This episode is just one of many to emerge from Wallace Letters Online, launched today on the website of the Natural History Museum in London. It is a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation based in New York city to track down and digitize Wallace’s correspondence.
So far, the open-access database contains nearly 4,000 letters sent to and from the famous naturalist, or about 95% of his known surviving correspondence. The database is fully searchable and includes transcripts as well as scans of many of the letters. The launch of this database is part of Wallace100, a series of events celebrating Wallace’s life and work during the centenary of his death.
Darwin is so strongly associated with natural selection that Wallace is sometimes forgotten. However, with the launch of this database, scientists and historians can better understand the personal and scientific relationship between these two men. “This is the first time that all of the Darwin and Wallace correspondence has been published in full,” says George Beccaloni, director of the project.
Shortly after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientific debate turned to the problem of animal coloration: could natural selection explain the bright pigments observed in so many species? “It was the test case of the new theory,” says Beccaloni.
Letters in the database address this, as well as topics as diverse as biogeography, socialism and phrenology. Currently, 60% of the letters have viewable images and 36% have transcripts. Over the next three years, the Natural History Museum intends to complete the transcripts, hiring two professional historians to produce scholarly annotations. “The hope is that Wallace Letters Online will lead to a renaissance in research about Wallace,” says Beccaloni.
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