Bugs and the Victorians 9780300160031

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The Politics of Insects
3. Struggle for the Minds of Insects
4. Bees and Ants
5. Social Insects and Secular Science
6. Darwin and the Entomologists
7. The Colorado Beetle
8. A Female Entomologist
9. Insects and Empire
10. House Flies
11. Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

BUGS AND THE VICTORIANS

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

J. F. M. CLARK

BUGS AND THE VICTORIANS

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Copyright © 2009 J. F. M. Clark All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yaleup.co.uk Set in Bell MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Control Number: 2009925433 ISBN 978-0-300-15091-9 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, Jean and Bob Clark

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CONTENTS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction The Politics of Insects Struggle for the Minds of Insects Bees and Ants Social Insects and Secular Science Darwin and the Entomologists The Colorado Beetle A Female Entomologist Insects and Empire House Flies Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index

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FIGURES

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1.3 1.4

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From Henry Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot Climates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 71 (1781), tab. 7, opposite p. 191, University of St Andrews Library. F. Stelluti’s illustration of a honeybee from Aulus Persius Flaccus, Persio tradotto in verso sciotto e dichiarato (1630), British Library. Dru Drury, Illustrations of Natural History (1770–82), Royal Entomological Society. Photograph of Professor Poulton taken through the eye of a glow-worm, 1918, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Portrait of William Spence from William Kirby and William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 2 (1817), frontispiece, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Portrait of William Kirby from William Kirby and William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), frontispiece, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. From H. F. Wilson and M. H. Doner, The Historical Development of Insect Classification (privately printed 1937), fig. 13, p. 66.

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4.9 5.1 5.2 5.3

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‘Prince Albert’s Bee-Hives’, Punch, or the London Charivari, (1 August 1844), Templeman Library, University of Kent. Detail from title page of Thomas Moffet, Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (London: Thomas Cotes, 1634). Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Christopher Wren’s design for a beehive from a model by William Mewe in Samuel Hartlib, The Reformed CommonWealth of Bees (1655). British Library. William Dunbar, ‘Some Observations on the instinct and Operations of Bees, With a Description and Figure of a Glazed Bee-Hive’, The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 3 (1820), plate 6, University of St Andrews Library. Francis Huber, Observations on the Natural History of Bees. New edition (Cupar: G. Tullis, 1840), plate 1. University of St Andrews Library. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees (Wisbech: John Leach, 1837), p. 17. University of St Andrews Library. Photograph of a surviving example of a Nutt collateral hive. Courtesy of the International Bee Research Association (Collection B65/6a). George Cruikshank, ‘The British Bee Hive’, designed in 1840, altered and etched in February 1867. © V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. H. W. Bates, Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863), title page, University of St Andrews Library. Sir John Lubbock in his study, London Illustrated News, 1884, Mary Evans Picture Library. ‘Man is but a worm’, Punch’s Almanack for 1882, Mary Evans Picture Library. ‘A Philosopher’s Pet’, Punch, or the London Charivari, September 7, 1872, p. 97, Templeman Library, University of Kent, Canterbury. Lubbock’s ant nests apparatus from his Ants, Bees, and Wasps (17th edn 1915), fig. 1, p. 3. Lubbock’s ants from his Ants, Bees, and Wasps (17th edn 1915), plate 1, frontispiece.

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‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits – No. 97’, Punch, or the London Charivari (19 August 1882), Templeman Library, University of Kent, Canterbury. 6.1 ‘Go it Charlie!’, Cartoon of Charles Darwin by Albert Way, Cambridge University Library, DAR. 204.29. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 6.2 From Henry Walter Bates, ‘Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley. LEPIDOPTERA: HELICONIDAE’, Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 23 (1862), plate 55, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 6.3 Photograph of E. B. Poulton from S. A. Neave and F. J. Griffin, The History of the Entomological Society of London, 1833–1933 (1933), frontispiece. 6.4 Photograph of J. O. Westwood from Berit Pedersen, ed., A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomological Society, plate 6, Royal Entomological Society. 7.1 ‘The Invasion of England’, Funny Folks, July 21, 1877. 7.2 J. O. Westwood lecture illustration of the ‘Colorado Potato Beetle’, 1878, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 7.3 Customs poster of the Colorado Beetle, Colorado Beetle, Parliamentary Papers, 68, 1877, p. 411. 7.4 Cover of C. V. Riley, Colorado Beetle (1877), National Library of Scotland. 7.5 Cover of J. F. McArdle, The Colorado-Beetle Collared at Last (1888), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 7.6 ‘A False Alarm!’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 73 (21 July 1877), 19, University of St Andrews Library. 7.7 ‘The Great Beetle Panic’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 73 (11 August 1877), 57, University of St Andrews Library. 8.1 Photograph of Eleanor Ormerod from Eleanor Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, LL.D. Economic Entomologist. Autobiography and Correspondence, ed., Robert Wallace (1904), frontispiece. 8.2 a and b Calling card of ‘The Miss Ormerods’, 1877–8, J. F. M Clark’s personal collection.

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8.3 Photograph of ox hide pierced by warbles: donated by E. A. Ormerod, 1888, Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 8.4 The house sparrow from William Yarrell, A History of British Birds (1871–85), vol. 2, p. 89, University of St Andrews Library. 8.5 ‘To Let, No English Need Apply’, from E. T. Seton, Lives of the Hunted (1902), University of St Andrews Library. 9.1 ‘The malaria mosquito forming the eye-sockets of a skull, representing death from malaria’. Colour lithograph after A. Games, 1941, Wellcome Library, London. 9.2 Photograph of B. F. Cummings from R. H. Hellyar, W. N. P. Barbellion (1926), frontispiece. 9.3 ‘The London School of Tropical Medicine Fund’, Tropical Life, 9 (1913), 32. 10.1 ‘The House Fly, Disease Carrier’, from L. O. Howard, The House Fly Disease Carrier (2nd edn 1911), frontispiece. 10.2 House-fly chart from C. G. Hewitt, House-Flies and How Thy Spread Disease (1914), fig. 19, p. 88. 10.3 W. K. Haselden, ‘The Awful Failure in Store for the Common Fly’, Daily Mirror, 22 April 1915, reproduced by the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, Canterbury with permission of Mirrorpix. 10.4 G. W. Foster, ‘Regard Every Fly as Your Enemy’ from T. Crew, Health First in Verse, Prose and Epigram (1931), p. 36, Wellcome Library, London. 10.5 ‘The Fly Danger’ poster, 1915, British Museum (Natural History), Hope Entomological Archives, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 10.6 ‘Consider Now the Little Fly’ from T. Crew, Health First in Verse, Prose and Epigram (1931), Wellcome Library, London. 10.7 ‘The Fly Must be Exterminated to Make the World Safe for Habitation’, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reproduced in E. Russell, War and Nature (2001), p. 48. Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, © 1918. 11.1 G. Spratt, ‘The Entomologist’ (c. 1830), Royal Entomological Society.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Charles Darwin contended that people tend to look like their pets. A colleague of mine developed a variant of this argument: he maintained that historians resemble their subjects of study. In support of this theory, I shall liken myself and this book to a ‘true’ bug – the cicada. I have spent an inordinately long period of time underground, sucking the sap from the tree of knowledge. In many ways, I began this process working on William Saunders at the University of Toronto under Carl Berger. I subsequently profited greatly from the guidance of Paul Weindling at the University of Oxford. I was fortunate to be in the company of an exciting community of historians of science, assembled by Robert Fox, at Oxford. Many of my fondest moments at Oxford were spent in the Hope Library at the University Museum: Stella Brecknell was consistently generous with her help and time. At the University of Kent at Canterbury, Crosbie Smith and Ben Marsden offered vibrant discussions on science in nineteenth-century Britain, and fed me with anecdotal information on social insects. More recently, Tim Cooper and John Scanlan have provided further intellectual engagement and support. Librarians at Oxford, Kent and the University of St Andrews helped enormously in obtaining relevant books. Berit Pedersen and her successor, Val McAtear, at the Royal Entomological Society were very accommodating. Robert Baldock and Heather McCallum, at Yale, had the collective patience of an entomologist awaiting the emergence of a brood of periodical cicadas. At long last, I offer the song of the bugs: notes have been tuned and refined

A C K NOWLEDG EM EN TS

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through a number of research seminars, conference papers, and public lectures, and through publications in British Journal for the History of Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Agricultural History, Isis, and Archives of Natural History. I thank various audiences for their feedback. At various times, I have received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian High Commission, London. I gratefully acknowledge this financial support. My family has provided me with the ideal environment for gestation. My children, Sam and Kenzie, have happily grown up with the ghosts of bugs – past, present, and yet to come. Ultimately, the cicada sings for a mate, and I am no exception. Jacqui, consider each word a contributing sound in the deafening chorus for you.

