When Bill Wallace, great grandson of famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, was growing up, he would put on his great grandfather’s hat and finger a cabinet that his family considered “a bit of a shrine to Wallace,” Bill recalls. By that time, the family had sold most of Wallace’s collections, but had kept the cabinet—one of two that housed the naturalist’s specimens. The cabinet depicted below, now displayed at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, may be the other.
The rosewood cabinet was discovered some 40 years ago as unclaimed baggage in a customs warehouse in Philadelphia. The clear Victorian handwriting on the labels, specimens, and other objects found in the cabinet link it to Wallace, historians believe.
1. The cabinet was built to a collector’s specifications, said David Grimaldi, a curator at the AMNH. To keep unwanted bugs out, the drawers were fitted so tightly ...
