politically correct these days and say that local assistants deserve much of the credit because they really understood the animals and they were key to the whole process. However, it’s a bit like saying that Darwin’s gardener deserves a share of the credit for Darwin’s great work on carnivorous plants because the gardener helped to grow them. John van Wyhe even says in his book Dispelling the Darkness that Wallace may have got his inspiration for the Wallace Line from a local person he stayed with onon Lombok.¹ In reality, the local people really didn’t have a clue about major biological patterns like that. So no, it was only Wallace with his detailed scientific knowledge who would have seen the significance in species breaks and continuums across the islands of the region. He knew that cockatoo diversity was centered in Australia and that one species reached Lombok, but no further west; that marsupials were found to the east of Lombok, but not to the west; that tigers, elephants and rhinos were found to the west, but not to the east, etc. Furthermore, he realized what the likely explanation for these patterns was. What local person would have been able to draw that kind of conclusion?