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1

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I

n the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Englishman Henry Smeathman scrambled to the top of a Bugga bug hill with four other men. He had been informed of a ship in sight, so he had clambered up the twelve-foot clay hillock with his spyglass to get a better view. He was, however, no ordinary Englishman, and a Bugga bug hill was no ordinary landform. As an accomplished naturalist working and living in Sierra Leone, Smeathman knew that his elevated vantage point had been constructed by millions of termites, or Bugga bugs as they were known in West Africa. The insects afforded him a well placed spot from which to spy an anticipated vessel, his future. For us, the insects elevated Smeathman to a privileged position in the past.1 What about the present? What about the ground upon which he stood? The diminutive creatures under Smeathman’s feet hold historical promise. We now live in an age in which ‘there is little history in the study of nature, and . . . little nature in the study of history’. Nature is part of the world that we have lost, yet we remain surrounded by it: surrounded, for instance, by an abundance of bugs. Collectively, insects outweigh all of humanity on the planet. There are about 800,000 insect species, in comparison to 4,500 mammal species, on Earth. They constitute almost 80 per cent of the animal species. A single colony of termites can number in excess of 20 million individuals: they account for 10 per cent of the biomass of the tropics. Henry Smeathman and his fellow naturalists provided history from the ground up through their

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investigations of the voiceless masses of six-legged miniature beings that comprise essential parts of our ecosystems.2 This book is a history of insects and of the men and women like Henry Smeathman who studied them. Smeathman is most often associated with entomology (the study of insects) and slavery. He published a pioneering account of termites in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1781. He was a language teacher, naturalist, and sometime secretary to the London Chamber of Commerce, who lived in Africa from 1771 to 1775. He defined himself principally as a ‘fly-catcher’, or entomologist, and struggled to convince many of his contemporaries of the relevance of his chosen vocation. The merchants of Sierra Leone saw nothing of value in creepy crawlies or beautiful butterflies. They assumed that Smeathman’s interest in insects arose from a career in medicine or art. He was, however, a paid collector with a merchant brother who acted as his agent.3 Henry Smeathman is a fitting subject with whom to begin an exploration of nineteenth-century entomology. He sought a career as a naturalist at a time when the study of insects was just beginning to find an audience. In the age of commerce, he earned his living through the sale of natural history specimens. But as his work on termites demonstrated, he also undertook a systematic study of insects through close observation. His behaviour in Africa was born of an imperial vision of science. It reminds us that the history of ideas about insects must be located in a broader cultural history. Ideas about the natural world are products of particular times and places. They are shaped by moral, political, economic and religious contexts. Consider, for example, Smeathman’s illustration of termite mounds (figure 1.1). It is copiously labelled – from Europeans on a nest to a bull standing sentinel to African palm trees. In fact, just one element of the illustration is left without an explanation: the native African standing with a hoe in the foreground. This illustration captures the ambiguity surrounding the naturalist Smeathman’s relationship with native Africans. His biographer celebrated him as a pioneer in entomology and an opponent of slavery. The enlightened naturalist, after all, must have been a humanitarian. Smeathman certainly wrote harrowing accounts of slave ships, and he may have been involved in a projected scheme to establish a settlement for liberated slaves in West Africa just prior to his death. But in 1773 he became a slave trader: a ‘dealer in souls as well as

I NTRODUCTION

3

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 1.1 Nature of Empire: This illustration accompanied Henry Smeathman’s ‘Account of the Termites’ (1781) of West Africa. The unidentified native African is indicative of the conflation of natural history and human social arrangements.

a merchant of butterflies and moths’. He described native Africans as animals and included them with his collections as part of his insurable property. Native Africans became subsumed within his naturalist’s gaze. They were part of the passive natural world he sought to describe and control. Science and human social arrangements mixed in Smeathman’s insect illustration.4 Smeathman was part of a revival and redefinition of natural history that began in the Renaissance. Although natural history could trace its roots to antiquity, the systematic investigation of natural objects did not become an autonomous field of study until after the mid-sixteenth century. Previously, it had been subordinate to natural philosophy, medicine, agriculture and husbandry. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, natural history, as an engine of the Scientific Revolution, became associated with the impulse to gather facts, natural objects and human artifacts. An emergent community of naturalists questioned the adequacy

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of ancient Greek and Latin texts as the foundation of knowledge of the natural world. Increasingly, naturalists concerned themselves with the discrepancies between what they read and what they saw through experience: through observation and experiment. Rather than gathering their knowledge of nature from past books, they engaged directly with plants, animals, minerals and other assorted natural objects.5 Initially, this nascent descriptive science of natural history arose primarily out of the study of plants because botany had close associations with herbal remedies used for medicine. Invertebrates – ‘insects’ and ‘worms’ – attracted little interest within natural history prior to the seventeenth century. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De animalibus insectis (1602) and Thomas Mouffet’s (or Muffet’s) Insectorum theatrum (1634) – a posthumously published compilation of notes by Thomas Penny, Edward Wotton and Conrad Gesner – were the only notable histories of insects prior to Jan Swammerdam’s Historia insectorum generalis (1669). The seventeenth-century revival of ancient physiology, however, promoted the study of insects and other animals within natural history. The microscope was a significant tool for the study of the structure and inner workings of living organisms. And it had close associations with insects. Early microscopes were called ‘flea-glasses’ because they were often employed to watch these entrancing tiny subjects. Francesco Stelluti’s study of the structure of the honeybee, which was published in 1625, was the first scientific treatise to be based entirely on microscopical investigations (figure 1.2). Insects, therefore, were subjects of the renewed interest in physiology, and found themselves placed under the lens of one of the new instruments of the Scientific Revolution.6 In addition to their physiology, honeybees held a special attraction for naturalists because, like humans, they live in complex societies distinguished by large workforces, a reproductive division of labour, and specialist castes. Other social insects include some species of wasps and all ants and termites. Smeathman contended that termites were insects that most closely imitated human sagacity, industry and government, and therefore were worthy of naturalists’ attention. Natural history had long sought to locate animals in human culture. Early Renaissance natural history included exhaustive explorations of myths and folktales attached to particular animals. An animal’s symbolic currency in human culture was an acknowledged element of its natural history. The fox, for example, was noted for its craftiness, cleverness and ability to learn from

I NTRODUCTION

5

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 1.2 Common Cultural Property: Francesco Stelluti’s seventeenth-century engraving of a bee was the first illustration to be made with the aid of a microscope.

