WCP6158

Letter (WCP6158.7133)

[1]1

FROM E. B. POULTON, WYKEHAM HOUSE, OXFORD

Oct[ober]. 23. 1915

Dear Mr Wallace2,

I have now looked carefully through the 2 note-books you put aside as suitable perhaps for the B[ritish]. M[useum]3. I quite see that they would like them & that they would be useful to them. On the other hand there is much in them that is not specially needful to them & of great interest. If they were mine I should prefer to keep all together & add them to the Linnean4 library books, especially the earlier notebooks [2] that are there. Of course they could then be available at the B[ritish]. M[useum]., & the important data could be copied. I saw much that would be of interest to collect together & publish — especially the notes on habits of birds & insects & their food of the former.

//

I am not by any means sure that the bulk of your father’s insects are at the B[ritish]. M[useum]. We have in Oxford the W. W. Saunders5 Moths, Orthoptera6, and Hymenoptera7. The W. W. S[aunders]. butterflies are with Joicey8. The W. W. S[aunders]. beetles were broken up & sold piecemeal. [3] We have also many of the groups in your father’s private coll[ection]s. which Prof[essor]. Westwood9 purchased from him direct. But I should think these volumes more suitably placed in the Linn[ean]. Soc[iety]. library than in my Dep[artm]ent.10 — because of the great advantage in keeping the books of notes & m[anu]s[cripts]s. together.

We are quite well thank you, & my wife11 is wonderful in keeping up under our terrible loss12. Only today we see a Balliol13 friend of our dear boy, S. L. Reiss14, has joined him, giving his life also for the liberty of the world.

With kind regards, | Y[our]s sincerely | Edward B. Poulton15 [signature]

[Following note in pencil in hand of recipient]

Tiles[?] sent [square symbol] 20, 14, 17

[circle symbol] 2,11

1
The page is numbered WP16/1/100 in pencil in the top LH corner.
2
Wallace, William Greenell (1871-1951) Electrical engineer, second son and third child of ARW.
3
The British Museum, dedicated to human history, art and culture was established in Bloomsbury, London in 1753. The author refers to the first branch institution, the British Museum (Natural History), which opened in South Kensington in 1881. It is now commonly referred to as the Natural History Museum.
4
A learned society founded in 1788 for the study and dissemination of taxonomy and natural history, named in honour of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist.
5
Saunders, William Wilson (1809-1879), British insurance broker, entomologist and botanist. His entomological interests centred on Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera but his collection contained insects from all orders. Saunders’ Diptera collection contained many new species described by Francis Walker (1856) Insecta Saundersiana: or characters of undescribed species in the collection of William Wilson Saunders, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S., John Van Voorst, London. More than 2000 species of insects collected by ARW in the Malay Archipelago, (including more than 900 Hymenoptera, with 200 new species of Ants) were in the Saunders collection.
6
Order of insects including grasshoppers, crickets, katydids and locusts.
7
Order of insects including wasps, bees and ants.
8
Joicey, James John (1871-1932) Amateur entomologist who assembled a massive collection of Lepidoptera in his private Hill Museum at his home at Witley, Surrey. A Catalogue of the Type Specimens of Lepidoptera Rhopalocera in the Hill Museum was published by Alfred George Gabriel in 1932. The collection was eventually given to the British Museum (Natural History).
9
Westwood, John Obadiah (1805-1893) English entomologist and archaeologist. He became a curator and later professor at the University of Oxford, having been nominated by this friend and patron the Reverend Frederick William Hope, whose donation was the basis of the Hope Collection at Oxford.
10
Hope Department of Entomology, University of Oxford (see Endnote 9).
11
Poulton, Emily (née Palmer) (1856?-1939) Wife of the author.
12
The author’s younger son, Ronald Poulton-Palmer, an English rugby union footballer who captained England, was killed in May 1915 in World War I.
13
College of the University of Oxford, founded 1263.
14
Reiss S. L. (no dates found) Lieutenant, 5th (S.) Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment.
15
Poulton, Edward Bagnall (1856-1943) British evolutionary biologist, friend of ARW and lifelong advocate of natural selection. He did pioneering work on warning or protective colouration in animals and became Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford in 1893.

Editorial information

Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP6158.7133)]

For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon

Revision history

Transcribed by O'Dell, Sandra [2018-08-15]

Please cite as “WCP6158,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 1 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP6158