THE Sarawak Government plans to erect a memorial at Santubong in honour of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who had contributed greatly to Sarawak’s natural history collections.

“As you know, the theory of natural selection does not exclusively belong to Darwin because Alfred Wallace was also thinking of natural selection.

“The place where he was pondering over his collection of research of flora and fauna of Sarawak is still there in Santubong,” he said at the opening of the Borneo International Conference on Language and Literature 2010 here yesterday.

He hoped to have the memorial erected when funds are available.

Wallace arrived in Sarawak at the invitation of Rajah Sir James Brooke in 1854 and spent the 15 months exploring and collecting enormous specimens of flora and fauna.

The specimens included 2,000 beetle species, 1,500 moth species and 1,500 other insect orders along the Sarawak River valley from Santubong to Bau as well as the peat swamps of Simunjan.

The collections, which he sold to private collectors and institutions in the United Kingdom to finance his travels in the region, are now kept at the Natural History Museum in London and Tring.

From January to February 1955, Wallace also wrote his first major paper on evolution, which became known as “The Sarawak Law” in Santubong, followed by another major publication on the Orangutan in Simunjan the following year.

Recognising the danger that such specimens might be in great demand as collectors’ items, the Rajah Brooke Birdwing butterfly, for which Wallace was more widely known, had been declared a protected species under the Sarawak Wildlife Protection Ordinance.