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experience. This practice became formalized within an emblematic tradition which combined an image of the animal with a short motto and explanatory poem.7 Just as the study of insects began to emerge within natural history, the emblematic tradition disappeared in the mid-seventeenth century. Both of these developments undoubtedly arose out of a renewed interest in physiology, but the loss of an emblematic tradition did not mean the end of anthropomorphism, metaphor, analogy and allegory in natural history. Smeathman, therefore, described termite societies in the following manner: Of every species there are three orders; first, the working insects, which, for brevity, I shall generally call labourers; next the fighting ones, or soldiers, which do no kind of labour; and, last of all, the winged ones, or perfect insects, which are male and female, and capable of propagation. These might very appositely be called the nobility or gentry, for they neither labour, or toil, or fight, being quite incapable of either, and almost of self-defence. These only are capable of being elected kings or queens; and nature has so ordered it, that they emigrate within a few weeks after they are elevated to this state, and either establish new kingdoms, or perish within a day or two. According to Smeathman, a hierarchical society, at whose summit sat a king and queen, had been ordained by nature. Constitutional monarchy, divine right, and patriarchalism lay at the heart of political disputes in England after the bloodless ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Smeathman offered a natural model of an elected monarchy. Moreover, he was the first to observe a king in addition to a queen. Through his explication of an insect society, he engaged with the nature of politics.8 Nature was at the heart of the Enlightenment: it was grand, orderly, objective and rational. As the post-Enlightenment faith in science grew in the nineteenth century, systematic knowledge of the natural world became associated with objective authority, shorn of obvious political and religious sectarianism. Under the twin pressures of the French and industrial revolutions, the content of science, and the institutions devoted to it, changed significantly. An altogether more enigmatic relationship between science and political ideology emerged. Despite the proclaimed separation of the two, descriptions of the natural world mixed with

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competing ideologies. Even as nineteenth-century natural history transformed into ‘biology’, a science of life, nature continued to provide powerful support for different social arrangements.9 Entomology, the study of insects, emerged from its chrysalis at a time when an increasingly complex and multifaceted culture struggled to define the relationship between science and politics. Reasons for past neglect of the study of insects now made entomology an attractive field within natural history. Throughout history, insects’ ubiquitous presence on earth and in air and water had rendered them anomalies of the animal kingdom and objects of fear and ambivalence. Late eighteenth-century naturalists noted a pervasive imperfect knowledge of insects which, they claimed, arose from the insects’ estrangement from the rest of the larger animals: there were insufficient grounds for analogy with them. What, they asked, was one to make of antennae? Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus remained faithful to his eighteenth-century peers’ anthropocentrism by recommending that taxonomists begin with natural objects most closely related to humans – quadrupeds, birds and fish – before turning their attention to insects. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, insects became attractive subjects precisely because of their apparent distance from humanity. They were less human and therefore more natural than quadrupeds. This made insects potentially powerful ideological tools as the authority of science grew. Consequently, an increasing interest in reproduction and social and biological evolution inspired interest in social insects. Endowed with an utterly alien morphology, insects highlighted the inherent tensions between animality and humanity within studies of natural history.10 Interest in entomology grew as people increasingly engaged in insect collecting. Economic and social changes lay behind the burgeoning interest in natural history. The accumulation of personal wealth, and the related acquisition of things, accompanied the rise of consumer capitalism in eighteenth-century England. Smeathman, for example, travelled to Africa as a paid naturalist. Five wealthy English patrons provided subscriptions of £30–£100 each in exchange for which he promised to send collections of insects, birds, plants, seeds and shells. Dru Drury, who acted as secretary for the group, was a wealthy London silversmith and goldsmith, who earned as much as £2,000 per year. He used his fortune to amass an impressive collection of insects which ultimately numbered about 11,000 specimens. After his death in 1804, his

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‘Museum of Entomology’ fetched approximately £600 by public auction. One insect alone, a giant scarab beetle, sold for the grand sum of twelve and a half guineas. Here again, Drury and his collector Smeathman were representatives of things to come. By 1836, one year before Victoria’s accession to the throne, renowned ornithologist John James Audubon announced with some disdain: ‘The world is all agog . . . for Bugs the size of Water Melons.’11 Drury’s three-volume Illustrations of Natural History (1770–82) was another facet of the conspicuous consumption of nature. Beautiful illustrations celebrated Drury’s acquisition of exotic insects from foreign lands (figure 1.3). The publication of books such as his on natural history was indicative of the commercialization of leisure and increasing literacy in Enlightenment England. The introduction of lithography and steamdriven printing presses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served to feed the growing interest in natural history publications. J. G. Wood, author of books such as Insects at Home (1872), sold an

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 1.3 Conspicuous Consumption: Dru Drury acquired this Goliath beetle from a surgeon who collected it in Africa. Drury paid £10 for it, and had Moses Harris produce this drawing for Illustrations of Natural History (1770-82).

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astonishing 100,000 copies of his Common Objects of the Country (1858) within a single week. In comparison, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) and Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) managed to sell 20,000 and 60,000 copies, respectively, over the course of an entire year. The nineteenth century truly was ‘the heyday of natural history’.12 New aesthetic commitments, born of a more immediate engagement with nature, inspired interest in natural history. An emotional attachment to the vastness of nature – its sublime quality – fired the imagination of the Romantic generation. The Rev. William Kirby, a parson-naturalist, mused: ‘Insects, indeed, appear to have been nature’s favourite productions, in which, to manifest her power and skill, she has combined and concentrated almost all that is either beautiful and graceful, interesting and alluring, or curious and singular, in every other class and order of her children. To these, her valued miniatures, she has given the most delicate touch and the highest finish of her pencil.’ A group of eighteenth-century entomologists – Eleazor Albin, Benjamin Wilkes and Joseph Dandridge – were all painters of miniature, who were inspired by the sublime diversity of form and colour of diminutive beetles and butterflies.13 Collection and study of insects was a worthy, sacred endeavour. Smeathman declared termites to be one of the greatest wonders of creation. The growth in scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century strengthened the arguments from design that bound together science and religion. The benevolent plan of the Creator could, for example, be discerned in the care and attention that He bestowed on the hinges in the wings of an earwig and the joints of its antennae. English naturalist John Ray’s The wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation (1691) implored people to study the marvels of God, the supreme contriver, craftsman and architect. Like a close reading of the Bible, a close examination of nature afforded proof of the existence of God. This natural theology flourished within the unique social and political climate of the English Enlightenment. Anglican priest William Paley, therefore, yoked progressive optimism to his Christian vision of science in his very popular Natural Theology (1802). The number, diversity and scale of insects rendered them a favourite subject of natural theologians.14 Urban growth and urbanization fostered a further desire to collect insect specimens in the nineteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, most people had continued to live on the land, in close communion with rural nature. Just one in eight persons lived in towns

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with a population over 5,000 in 1700. The proportion of the British population living in cities increased from 20 to 80 per cent between 1801 and 1911. As more people left the countryside, they showed an increasing propensity to collect bugs, to place beetles and butterflies under glass. Insect collecting was part of a nostalgic bid to capture lost nature in an increasingly urban Victorian Britain.15 Burgeoning interest in insects generated a collective body of persons who shared a common commitment to a specialist study of entomology. Efforts to establish a collegial body of entomologists stretched back to 1742 but the Entomological Society of London (founded in 1833) came into being in the Age of Reform. Within the sciences, the spirit of reform often manifested itself as increasing self-consciousness and a desire to secure a collective identity for expert talent. These sentiments certainly lay behind the formation of the Entomological Society, which was established to promote and protect the interest of ‘scientific entomology’. The immediate catalyst for a renewed sense of identity was a court case. In July 1832, James F. Stephens launched an unsuccessful action against James Rennie, whom he accused of plagiarizing his Synopsis of the Indigenous Insects of Great Britain. Fellow entomologists rallied to support Stephens and they raised a fund to defray legal costs. The Lord Chancellor, however, indicated that he doubted the merits of Stephens’s case. He contended that Latin names and the high cost of purchase rendered Stephens’s book less popular than Rennie’s, which provided English names and was cheaper. Stephens’s work was clearly ‘intended for scientific persons’, while Rennie’s was designed to address amateurs. The ‘scientific entomologists’ who supported Stephens in July 1832 were identical with the group that coalesced to form the Entomological Society of London in May of the following year when the legal case was scheduled to resume. Stephens took the chair at the founding meeting. Formed just two years after the creation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Entomological Society was part of the nineteenth-century associational impulse of scientists. The Entomological Society was shaped by competing ideologies of science from its inception.16 Membership of the Entomological society did not account for the number or diversity of persons who were interested in insects. It was, however, part of a growing trend towards specialist divisions within natural history. William Whewell, Cambridge mathematician and philosopher of science, objected to the fragmentation of intellectual culture as embodied in the rise of botanists, zoologists and entomologists.

