9. St. Mark's Crescent
Regent's Park. N.W.1
Jan.[uar]y 18th. 1869
Dear Dr. Hooker2
Thanks for the copy of the memorial,3 which I hope will not be forgotten when the British Museum3 comes to be moved and reconstituted.
I introduced Ethnology into my scheme4 for several reasons. It forms part at present of almost all local museums, and as it is certainly interesting and instructive I should have had more difficulty in justifying it[s] omission altogether from a "Popular Museum" than its inclusion.
But I had another reason. [2] It is a very general opinion that Art Museums, à la South Kensington,5 are the things the people want, & while advocating the claims of Natural History I was glad to show that it might include a few typical illustrations of art.
It is no doubt going out of the sphere of a "Natural History Museum" to include art at all, but it is equally so to show any of the economic uses of natural products. Yet for a popular museum intended to give information to the very ignorant and excite their interest in Nature, [3] it would no doubt be advisable to exhibit these.
Believe me | Yours very truly | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]
Dr. J. D. Hooker
P.S. Feb.[ruary] 9th.
I found this lying in my writing case & fear I forgot to send in [word illeg.] in reply & your kind remarks on my little Museum Article.
ARW [signature]
Hooker, Joseph Dalton (1817-1911). British botanist and explorer.
3. Possibly a memorial in favor of Hooker’s 1868 proposal that the British Museum's Banks herbarium be moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (Endersby, J. 2008. Hooker, Sir Joseph Dalton (1817-1911). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). In his Presidential Address at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Norwich, Hooker spoke of the role of museums and the treatment of collections, charging that the trustees of the museum have neglected the botanical collections (Hooker, J. D. 1869. Address of Joseph D. Hooker, F.R.S., D.C.L. Oxon.; LL.D. Cantab.; &c. President. Report of the Thirty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; held at Norwich in August 1868. London: John Murray [pp. liii-lxvv]. This argument over control over national scientific collections would result in a very public dispute in the early 1870s between Hooker and First Commissioner of Works Acton Smee Ayrton (1816-86), whom oversaw the Board of Works which funded Kew (see Barton, R. 2018. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [pp. 155-62, 338]; and J. Endersby, J. 2008. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [pp. 282-303]).
Status: Edited (but not proofed) transcription [Letter (WCP3807.3724)]
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Please cite as “WCP3807,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 29 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3807