published by West, Newman & Co, London, and also D. Logan, Penang, 1882, retaining colour lithographed plates, with ink annotations throughout, believed to be that of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the volume also annotated to front flyleaf ‘L. Richmond Wheeler….Bound - Chowrata Malay School, Penang, May, 1937’, later red half leather binding
| Estimate: | £5,000 - £10,000 |
| Hammer price: | £4,900 |
Provenance: By repute, purchased from a second-hand bookshop in Southampton (UK) in 1978, along with a copy of Wallace’s autobiography 'My Life' (1905) which contained an autographed letter of his (see lot 169 in this auction).
This volume has been inspected by Dr George Beccaloni, Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project. The annotations have been examined by an expert on Wallace's hand-writing who came to the conclusion that the handwriting was “probably that of Wallace.’’
Wallace possibly used the book when he wrote a review of it for the journal Nature in 1882 - he was an admirer of Distant and corresponded with him on various issues.
Supporting evidence of the date is found in a leaflet included in the book advertising the publication of The Butterflies of India, Burma and Ceylon (Marshall & Nicéville, Calcutta Press 1882) which is a comprehensive guide to butterfly species found in the regions of India, Burma (now Myanmar), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
There is also, curiously, a pressed flower inside the back cover of the Distant book, provisionally identified by Sir Ghillean Prance as a species of Poppy, which was almost certainly put there by the British educationalist, philosopher of biology and botanist Leonard Richard Wheeler (1888-1948), into whose hands the book seems to have passed after Wallace’s death.
We shall never know the exact circumstances, but it seems feasible that Wallace brought this volume back from Malaya and that somehow it passed to Wheeler.
Wheeler seemingly took the book to Penang with him where he worked as a Schools Inspector for the British Colonial Service. He has written on the inside cover of the book “L R Wheeler 1936, Bound - Chlororasta Malay School, Penang May.1937". Wheeler returned to Britain in 1945 to avoid the advance of the Japanese forces into Penang.
Note: Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century. A contemporary of Charles Darwin, he independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection, travelled the world collecting specimens including courageous solo trips up the Amazon and even addressed humanity’s place in the universe.
William Lucas Distant (1845-1922) was inspired to write a study of natural history on a whaling trip to the Malay Peninsula with his father in 1867. He was editor of the journal The Zoologist and was employed by the British Museum of Natural History between 1899 and 1920, where he worked mainly on bugs (Hemiptera). He also collected many species of insects during a four-year stay in South Africa, many of which were described in his 'Insecta Transvaaliensia' (1900-1911).