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He coined the word ‘scientist’ in 1833–4 as a reactionary measure against this trend. Despite Whewell’s efforts, the number of persons who defined themselves as entomologists doubled from about 250 to 500 in the first half of the nineteenth century. In part, the rise of a specialist discipline of entomology was linked to the growth of the professional classes in nineteenth-century Britain. The professional ideal encouraged the acquisition of esoteric knowledge. Throughout the nineteenth century, self-defined entomologists espoused or contested the various political and professional goals of Victorian scientists. In the process, some of them sought paid posts for entomologists and specialist educational programmes, publications and associations.17 Expert entomologists offered to transform and improve environments through the application of their specialist knowledge. Smeathman, for example, believed the uncultivated wasteland of West Africa only required ‘the rays of science and knowledge to shine over it’ to make it as productive as any part of the earth. Similarly, nineteenth-century entomologists placated periodic Malthusian fears of imminent famine by allying themselves with agricultural science. Like chemists, entomologists claimed that they could increase agricultural yields. Instead of fertilizers, however, they wielded poisonous insecticides and various other methods to manage, control and eradicate insect pests of food crops.18 Expert entomologists were equally in demand in cities and towns. Dense insect populations of lice, fleas and house flies returned to crowded urban areas after a brief period of respite in the eighteenth century. Throughout the seventeenth century, Britain had undoubtedly suffered from large insect populations. Infrequently washed woollen garments, undrained swamps and accumulations of human and animal waste provided ideal feeding and breeding grounds for insect vectors of disease such as lice, mosquitoes and flies. Through lavation and drainage, environmentalist physicians and agricultural improvers unintentionally reduced the density of insects and thereby improved the health of people. After 1820, however, the eighteenth-century decline in human disease and death stalled in the face of resurgent populations of insects. Initially, filth-borne insects were embraced as part of a natural theology of public health. Flies were God’s bin men, designed to remove putrefying matter from human environments and to ventilate closed spaces through the buzzing of their wings. By the late nineteenth century, however, mosquitoes, flies, lice and fleas were redefined as dangerous vectors of disease.

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Consequently, entomologists deployed their specialist knowledge to control and eradicate insect threats to human health.19 Nineteenth-century entomology was part of the systematization of nature that underpinned the emergence of modern Britain. Collections of domestic and exotic insect specimens embodied extractive capitalism – the accumulation of wealth – which fuelled urbanization and industrialization; and changed the relationship between the city and the countryside. As the century progressed, however, entomologists increasingly demanded mastery of specialist knowledge of insect physiology and habits. This was part of the shift from an aristocracy founded on landed property to a meritocracy grounded in esoteric knowledge: the rise of professional society. Scientific expertise assisted government with efficient management of the nation and empire. An increasingly secular and disinterested science naturalized this process. Statecraft was founded on rational organization of both nature and the state for administrative purposes. The modern state sought economic and military efficiency and political stability through measurement, control and manipulation of insects and the broader environment.20 Some environmental historians have sought empathy with nature for their study of the past. They strive to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature by ‘thinking like a mountain’ – or by writing history through the eyes of a beaver. The aptly named Vincent Wigglesworth would often begin his course on insect physiology by projecting a picture of Edward Poulton, taken through the eye of an insect (figure 1.4). Wigglesworth wished to retrieve the perceptual world of an insect. Significantly, he projected the image of a past entomologist. In this book, I trace past knowledge of insect life through an examination of the lives and thoughts of entomologists. The contextualist approach to the history of science is like the physiology of the insect’s compound eye. Like the mosaic of points of light that merge to form an image on the insect’s retina, a mosaic of contexts produces a picture of past science. Politics, religion, gender and empire shaped knowledge of the natural world in nineteenth-century Britain.21 Although I make no claims to write history through the eyes of insects, Bugs and the Victorians periodically turns the lens of history on particular insects rather than entomologists. These departures from the routine of actor-oriented history are best compared to entomological excursions: single insects are pursued through the fields of the past. In the late eighteenth century, entomological excursions were ostensibly

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 1.4 A Bug’s-Eye View: Twentieth-century entomologist Vincent Wigglesworth often used this picture of Edward Poulton, taken through the eye of a glow-worm, to introduce his course on insect physiology.

quests for the acquisition of insects. But they were also a means through which entomologists could engage with a wider cultural world. In 1797, for instance, William Kirby recorded his entomological excursion in Norfolk. Insect captures were incidental to his descriptions of the art and architecture of churches and stately homes, and the topography and history of towns. More than once, he was moved by the ‘sublime spectacle’ of rural landscapes. Whereas the awesome clouds of the heavens inspired his aesthetic senses, the clouds of the French Revolution and War hung over his social and political judgement. Like Kirby’s, my entomological excursions are a means through which to acquire a deeper appreciation of the non-human natural world; and to understand the moral, religious and political circumstances which shaped the knowledge of the people who studied insects.22

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eader of the MS. [manuscript], whoever thou art, let not the dulness of this beginning deter thee from proceeding . . .’ The Rev. William Kirby began his ‘Journal of an Entomological Excursion’ with this plea. As early as 1797, he clearly concerned himself with the potential audience for his entomological writings. Ultimately, his ambitions manifested themselves in his co-authored Introduction to Entomology. Introduced through a common friend and family relation, George Rodwell, in 1805, William Kirby and William Spence formed a friendship which, three years later, grew into a literary partnership. Between 1815 and 1826, the four volumes of the Introduction to Entomology appeared. These went through numerous editions before a seventh one-volume ‘people’s edition’, of volumes 1 and 2, was published in 1856.1 The Introduction to Entomology was a seminal contribution to the increase in interest in the study of insects in the nineteenth century. By mid-century, naturalist James Wilson acknowledged the Introduction as the single greatest impetus to the production of ‘a general taste for Entomology in Britain’. Similarly, the Gardener’s Chronicle described it ‘as the most entertaining account of the habits of insects that has ever been put into popular form’. In 1868, the Rev. Charles Bethune, co-founder of the Entomological Society of Canada, recommended it as one of the three books most helpful to beginners. For most of the nineteenth century, Kirby and Spence’s Introduction was the standard text on entomology in Britain and throughout parts of the empire.2

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Political and social instability marked the age in which the Introduction to Entomology was written. The industrial and French revolutions cast their shadows over a plethora of contested ideas during a period in British history ‘when there simply was no consensus’. Across a broad spectrum of reform politics, elite culture debated the relative merits of an ancien régime versus a secular democracy. Literary partners William Kirby, a Tory High Churchman from Suffolk, and William Spence, a merchant capitalist from Hull, articulated contested religion, politics and ideas through their study of entomology. This chapter examines the relationship between political economy and natural knowledge as part of a British Tory politico-religious programme for social stability. Like Carl Linnaeus, Kirby and Spence shared a commitment to autarky founded on protectionist legislation and applied natural knowledge. Moreover, Kirby envisioned religious, moral and material utility as the foundation of national self-sufficiency.3 Historians of the life sciences have identified the Introduction to Entomology as a significant contribution to the early nineteenth-century ‘transition from natural history towards the sterner science of biology’ because explanations of the inner workings and physiology of insects were intermingled with descriptions of static classification schemes. The seriousness of Kirby and Spence’s science is implicitly celebrated as a departure from traditional amateur natural history. This seriousness cannot be captured in a simple juxtaposition of amateur and professional. It was a new alternative to the tradition of dilettanti that principally originated with agricultural improvers who wished to preserve the political power of the landowning elite through the deployment of expert scientific knowledge. A considerable portion of the first volume of the Introduction dealt with agricultural applications of entomology, a subject on which Kirby and Spence found considerable common ground. Spence had, by the time that he embarked upon his partnership with Kirby, achieved notoriety as a political economist of the ‘land-lauding’ ilk. Although Kirby expressed private reservations about the logical possibilities of Spence’s brand of political economy, he shared his partner’s commitment to the landed interest and agricultural improvement.4 Britain Independent of Commerce? William Spence (figure 2.1) was the embodiment of the contested notions – town v. country, industry v. agriculture – that infected elite culture during

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the early nineteenth-century ‘age of crisis’. Baptized an Anglican in 1782, he was the son of a Yorkshire husbandman.5 He received his early education in natural history from the Rev. Robert Rigby, vicar of St Mary’s Anglican Church, Beverley. After attending Beverley grammar school, Spence served an apprenticeship to merchants and shipowners Carlill, Greenwood & Company at Hull. This proved to be the beginning of a successful career. In 1811, he and Henry Blundell founded Messrs Blundell, Spence & Company, paint and colour makers and general merchants. Interestingly, Spence was elected to the Holderness Agricultural Society in the same year. This combination of a farming background and a commercial career shaped both his political economy and his entomology, and created some difficult ideological tensions. In the first instance, however, he found common intellectual and ideological ground between his commitments to a patriarchal, agrarian variant of political economy and to agricultural entomology. Spence first achieved notoriety in the early nineteenth century as a political economist. Inspired by Napoleon’s continental blockade, he produced a pamphlet, Britain Independent of Commerce, in late 1807. Several months later, Kirby confided in him: ‘I have been as deeply immersed in theology as yourself in political economy, so that I have not cast my eye upon an

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 2.1 Apologist for the Landed Order? William Spence, merchant capitalist from Hull, was the co-author of the Introduction to Entomology (1815-26). Production of the books pushed him to the point of mental collapse.

