Parkstone, Dorset.
March 26th. 1896
My dear Poulton
As to the labels I can only say as before that none are mine but the little round ones. Each purchaser no doubt put on his own labels with date of purchase &c. Some may have been put on by Stevens, as many butt[erflie]s were sent in papers & he set them out. Higgins was the successor of Stevens & took over his stock, & had all my unsold duplicates. The dates are evidently always the dates [2] of purchase. Westwood, having but a small amount for purchases, used to buy damaged specimens at a low price & patch them up. He did this very cleverly, but you must have come across some.
Borneo (Low)1
would not be my2
collecting at all but Sir Hugh Lows from N[orth] Borneo.
S[circled] would probably be Salwatty [3] where Allen3 collected a little for me.
You will probably have two distinct series of labels of my insects, those of W.W. Saunders on almost all the Moths and miscellaneous orders, — & those of Westwood chiefly on butterflies, & the dates will I expect be always the date of purchase. The date of collecting will be shown by my Mal[ay] Archipelago.
I shall be glad to give you any further information but none of the square tickets [4]4 would be mine, except perhaps on my private coll[ection] of Butterflies which all went to Hewitson & thence to the B[ritish] Museum.
Lloyd Morgan has sent me a copy of Romanes volume. I think "Cope" would be rather lost in the Hope Library as it has no reference to insects, & would be more accessible to biologists generally in the Linnean or Zool[ogical Society]. I should therefore much prefer it to go to the Linnean.
Believe me| Yours very truly| Alfred R. Wallace [signature]
Prof. E.B. Poulton
Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP4402.4668)]
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Please cite as “WCP4402,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 30 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP4402