One day in spring 1979, Robert E. Heggestad walked into a small antique shop in Arlington, Va. Mr. Heggestad, a young lawyer from Iowa, was looking for Chinese carpets. The selection of rugs in the small back room was disappointing, and he was about to leave when he noticed a handsome rosewood cabinet behind the cash register.
The owner wanted a sum that far exceeded Mr. Heggestad’s budget — a colossal $600. “I was just out of law school, I had no money and no business buying it,” he said. But the owner was willing to take installments of $100 a month, and into Mr. Heggestad’s possession fell an incomparable scientific treasure.
The cabinet belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist who conceived the idea of evolution through natural selection independently of Charles Darwin. It arrived earlier this month at the American Museum of Natural History on loan from Mr. Heggestad and will be on display starting Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
The cabinet is “a national treasure,” said David Grimaldi, a curator at the museum, citing its historical value and Wallace’s role in the theory of evolution.
Wallace, a naturalist and explorer, conceived the idea of natural selection while in Indonesia and described it in a letter to Darwin, prompting Darwin to announce his own theory, on which he had been working for many years. Work by the two authors describing their versions of the theory of evolution were announced at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in 1858.
After Darwin published “Origin” a year later, his book became the definitive statement of the theory, and Wallace’s role faded. But Wallace was a true co-discoverer of the greatest theory in biology, and an explorer and collector, like Darwin. Through their collecting, each developed a keen appreciation of natural variation. And each had read Thomas Malthus’s theory of the struggle for existence at the edge of starvation, the background against which natural selection favors the fittest.
What fell into Mr. Heggestad’s hands three decades ago was Wallace’s personal collection of specimens, like fireflies he caught as a boy and prized items that formed the basis for his scientific work and are referred to in his books.
One other personal collection of Wallace’s is known. Owned by the British Museum of Natural History, it is one-third the size and no longer in its original cabinet.
Mr. Heggestad’s cabinet holds some 1,700 specimens, mostly botanical items, butterflies, dragonflies, moths and shells. The collection is in surprisingly good condition, mostly because he noticed some beetle damage and has added mothballs to every drawer for the past 30 years.
“Dermestid beetles,” Dr. Grimaldi said, “would have rendered the collection to dust if he hadn’t taken care of it.”
What happened with the cabinet after it left Wallace’s possession is mostly a mystery. Before turning up in Virginia, the cabinet was bought in 1964 by an antiques dealer from an unclaimed baggage sale in Philadelphia. He suspected that the cabinet belonged to Wallace, but never took the pains to prove it. Mr. Heggestad made some inquiries after he bought the cabinet and then let the matter drop. He kept the cabinet in his dining room until a friend advised him in 2007 that it should be in a museum. That inspired him to a flurry of research in which he compared the handwriting on the specimen labels with those in the British museum and studied the source of the specimens, putting beyond doubt that the collection was Wallace’s.
The cabinet will be returned to Mr. Heggestad after being displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. After that, he said, “I’m going to place it with a national museum, but I haven’t decided which.”