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insect for months . . .’ Nine months later, Kirby suggested to Spence that they co-author ‘A general English work on British Entomology’. In those nine months, Spence’s pamphlet went through six editions and netted him a profit of £230. In addition, it spawned some three dozen books and pamphlets in response to his highly contentious opinions. Spence was at the height of his fame as a political economist when Kirby suggested that they enter upon their shared entomological endeavour. Kirby was not strictly a literary opportunist anxious to exploit his friend’s fame: his first book, Monographia Apum Angliae, had already catapulted him to the foremost ranks among entomologists. Spence’s brand of political economy had ideological implications which could be buttressed or complemented by entomological science.6 As an avowed follower of the Physiocrats or ‘French Economists’, William Spence espoused a doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that harkened back to patriarchal models of state administration. Instead of building a theoretical system on an economic foundation of the concepts of production and distribution, he posited a polity, distinguished by various sectors and reliant upon an established social order. His was a ‘physical cost theory’ of value instead of a ‘labour cost theory’: value only accrued according to the physical items – the food and raw materials – used in the production of a commodity. Agriculture, therefore, was the sole source of a nation’s wealth; manufacture played a minor role as a stimulant to agricultural production.7 A rapid succession of governmental economic initiatives in time of war and popular unrest brought the study of political economy to the fore in the first several decades of the nineteenth century. In 1821, the Political Economy Club was founded, and four years later, Oxford established the Drummond Chair. The 1820s proved to be a divisive decade for the nascent discipline of political economy. Vehement discussions over political reform created irreparable ideological rifts. In the mid-1820s, the Philosophic Radicals – James Mill, Francis Place, Jeremy Bentham – claimed the new orthodoxy, as defined by David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817), as their own. The bald atheism of the Philosophic Radicals created the historical tradition that political economy was antithetical to Christian orthodoxy. Several historians have made a convincing case for an alternative early nineteenth-century ‘Christian Political Economy’. They credit Christian Political Economy with programmatic consistency and intellectual respectability. It was,

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they maintain, a working ideological compromise between ultra-Tories and the various manifestations of radicalism in the nineteenth century. As such, it represented the ideological transition from the ancien régime to secular society.8 Thomas Chalmers looms large in revisionist studies of Christian Political Economy. Although he included an appendix addressing the issues of the Spence–Mill debate, Chalmers denied that William Spence influenced his commercially unsuccessful Inquiry into the Nature and Stability of National Resources (1808): ‘Since the . . . work was nearly completed, its author has had the benefit of Mr Spence’s pamphlet entitled, “Britain independent of commerce;” and he has also read with attention the remarks of the Edinburgh Reviewers.’ Perhaps significantly, Chalmers – unlike Spence – wished to distance himself from any connection with French Physiocracy, which clashed with his liberal-Toryism.9 Spence’s tracts did not contain the standard polemical apparatus of Christian Political Economy. But Spence shared assumptions with agrarian economists that drew him closer to T. R. Malthus, Dugald Stewart and Thomas Chalmers, and set him in opposition to the emerging Ricardian orthodoxy. For David Ricardo, landlords, with their unearned rent, were inimical to the interests of society; capitalists, in contrast, were an asset. Ricardo, who was imbued with a faith in the inevitability of capitalist-driven progress, was the darling of emergent industrialists. Nineteenth-century responses to Spence’s political economy highlighted his ideological allegiances. The Whig Edinburgh Review produced two very critical reviews. J. R. McCulloch, who became the leading exponent of a Ricardian orthodoxy, judged Britain Independent of Commerce to be an ‘exaggeration of the exploded errors of the Economists [Physiocrats], consisting of a series of shallow sophisms which had been refuted over and over again’. Karl Marx saw the ‘scoundrel’ Spence as ‘one of the most fanatical defenders of the landed interests’. The ultra-Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in contrast, felt ‘that while he is just as right in the main as his acute antagonist [James Mill] . . . his style, both in form and colour, is . . . far superior to that of the Economist’.10 In Defence of the Landed Order Ostensibly a response to Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees of 1806 and 1807, Britain Independent of Commerce was the battle-cry of an ideological

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war fought on the ‘economic terrain’ of Britain’s home soil. As the first of England’s under-consumptionists, William Spence allied himself to the traditional agrarian order in its struggle with the rising commercial and industrial classes. He contended, therefore, that Napoleon’s continental system, which threatened the loss of foreign trade and the colonies, posed no threat to Britain’s wealth. Moreover, he perceived limits to capital accumulation: gluts of goods and capital were inevitable within the capitalist rubric. James Mill, in his response to Spence, Commerce Defended (1808), sketched the underpinnings of what would become Classical Political Economy.11 Using Jean-Baptiste Say’s symbiotic relationship between the production and consumption of commodities, he denied the possibility of glut, and affirmed the utility of foreign trade. Moreover, Mill recognized Spence’s purportedly nationalistic economic cant for what it was – a critique of capitalism and an apologia for the landed interests. Physiocracy was not, however, the preserve of the landed interests. Radicals, such as Piercy Ravenstone, Thomas Hopkins and Charles Hall, deployed physiocratic arguments to denigrate the parasitical landowners. William Cobbett, who was the acknowledged creator of ‘the Radical intellectual culture’, strongly endorsed Britain Independent of Commerce. Through a series of five ‘perish commerce’ articles in his Political Register, he printed extensive extracts from Spence’s pamphlet.12 He liked Spence’s ideas so much that he claimed them as his own: ‘from the prejudice excited by those unfortunate initials’ F.L.S. (Fellow of the Linnean society) after Spence’s name, Cobbett levelled a charge of plagiarism. As a Tory-turned-Radical, Cobbett was – and remains – a problematic figure.13 But his disdain for urban capitalism and industrialism, and his commitment to an idealized traditional agrarian patriarchal society provided common ground with Spence. Cobbett wished to regain an idyllic past that he had known as a cottage farmer in the 1760s and 1770s. Furthermore, although he was a lukewarm opponent of enclosure, he remained a supporter of agricultural improvement. Spence’s secular political economy must have been a further attraction for Cobbett. By his own admission, Cobbett hated ‘many men’; and he hated ‘parson Malthus’ above all others. He spent a lifetime pouring invective upon the Anglican clergy. Although Spence embraced the population principle, under-consumptionism, protectionism and other principles of political economy in common with Malthus, he did not operate within the context of Anglican orthodoxy. Whereas Malthus littered his Essay on the

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Principle of Population (1798) with references to ‘God’, ‘Supreme Being’, ‘Supreme Creator’, ‘Nature’, ‘miracles’, ‘revelation’, ‘sin’, ‘soul’, ‘immortality’ and ‘temptation’, Spence’s political economy was devoid of theological trappings. Spence, therefore, represented an early nineteenth-century curiosity. According to Edmund Burke’s formula, religion and government were the two pillars upon which the protection of property and rank rested. Clearly allied with conservative interests, Spence’s writings displayed no commitment to Anglican Christianity.14 ‘Improving’ agricultural science lent support to this apparently structurally flawed ideological edifice. A commitment to patriarchalism and agricultural improvement created the strange nexus around which William Spence, William Cobbett and William Kirby loosely coalesced. Spence’s ideological use of political economy and science drew him closer to the ultra-Toryism of Kirby. His secular presentation of these literary productions, however, placed him closer to Cobbett. This tension persisted for the duration of Kirby and Spence’s partnership. Insect Improvement Published in 1815, Kirby and Spence’s first volume of the Introduction to Entomology was dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks for his unflagging demonstration of how natural science could serve the cause of agricultural improvement. Applied entomology claimed seven of the book’s fifteen ‘letters’. The same year saw the publication of another of Spence’s tracts, entitled The Objections against the Corn Bill Refuted. It was an addition to a large body of timely literature surrounding the ideologically divisive debate over the Corn Bill. The chronological confluence of these two publications was not coincidental. They were separate facets of an ideology designed to retain cultural leadership in the hands of the landed gentry and clergy.15 Kirby and Spence were part of the ‘Banksian Learned Empire’. Banks was a moving force behind the creation of the Royal Institution and he was a permanent member of the Board of Agriculture. Although his contributions to the institutionalization of botany and agricultural science have been well documented, Joseph Banks’s influence on entomological science has received less attention. In addition to a collection that he began in his youth, Banks amassed a formidable array of insects during his voyage with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour (1768–71). Moreover,

