Now Beccaloni provides further evidence to back his opinion in the form of a letter written by Wallace to Walter Bates in 1846. Read for yourself and decide.

Oh, and a happy new year to all the readers of this blog!

© D. Finnin/AMNH

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has currently on display a cabinet with a collection of specimens thought to belong to Alfred Russell Wallace, the great Victorian naturalist considered to be the father of biogeography and co-discover of natural selection. The cabinet currently belongs to a private owner who purchased it from an antique dealer in Arlington, Va. in 1979.

The New York Times has a piece with the story of this find that explains the cabinet’s importance: prior to this discovery, it was thought that the only existing Wallace collection consisted of the fewer specimens housed at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.

But not everybody is sure about the Arlington cabinet authenticity. George Beccaloni, curator of Orthoptera at the NHM, has a post in his blog, dedicated to no other than Wallace, where he lists a number of reasons as to why he thinks it is unlikely that the cabinet belonged to this nineteenth century naturalist and explorer. Among them is the observation that Wallace always used circular labels for his specimens, something that seems not to be the case in the collection on exhibit at the AMNH.

In a message posted in the online discussion forum Taxacom, Beccaloni has promised to write a further post in his blog about a letter from Wallace addressed to Henry Walter Bates that may provide more clues about why the cabinet is not likely Wallace’s.

The Arlington cabinet is a truly beautiful example of a natural history collection of the Nineteenth century, and it will be interesting to know who really put it together and how did it ended in Philadelphia, where the antique dealer first purchased it from an unclaimed baggage sales.