Bid to save scientist’s medals

A FUNDRAISING drive has been launched to buy for the nation five medals awarded to Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian naturalist who preempted Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Wallace was awarded with five medals in his lifetime, including one from the Royal Society, for his papers on evolution in the 19th century. The medals are to be sold at auction later this month.

Wallace sent his work to Darwin and helped push him to publish his own two decades-worth of work as the scientific work On The Origin of Species.

While Wallace’s contribution was fully acknowledged at the time, he would disappear from the public imagination in which Darwin looms so large.

Now, the Wallace Memorial Fund has said it would be willing to share the cost of the medals with anyone who was happy to loan them for public display. The rarest in the collection is valued at £15,000.

Fund chairman Dr George Beccaloni told the BBC: “We’re not trying to raise money, rather we’re trying to create awareness of the auction, to flag it up to anyone who feels as passionately about Wallace as we do.

“If there was someone who had both the money and inclination to purchase one or all of them with a view to loaning them back to a museum or scientific organisation in the UK, we’d only be too happy to help with the arrangements.”

Dr Beccaloni called for potential bidders to contact him before the auction on July 20 to coordinate cost-sharing and prevent people bidding against each other and raising the price.

He added: “Darwin died in 1882, while Wallace lived on until 1913. Only one of Wallace’s medals was received in Darwin’s lifetime.”