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as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and as an adviser to the government, to the East India Company and to the Admiralty, he supplemented his insect acquisitions through a network of collectors. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the status of Banks’s collection of insects was greatly enhanced by the identification of numerous specimens as taxonomic types (that is, yardsticks of classification). Spence, therefore, spent four or five months in Banks’s library in London in 1812, completing research for the Introduction.16 Under the influence of a shift to alternate and convertible husbandry, and a trend towards enclosure, agriculture experienced considerable expansion and change in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Due to wartime conditions and a series of bad seasons, this trend greatly accelerated after 1793. Compounded by politically uncertain times, this led to the growth of a farming lobby in the last decade of the eighteenth century. This agricultural interest was not monolithic. Often improving farmers were pitted against the landed aristocracy and the church. Land was a politically volatile issue: Burke identified Jacobinism as an attack on property. Bread riots, which had occurred in 1709, 1740, 1756–7, 1766–7, 1773 and 1782, were, for the first time, politicized when they recurred in 1795 and 1800–1. Under these circumstances, Physiocracy and agricultural science were ideological tools for the Tory landed interest. Together, they represented a Tory compromise between the ‘paternalism of provision’ and the ‘political economy of the free market’. The landowners wished to retain their leadership over the agricultural interest and, more generally, their cultural hegemony over the nation.17 Like the Royal Institution, the Holderness Agricultural Society was an institutional conduit for an ideology of agricultural science. One manifestation of the emergent agricultural interest was the formation of agricultural associations and societies. The Board of Agriculture (f. 1793), the Royal Institution (f. 1799) and the Royal Horticultural Society (f. 1804) all came into being in these tumultuous decades. In 1795, for instance, England experienced one of its worst years of agricultural dearth: the price of wheat almost doubled to 90 shillings per quarter, and bread riots ensued. In the same year, a group of wealthy gentlemen and farmers formed the Holderness Agricultural Society. Members had to pay a subscription of a guinea and a half to join, and an annual half guinea fee thereafter. Any farmer occupying a farm of less than £50 rent per annum could join as a ‘visiting’ member, without any payment. They were,

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however, subject to a fine of one shilling and sixpence for every meeting missed, and they were barred from voting, serving on any committee and borrowing books. The society’s constitution and its subscription fees rendered it the preserve of the wealthy.18 On 23 December 1811, William Spence became a member of this society. The paper he presented at his first meeting appeared as Observations on the disease in Turnips, termed in Holderness ‘fingers and toes’ the following year. Two years later, at the height of the Corn Law agitation, he became vicepresident, and orchestrated the election of Sir Joseph Banks as an honorary member. The following year, the society elected Spence as its president, whereupon he used his position to transmit Banks’s views on the Corn Law, and ‘presented to the Society a volume of his [Spence’s] tracts on the subjects connected with agriculture and political economy’. Spence dedicated his Objections against the Corn Bill Refuted, ‘To the Holderness Agricultural Society, with which every new year of his acquaintance has served only to rivet more firmly his conviction of the information, liberality, and worth, which distinguish the character of the BRITISH FARMER . . .’ On several occasions (1 Sept. 1800, 7 June 1802, 16 June 1828), the society discussed insects in relation to agriculture; Spence subsequently used entomological contacts from the society to gather material for the Introduction.19 Spence’s agrarian variant on political economy was closely allied to the agricultural interest committed to improvement. The few explicit references in Britain Independent of Commerce included Sir John Sinclair, Sir Joseph Banks and Arthur Young. These individuals, in turn, recognized the threat of insect pests as fodder for their ideological battle with the emerging industrial and commercial classes. When Britain feared an attack of Hessian fly from North America in 1788, Arthur Young reported: In consequence of information received from America . . . of the progress of this insect, the Privy Council made an order against the importation of wheat from America, which order, and the papers on which it was grounded, are now laid before the House of Commons for their consideration; a contest will therefore ensue between the landed interest, who, no doubt, will be much alarmed at the chance of such a calamity being introduced, and the trading interest, who care not a fig what is introduced, so they gain the profits of its introduction.

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Called upon by the Privy Council to investigate the possible invasion of these insect enemies, Sir Joseph Banks supported prohibition and favoured protectionism, because, he argued, insects attacking wheat represented a greater threat to the country than either human or cattle plague.20 Moreover, insect pests were more dangerous because their evil consequences were not finite: once admitted, a noxious insect would be present as long as wheat continued to be grown. By diminishing the amount of bread corn – a staple necessary for subsistence – insects reduced productive labour, the very basis of government. Finally, in the strictest physiocratic terms, Banks asserted that this represented a severe threat because ‘in whatever shape manufacture is carried to the market, food, and food only, is its creator, and . . . the whole of the honest gain it produces, must ultimately centre in the country that produces the food’. He contended that naturalists were the ‘new guardians of agricultural national security’. On Banks’s recommendation, the Privy Council maintained their Order of 25 June 1788, which prohibited the importation of North American wheat. Thomas Paine was convinced that this ‘was only a political manoeuvre of the Ministry to please the landed interest’. The Order was withdrawn eleven months later when the storm clouds of the French Revolution raised concerns for Britain’s wheat shortage: the Privy Council was persuaded that the insect no longer posed a threat.21 Economic reductionism proves an inadequate explanation for Kirby and Spence’s common commitment to agricultural science and improvement. Spence, for instance, threw his support behind the Corn Bill and protectionism after being ‘educated to’ commerce, and at a time when he did not occupy ‘a single acre of land’. Kirby was not engaged in any explicit farming activities, but he had a vested financial interest. As a rural Anglican clergyman, he was in receipt of tithes. In addition, the rectorate of Barham, which he had held since 1796, granted him freehold rights that created a special bond with the land, nature and people of his parish. William Kirby, as author of the ‘letters’ of the Introduction relevant to agricultural applications, demonstrated an allegiance to the same agricultural interest that favoured improvements. The majority of his earliest entomological articles – dating from the last decade of the eighteenth century – focused on agricultural pests. A study of insect enemies of wheat, his earliest contribution to the subject, placed him in league with Thomas Marsham and Joseph Banks.22

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Although he advanced applications of entomology that served some perceived economic interests, Kirby failed to investigate fully the possible remedies to the ravages of insect enemies. He explained: We are now apt to think, that if certain noxious species of animals could be annihilated, it would be a great benefit to the human race; an idea that arises only from our short-sightedness, and our ignorance of the other parts of the great plan of Providence. We see and feel the mischief occasioned by such creatures, but are not aware of the good ends answered by them, which probably very much exceed it. Kirby’s theodicy prevented him from making his agricultural entomology an economically useful applied science. The Edinburgh Review remained unconvinced by Kirby and Spence’s claims about the multifarious utilities of entomology. The study of insects provided no firm basis for ‘that intellectual eminence which constitutes an able lawyer, a discriminating judge, a great general, a sagacious physician, a painter, an orator, or even an exciseman’. Although ‘impaling butterflies’ is ‘fully as laudable a pursuit as running after foxes or corrupting Cornish boroughs . . . Messrs. Kirby and Spence seem to have forgotten that ours is a busy country – except these said fox-hunters, we scarcely know one who is not employed’. Reacting to Kirby and Spence, the Edinburgh Review relegated the study of entomology to a pursuit of the idle landed classes, who controlled the unreformed Parliament.23 Kirby’s entomology may not have delivered clear material benefits to agriculture, but this does not make his appeals to utility disingenuous. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, utility could encompass moral, intellectual and religious benefits. Kirby, in fact, envisioned these various elements of utility as individual parts of his ultra-Toryism. He supported the application of entomology to agriculture, but his was a science inspired by pre-millenarian theology: he wished to discern ‘the true sense of Nature’ in order to achieve the triumph of Revelation. For this mission, he adopted the seriousness of the new entrepreneurial ideology of science which had arisen as an alternative to the gentleman amateur tradition. After hearing that Alexander Macleay intended to immigrate to New South Wales, Kirby bemoaned the loss of an unparalleled collection of insects to the scientific world and rebuked his friend: ‘Let it not be said that the mere Amor habendi urged you to collect.’ The

