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The A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund has donated £500 to the Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) to pay for a programmer to design the user interface for the Project's MS Access database, which will be used to catalogue Wallace's surviving correspondence. The grant which funds the WCP does not include any money to pay for the construction of the Project's database or its Website, so the WCP has had to look elsewhere for help with developing these vital components of its project.
Regular readers of this blog (there are some!) might have wondered why I have not posted anything for quite a while. The simple answer is not that I am bored with Wallace, but that I have been extremely busy with other things – e.g. designing the database for my Wallace Correspondence Project (http://wallaceletters.info/).
Thanks to being ill at home with a bad cold, I have finally had the opportunity to go through all the scans that the Fund made of the many rare and extraordinary images of Wallace, his family, friends, colleagues and houses, which his grandson John discovered in his attic about one year ago (see http://wallacefund.info/extraordinary-collection-wallace-photographs-discovered and http://wallacefund.info/more-previously-unknow
NUS brings to light works of the other Great Naturalist
Victoria Vaughan Straits Times 9 Oct 10;
HANDWRITTEN notebooks and publications from famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace will be made available to the public on a new website at no charge.
Wallace independently formulated the theory of evolution at about the same time as Charles Darwin.
Michael Barton, who runs the excellent Dispersal of Darwin website informs me that the infamous Discovery Institute is about to publish a book by Michael Flannery entitled Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (http://www.amppubgroup.com/press/discovery-institute-press/alfred-russel-wallace-a-rediscovered-life/).
A new species of tarsier (a small large-eyed nocturnal primate) has recently been discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi by Stefan Merker of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and colleagues (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/l6g2818052rn7r20/ and http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19738-zoologger-a-primate-with-eyes-bigger-than-its-brains.html).
Many journalists travelled down to darkest Dorset to interview Wallace in his later life. Probably the best of all of the articles arising from these interviews was Ernest Rann's nicely illustrated "Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace at home", which was published in The Pall Mall Magazine in 1909. The Wallace Fund has now produced a pdf copy of this article. To download it go to the following page and click on the link to the pdf:- http://wallacefund.info/dr-alfred-russel-wallace-home
Enjoy!
Today is the 97th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace's death, and to mark the occasion the Wallace Fund has released a digitized copy of a very rare biographical work about Wallace - George Kinman's booklet "A Great Hertfordian", which was published in 1914, the year after Wallace died. To download a copy go to the following page: http://wallacefund.info/great-hertfordian.
George Beccaloni (me!) and Judith Magee (Curator of the Natural History Museum (London) Library's Rare Books Room collection) have been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund phase 1 of the Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) - see http://wallaceletters.info/ . The total cost of this part of the project is £200,730 over a three year period, with funding awarded on a yearly basis. Phase 1 aims to locate and digitize all surviving correspondence to and from Wallace held in institutions and private collections worldwide.
Wallace poet Anne Cluysenaar, who lives near Usk and knows Wallace's birthplace better than virtually anyone else, has just sent the following message to Cadw in the hope of persuading them to protect the building. PLEASE would YOU also write to Mr Hobson (hobsonp@wales.gsi.gov.uk) and ask Cadw to protect the house before it is too late (see the following News & Views post for more information). Thanks!
