Transcripts of Alfred Russel Wallace's Four Surviving Field Notebooks From the Malay Archipelago are now Available

By George Beccaloni PhD. January 2025.

[A pdf of this article is available HERE. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12016.98568]

Sample pages from Field Notebook 3 (left) and Field Notebook 2 (right)

Alfred Russel Wallace's nearly eight year collecting expedition (1854-1862) to the region he called the Malay Archipelago (now Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and East Timor) was later described by him as “..the central and controlling incident of my life.” (Wallace, 1905). Not only did he independently discover evolution by natural selection and the Wallace Line whilst there, but he and his assistants collected an amazing total of nearly 126,000 animal specimens: about 110,000 insects, 7,500 shells, 8,050 bird skins, and 410 mammals and reptiles. They ranged from orangutans to birds-of-paradise, from land snails to cockroaches, from birdwing butterflies to tiny parasitic wasps, and included about 5,000 species new to science.

A selection of specimens collected during Wallace's expedition. The text is from his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago

During his expedition Wallace kept a set of (at least) five field notebooks (FNs), four of which survive. He used them to record a wide assortment of information, from notes about hunting orangutans (FN4), to his financial accounts (FN5), to details about the specimens he shipped to his agent in London (FN2), to notes about evolution for a book he was planning to write on the subject (FN4), and much more. With the exception of FN4, one of their main uses was to record lists of the animal species (and in one instance ferns) that Wallace and his assistants collected on each of the islands or regions they visited during the expedition (he called these lists species "registers"). The species of each major group (birds, butterflies, beetles etc) from each area were sequentially numbered and these numbers were written on the data labels (which Wallace called "tickets") of the specimens Wallace kept for his private study collection. They crosslinked these specimens to the appropriate records in the notebooks. In the numbered lists he tried to give the scientific names of the species, and he sometimes made notes about their behaviour etc and drawings to help him identify the species in the future. The field notebooks are some of the most important of all of Wallace's manuscripts, as they not only provide a record of the species and specimens he collected and sent back to England, but a lot of the other information in them is not available elsewhere and provides valuable insights into his work and the itinerary of his trip.

Wallace's Field Notebooks are some of the most complex and difficult of all of his manuscripts to transcribe (see images above). The transcripts of only two have previously been published: Field Notebook 2 (WCP5799), was published on this site in March 2024 and has now been further corrected, and Field Notebook 4 (WCP5800), which was first published by Costa (2013). The remaining two, Field Notebook 3 (WCP4766) and Field Notebook 5 (WCP4767), are published today for the first time.

The transcripts were produced using images of the original documents, following the rules of the WCP's Transcription Protocol. They were worked on by a number of WCP volunteers over the years and have now been corrected and edited by me. Links to online electronic versions of the images are given in the introductory sections in the pdfs of the transcripts. Please note that the 'reading order' numbering sequence we have used for the transcripts doesn't always follow the sequence of the scanned pages, especially those of the back sections of the notebooks. The approximate position of sketches that Wallace made in the text are noted in the transcripts, but the page images will have to be viewed in order to see the actual sketches.

We are in the process of annotating the transcripts, and as we do so further (relatively minor) corrections are being made to the text and layout. We decided to release the unannotated versions, because we are currently preparing the Travel Journal that Wallace kept during his expedition for publication as a printed book, so our work annotating the notebooks will be delayed until this big project has been completed. Also we needed to make transcripts of the Field Notebooks available so that we can refer to them in the footnotes in the Travel Journal.

The missing notebook

There is evidence that Wallace somehow lost his first field notebook. It would have almost certainly contained numbered species lists (registers) of the vertebrates other than birds, plus insects other than moths which he collected in Singapore and the Malaysian state of Melaka in 1854 (both the bird and moth lists are present in the extant Field Notebook 2). We know from the records of specimen shipments in Field Notebook 4 and elsewhere, that he collected a large number of butterflies, beetles etc in these places (Baker, 2001), yet the numbered lists of the species he collected there are absent from the surviving notebooks. Evidence that Field Notebook 1 once existed is found in Field Notebook 3 which contains a list of the dragonfly species collected in Sarawak (beginning on page 9), which is headed "Dragon flies – nos. continued from 72. Singapore". The first part of the list with species 1-71 from Singapore is absent from the surviving notebooks. In addition, on page 131 the following two notes refer to the missing first notebook: "3. Moth.. from larva. see note Book. (No. 1.)" and "5. Hesperidae, fire red beneath - fig. of pupa see note B[ook]. 1." (no corresponding entries have be found in the surviving notebooks).

Interestingly, in an 1898 letter Wallace wrote, "I lost my notebooks on Singapore & Malacca, or I should have given fuller details of many things in my Malay Archipelago." (Wallace, 1898). This is probably a reference to Field Notebook 1 (he may have lost the first part of his Travel Journal as well).

Pdfs of the field notebooks can be viewed and downloaded here:

Field Notebook 2: https://zenodo.org/records/14592613

Field Notebook 3: https://zenodo.org/records/14592871

Field Notebook 4: https://zenodo.org/records/14592972

Field Notebook 5: https://zenodo.org/records/14593050

More information about Wallace's collections

An overview of Wallace's collections: https://wallacefund.myspecies.info/wallaces-specimens

Article entitled "What did Alfred Russel Wallace collect, and where are his specimens now?" See  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376110578_WHAT_DID_ALFRED_RUSSEL_WALLACE_COLLECT_AND_WHERE_ARE_HIS_SPECIMENS_NOW_Transcript_of_a_lecture_presented_online_via_Zoom_on_1_December_2023_at_the_symposium_200_anni_di_Alfred_R_Wallace_L%27evoluzionist?showFulltext=1&linkId=6569e24eb86a1d521b25cd80

A talk about Wallace's notebooks in the Linnean Society's Linnean Lens series: https://youtu.be/kZ2Cncl4y0s?si=lcP74JajAdhSN09c

REFERENCES

Baker, D. B. 2001. Alfred Russel Wallace's record of his consignments to Samuel Stevens, 1854–1861. Zoologische Mededeelingen, 75: 254-341.

Costa, J. T. (Ed.). 2013. On the Organic Law of Change: A Facsimile Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfred Russel Wallace's Species Notebook of 1855-1859. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

McKinney, H. L. 1966. Alfred Russel Wallace and the discovery of natural selection. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 21: 333–357.

Wallace, A. R. 1898. [WCP3886: Letter to Henry Nicholas Ridley, dated 31 December, 1898]. In: Beccaloni, G. W. (Ed.). 2021. Epsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection. World Wide Web electronic publication. https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3886

Wallace, A. R. 1905. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. Vol. 1. London: Chapman and Hall.

Wyhe, J. van. 2013. Dispelling the Darkness: Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin. Singapore: World Scientific.