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amateur tradition had defined science as entertainment: Kirby’s entomology was Tory British science in aid of national pre-eminence and social stability.24 A Tory Parson-Naturalist A belief that the worst irreligious and anarchistic elements of the French Revolution lay in materialist and atheist ideas rendered some science suspect in Britain. Nevertheless, representatives of an aggressive Tory British science entered into a sometimes acrimonious dialogue with French scientific publications. High Church Toryism of the 1790s included a wide swathe of politically conservative individuals, who were devoted to the preservation of the status quo in church and state. They, therefore, held firmly to privilege, hierarchy, Royal Supremacy, property and Anglican orthodoxy. Motivated by fear that Jacobinism was an exportable commodity, church-and-king Tories took it upon themselves ‘to wield the pen, and shed the ink’. The Gentleman’s Magazine, the British Critic (f. 1793) and the Anti-Jacobin Review (f. 1798) formed the principal phalanx of periodicals in the British counter-revolutionary cause.25 Although political and theological publications were the most prominent staples of reviews, medico-scientific works were also significant, though minor, areas of contribution. This lesser role for science was indicative of its ideological ambiguity. Whereas the Philosophical Society of London (f. 1810) explicitly excluded theology and politics from discussions, these subjects could be covertly introduced under the guise of science. The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act and the antecedent legislation of 1795, 1799 and 1801 were one manifestation of the war of opposing ideologies that encompassed science: should scientific meetings be included within the ban on public gatherings that threatened to infect Britain with French radicalism? As the debates surrounding the Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 demonstrated to frustrated legislators and to would-be radicals, there was an absence of well defined boundaries between science and politics.26 Among the most vociferous church-and-king propagandists were the Anglican clergy. In general, their interests were inextricably bound to those of the landed aristocracy. Between 1783 and 1852, only about 6 per cent of the bishops of the Church of England ever held an urban living. Officially discouraged from the use of, and training in, arms by the

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bishops’ resolution of 28 April 1798, the clergy set aside the gun and sword in favour of the pen. The single largest group of contributors to the early Anti-Jacobin Review was the provincial Anglican clergy. In addition, the clergy played a prominent role in the Associations for Preserving Liberty and Property (APLP, or the Crown and Anchor associations) and the Volunteer movement. Through publications, sermons and various organizations, the Anglican clergy spread their message.27 As Anglican curate, and later rector, of Barham in Suffolk, William Kirby (figure 2.2) felt the call to the pen. Under a pseudonym, he wrote an article that poured vitriolic scorn upon the moral character of Thomas Paine, infidel and author of the Rights of Man. Kirby wrote all his explicitly politico-religious articles anonymously or under a pseudonym. He planned and began numerous monographs on topical politico-religious subjects. In the early 1790s, for instance, he proposed to publish a pamphlet or book in defence of the primitive Fathers of the Church as a response to Edward Evanson’s letter to the Bishop of Worcester. Later in that decade, he began to write a defence of the Canon and a cautious review of the new biblical criticism. This, in turn, metamorphosed into an exhaustive examination of the prophecies. In 1805, he embarked on a refutation of Evangelical pretensions by an appeal to the Liturgy and the Homilies. None of these projected books ever came to fruition. Although anxious to enter into the ideological skirmish which beset the clergy, Kirby was reluctant to engage directly in debates. In 1806, he was chosen to preach at the Visitation of the Bishop of Norwich at Stow-market. A convinced pre-millennialist, Kirby chose to devote his sermon to tracing the signs of Christ’s impending Second Coming. No sooner had he launched into his discourse than he was seized by a paroxysmal paralysis which forced him to be carried from the church. As a consolation, he proposed to publish this sermon: he never did.28 Clearly uncomfortable on the front lines of overtly politico-religious debates, Kirby turned to the ideological ambiguity of science. Science or natural theology occupied a different intellectual terrain than fast day sermons or the politico-religious reviews that dominated church-andking periodicals. Being located behind the front lines of ideological warfare, entomology and natural history provided Kirby with a safer conduit for his Tory ideology. By the early nineteenth century, the pursuit of natural history was considered an accepted extension of the clergy’s work. Although its roots lay with the medieval monastic

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 2.2 A Tory Parson-Naturalist: The Rev. William Kirby was a committed High Churchman - a perspective which shaped his explanations of the insect world.

scholars, the parson-naturalist tradition reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. John Ray, in the seventeenth century, and William Paley, in the early nineteenth, had effectively espoused the belief that the intricate complexities of the natural world provided evidence of a Divine Creator: natural theology encouraged the interrogation of nature

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for evidence of design. The parson-naturalist was expected to bring philosophical and theological insight to his observations of the natural world. Kirby’s first book on entomology demonstrated the ideological potential of the systematic study of nature.29 Burkean Bees Ostensibly written for a specialized audience in one field of natural history, Monographia Apum Angliae (1802) was Kirby’s first book. It was a highly specialized taxonomic study of the English bees. In the first instance, it was a critique of the new insect systematics of Danish entomologist J. C. Fabricius. Whereas Linnaeus had based his system of insect classification on the number or general morphology (external structure) of the wings, Fabricius proposed eight new classes (orders) founded upon the ‘Instrumenta cibaria’, or the mouth parts. Extending back through Linnaeus and his predecessor Andrea Cesalpino, Fabricius operated in an Aristotelian tradition, which attempted to establish a system of classification from a single structure or ‘essential’ character of an organism. Kirby did not reject taxonomic essentialism, but he did deny that the mouth parts constituted the essence of the insect. Furthermore, he represented Fabricius’s denial of the possibility of constructing a ‘natural system’ founded upon distinctions of ‘classes’ (orders) and ‘ordines’ (families) as a blanket denial of a ‘natural system’. Fabricius, in fact, claimed to have created a ‘natural system’ at the level of genera and species.30 Kirby opposed Fabricius’s essentialism through an appeal to the authority of Linnaeus, whom he misrepresented as having based his system of insect classification on a variety of characters drawn indiscriminately from all parts of the organism. This ‘eclectic’ entomological classification system was most strongly associated with French taxonomic and political equivocator Pierre-André Latreille – not Linnaeus. Kirby’s conservative patriotic proclivities induced him to identify his taxonomic loyalties with a Linnaean tradition. Moreover, he was willing to draw upon Fabricius to reform this purported traditional approach to classification. Appealing to differences in mouth parts, he divided the genus apis into two genera, melitta and apis. Presciently, Kirby drew inspiration from the Hebrew root for bee, which he translated ‘to speak’. This, he asserted, ‘seems to direct us to the tongue for its Essential Character’.31

