E T
Maybe this leads us towards geography. What is the importance of Wallace’s work on the biogeographical distribution of species?

G B
Well, rhinos and tigers are on one side of the Wallace Line, while marsupials, cockatoos, and birds-of-paradise are on the other. As Wallace said in one of his early papers, when you look at two islands like New Guinea and Borneo, they seem very similar. They are similar in their climate, and their forests look the same on the face of things, and yet in Borneo you have monkeys and in New Guinea you have tree kangaroos and marsupials, but no monkeys. This was Wallace’s key argument against Charles Lyell’s idea regarding “centres of creation,” which held that over geological time, as climates changed, God would create species fitted for the new environment. For Lyell, if the climate changed from a desert to a rain forest, then God would create a whole bunch of monkeys. But this theory wouldn’t explain why everything to the west has monkeys and to the east there’s marsupials. Same climate, east and west. So why would God create different organisms to live in trees and eat leaves in such similar places? Why not just create monkeys everywhere?

A S
Wallace not only argued with Lyell over biogeographical distribution; he also envisioned a mode of display for the museum that would show a continental evolutionary panorama of the species. Did he also have a certain curatorial agenda, so to speak?

G B
Well, he did apply for a position as the director of the British Natural History Museum, which was to be at Bethnal Green. The collection used to be at the British Museum with all the archeology, but they wanted to make a new museum. The curious thing is that Wallace sent Richard Owen drawings of how to arrange the ideal collection of natural history, and the ideas in them are strikingly similar to the way our museum is actually designed. You can almost imagine Owen actually taking the ideas directly from Wallace. You have to look at the drawings because they’re incredibly similar.

E T
Do you have the original correspondence?