Alfred Russel Wallace is rightly celebrated for his articulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection together with Charles Darwin at the Linnean Society in 1858. He had corresponded with Darwin about his ideas from the island of Ternate, in today’s Indonesia. Wallace is also known for his exploration and collecting in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. But his deep understanding of the tropics was formed both in Asia and in the Americas. In the 1840s he, together with Henry Walter Bates, travelled to the Brazilian Amazon to investigate “the origin of species”.
He was fascinated by the rich flora of the tropics, and in particular palms - plants that stand out in tropical forests and were, and still are, widely used by people in their daily lives. On his return from South America to England, his ship caught fire and sank, destroying all his collections, save the shirt on his back and some drawings he was working on in his cabin. Among these were his sketches of palm trees. He used these to write, entirely from memory, a small book on the palm trees of the Amazon, focused on their uses by the local people of the region.
His book was panned by botanists, one of whom sniffily wrote to another that the tome was more suited “to the drawing room than to a botanist’s library”. Wallace’s sketches, held in the Linnean Society collections, are beautiful pencil portraits of palms, many of them new to science and described by him in the book, and the format of the book, written in an accessible way for non-specialists, makes it one of the first field guides - an easy guide to a particular group.
We will explore the sketches, that Wallace assembled into a draft book prior to publication, and compare them to the published work, illustrated using lithographs by the great botanical artist Walter Hood Fitch.
The Linnean Society works to inform, involve and inspire people of all ages about nature and its wider interactions through our collections, programmes and publications. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).
www.linnean.org
Follow us on social media:
/ linneansociety
/ linneansociety
/ linneansociety
Негізгі бет Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Palms of the Amazon” | Sandy Knapp
Пікірлер: 6