Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 2

by Alfred Russel Wallace; Sir James Marchant

TO MR. W.G. WALLACE

Old Orchard, Broadstone, Wimborne. February 23, 1909.

My dear Will,— ... In my last letter I did not say anything about my morning at the Nat. Hist. Museum.... What I enjoyed most was seeing some splendid New Guinea butterflies which Mr. Rothschild[47] and his curator, Mr. Jordan, brought up from Tring on purpose to show me. I could hardly have imagined anything so splendid as some of these. I also saw some of the new paradise birds in the British Museum. But Mr. Rothschild says they have five times as many at Tring, and much finer specimens, and he invited me to spend a week-end at Tring and see the Museum. So I may go, perhaps—in the summer.

But I have a curious thing to tell you about insect collecting at "Old Orchard." About five months back I was examining one of the clumps of an orchid in the glass case—which had been sent me from Buenos Ayres by Mr. John Hall—when three pretty little beetles dropped out of it, on the edge of the tank, and I only managed to catch two of them. They were pretty little Longicornes, about an inch long, but very slender and graceful, though only of a yellowish-brown colour. I sent them up to the British Museum asking the name, and telling them they could keep them if of any use. They told me they were a species of the large South American genus Ibidion, but they had not got it in the collection!

On the Sunday before Christmas Day I was taking my [pg 130] evening inspection of the orchids, etc., in the glass case when a largish insect flew by my face, and when it settled it looked like a handsome moth or butterfly. It was brilliant orange on the lower wings, the upper being shaded orange brown, very moth-like, but the antennæ were clubbed like a butterfly's. At first I thought it was a butterfly that mimicked a moth, but I had never seen anything like it before.

Next morning I got a glass jar half filled with bruised laurel leaves, and Ma got it in, and after a day or two I set it, clumsily, and meant to take it to London, but had no small box to put it in. I told Mr. Rothschild about it, and he said it sounded like a Castnia—curious South American moths very near to butterflies. So he got out the drawer with them, but mine was not there; then he got another drawer half-empty, and there it was—only a coloured drawing, but exactly like. It had been described, but neither the Museum nor Mr. Rothschild had got it! I had had the orchids nearly a year and a half, so it must have been, in the chrysalis all that time and longer, which Mr. Rothschild said was the case with the Castnias. On going home I searched, and found the brown chrysalis-case it had come out of among the roots of the same orchid the little Longicornes had dropped from. It is, I am pretty sure, a Brazilian species, and I have written to ask Mr. Hall if he knows where it came from. I have sent the moth and chrysalis to Prof. Poulton (I had promised it to him at the lecture) for the Oxford collection, and he is greatly pleased with it; and especially with its history—one quite small bit of an orchid, after more than a year in a greenhouse, producing a rare or new beetle and an equally rare moth!...

I am glad to say I feel really better than any time the last ten years.—A.R.W. [pg 131]

The Rev. O. Pickard-Cambridge has kindly written his reminiscence of another very curious coincidence connected with a natural history object.

"Some years ago, on looking over some insect drawers in my collection, Mr. A.R. Wallace exclaimed, 'Why, there is my old Sarawak spider!' 'Well! that is curious,' I replied, 'because that spider has caused me much trouble and thought as to who might have caught it, and where; I had only lately decided to describe and figure it, even though I could give the name of neither locality nor finder, being, as it seemed to me, of a genus and species not as yet recorded; also I had, as you see, provisionally conferred your name upon it, although I had not the remotest idea that it had anything else to do with you.' 'Well,' said Mr. Wallace, 'if it is my old spider it ought to have my own private ticket on the pin underneath.' 'It has a ticket,' I replied, 'but it is unintelligible to me; the spider came to me among some other items by purchase at the sale of Mr. Wilson Saunders' collections.' 'If it is mine,' said Wallace (examining it), 'the ticket should be so-and-so. And it is! I caught this spider at Sarawak, and specially noted its remarkable form. I remember it as if it were yesterday, and now I find it here, and you about to publish it as a new genus and species to which, in total ignorance of whence it came or who caught it, you have given my name!' Thus it stands, and 'Friula Wallacii, Camb. (family Gasteracanthidæ), taken by Alfred Russel Wallace at Sarawak,' is the (unique as I believe) type specimen, in my collection."—O.P.C.

Dr. Wallace was very fond of reading good novels, and usually spent an hour or two, before retiring to bed, with what he called a "good domestic story." One of his favourite authors was Marion Crawford. Poetry appealed to him very strongly, and he had a good memory for his favourite verses, especially for those he had learned in his youth. Amongst his books were over fifty volumes of poetry.