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Kirby operated in a ‘pre-consensus’ era in the history of insect taxonomy. Spence, for instance, later complained to Robert Brown: We . . . shall not be able to publish [the Introduction to Entomology] so soon as expected; . . . to the Entomological world of Britain of about 30 persons at most, will the delay be of much moment. We find it a much harder task than writing an Introd. to Botany would be, where the nomenclature is settled. On [venturing] into Entomology we found the most deplorable . . . confusion . . . the same names given to different parts, & different parts called by the same names – important parts without any names &c. &c. so that to make matter for two lines frequently requires anatomical investigations which occupy a day. To the chagrin of contemporary entomologists, no universally accepted, standard system of classification existed. Consequently, Kirby’s vehement – and rather muddled – rejection of Fabricius cannot be explained strictly in terms of his opposition to essentialism or his commitment to a clearly established taxonomic tradition. Fabricius’s transmutationism (early evolutionism) may have been a contributing factor, but Kirby never mentioned this issue, and Fabricius’s most explicit transmutationist statements did not appear until two years after the publication of the Monographia. More likely, Kirby’s politico-religious agenda contributed to his opposition to Fabricius.32 Kirby declared that his principal aim was to unite the two estranged sisters, Religion and Natural History. In December 1800, he had informed Josiah Rodwell that he was busy preparing a work of natural history: ‘I know that I run the risk of sneers from infidel and irreligious and worldly-minded naturalists; but that I regard not.’ Complemented by a smattering of references to the ‘ALMIGHTY’ and his ‘ETERNAL WISDOM’ in the body of the text, the long introduction conveyed typical statements of natural theology. But as a committed church and state ideologue, Kirby also had a political agenda. His attack on Fabricius must be seen as a statement of Burkean conservatism. In a passage, noted by both the British Critic and the Anti-Jacobin Review, he asserted: Fabricius, in his eagerness to innovate, has fixed upon characters taken from organs, which, in a large proportion of insects, are absolutely invisible, or next to it; and for the sake of systematic confusion has

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discarded nature and all orderly arrangement, and instead of facilitating, has perplexed the study of entomology with difficulties that are innumerable and inextricable. The rage of the present unhappy aera [era] is not for the amendment or improvement of what has been done before, but in these days a man thinks himself no philosopher, unless he can altogether obliterate, and for ever do away the collected wisdom of the ages that are past, in order, in its stead, to erect a novel system of his own: this is the case in religion, morals, politics, and philosophy. . . . Significantly, Kirby attributed Fabricius’s errors to his ‘eagerness to innovate’. In the present-day idiom, ‘innovation’ is the lifeblood of science. In the classical context, which was pervasive in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it meant to foment social or political unrest and radical change.33 Edmund Burke, therefore, distinguished the French Revolution from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the following manner: ‘It is a revolt of innovation, and thereby the very elements of Society have been confounded and dissipated.’ Similarly, in a book which Kirby recommended highly to a family relation and theological protégé, Charles Daubeny recognized the radical secularist potential of William Paley’s theological utilitarianism, because it gave ‘scope to that innovating spirit’.34 Again, scientific discourse reflected the ambiguous ideological role of science. Whereas Tory John Robison castigated French science for its ‘innovation’ in chemical nomenclature, linear measurement and the calendar, his Whig countryman John Playfair maintained that, though freed from natural and moral inertia, the French academicians ‘may be assured . . . of having innovated too little’. In contrast, Henry, Lord Brougham, spokesman for specialization in science, believed that ‘it should be remembered, that mere innovation, however sudden, in matters purely speculative, is liable to no one of the manifold objections which are so derisive against all political changes, however specious’. In the context of the politico-religious and scientific discussions surrounding the French Revolution and war with France, Kirby reacted to Fabricius in the manner of a Burkean conservative. Fabricius, he maintained, had erred because he had attempted to change the system of insect classification, rather than reforming it; he had committed the sin of innovation in the ‘age of revolution’. The spirit of Fabricius’s system, therefore, represented a threat to the social and political status quo.35

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Revolutionary Bugs For William Kirby, philosophies of nature and society were inseparable. His emergent agricultural science was not simply an entrepreneurial tool for economic gain. It was one facet of an ideological framework deployed to retain cultural and political hegemony in the hands of a traditional agrarian order in the face of challenges from industrial and commercial interests. Kirby and Spence, therefore, provided a wide-ranging set of justifications for the study of entomology. They claimed that they had introduced the Introduction to Entomology with discussions of noxious and beneficial insects to lead readers to the ‘dry abstractions’ of anatomy and physiology through ‘the attractive portal of economy and natural history of its objects’. But they made strong claims for the utility of a study of insects. In an age that increasingly looked to govern economy through the principles of science, Kirby and Spence implored ‘experimental agriculturists and gardeners’ to become conversant in insect properties, habits and habitat. Insects, they further argued, provided instruction for the improvement of arts and manufactures: bees and ants were model architects; the insect chrysalis illustrated the beauty and technique of expert lace-makers; and the wasp demonstrated the requisite skills for papermaking. And at a time during which science was becoming the ‘grammar of industrial society’, Kirby argued that insect systematics was the grammar of entomology. He exhorted ‘every patriot Zoologist’ to collect and classify, because once ‘an animal subject is named and described, it becomes a . . . possession for ever, and the value of every individual specimen of it, even in a mercantile view, is enhanced’. Kirby and Spence’s science, which was devoted to agricultural applications and to the collection and systematization of nature, reflected the ‘extractive transformative character of industrial capitalism’.36 In the late eighteenth century, social and political circumstances produced changes in natural history. Prominent among these were the ideological ramifications of the French Revolution. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the atheist and materialist implications of a temporalized nature became the paramount threat to the status quo. A dynamic and changeable model of nature threatened the traditional static hierarchical conception of both nature and society. Moreover, radical materialists believed that everything – including mind – could be reduced to matter: the universe, they boldly claimed, must be understood as random matter in motion rather than providential design.

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French zoologist Georges Cuvier’s shift from ‘classification to anatomy’ and, therefore, his reorientation away from botany and towards zoology must be seen in this context. As an opponent of materialist science, Cuvier realized that he needed to mount a rearguard action; only sentient beings provided fodder for the multifarious facets to any discussion on materialism. Similarly, John Freeman had noted that in 1791 William Kirby’s ‘scientific friends now observed a taste for Entomology so strong, that it threatened to obscure his favourite study of Botany’. By 1815, Kirby asserted: As to rank, I must claim for the entomologist some degree of precedence before the mineralogist and the botanist. The mineral kingdom, whose objects are neither organised nor sentient, stands certainly at the foot of the scale. Next above this is the vegetable, whose lovely tribes, though not endued with sensation, are organised. In the last and highest place ranks the animal world, consisting of beings that are both organised and sentient. In the opening years of the French Revolution, Kirby shifted his natural history devotions from botany to entomology. He did not subscribe to a dynamic view of nature, but – like Cuvier – his interest in sentient insects was a direct response to the perceived threat that it posed. Through the study of the purported minima of sentient beings, he could engage the dangerous enemy of religion: materialist science.37 Kirby believed that France had fallen under the spell of the Devil: Bonaparte and Lamarck were conduits for atheist doctrine that threatened the order and stability of Britain. Undoubtedly, Kirby would not have been surprised to learn that Napoleon later spent some of his time in captivity on the South Atlantic island of St Helena studying ants. With appropriate military metaphors, Corsican physician Francesco Antommarchi described Napoleon’s various experiments with ants and a sugar bowl: ‘ “This is not instinct,” said he; “it is much more – it is sagacity, intelligence, the ideal of civil association. . . . You see it is not instinct alone that guides them. . . . However, be the principle which directs them what it may, they offer to man an example worthy of observation and reflection. . . . Had we possessed such unanimity of views!” ’ Napoleon worked tirelessly to rewrite history – to construct the Napoleonic legend. He had, he claimed, sought to ‘bring freedom and

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unity to Europe’. He therefore used his observations upon ants as a springboard for a polemic about the legitimacy of his leadership: patriarchal theories of government, he asserted, were ‘ridiculous pretensions’ when compared to ‘a man of the people’, such as himself. According to Napoleon, ants provided a natural vindication of his republican reform of the ancien régime.38 Antommarchi was no stranger to fears of the possible union between science and sedition. In London, en route to St Helena, he believed himself under suspicion, because he possessed anatomical plates for a projected book: ‘In the present age everything conspires; and muscles and tendons might compass the death of kings or communicate with usurpation!’ Through his narrative of Napoleon, he orchestrated the confluence of theories of government and observations upon the behaviour of social insects. In the age of revolution, this was a common strategy: the habits and behaviour of bees, ants and other insects supplied important evidence for Enlightenment values, which challenged the hierarchy in nature and society, and threatened to blur or extinguish the distinction between human and beast, aristocrat and worker.39

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ny attempt to understand the roots of the nineteenth-century passion for entomology must take into consideration the new position it assumed within theoretical speculations in natural history, and the wider ideological concerns that these speculations entailed. One of the most contentious debates in early nineteenth-century zoology addressed the relative roles of instinct and reason in animals. Entomologists were able to engage in these debates precisely because they studied tiny, alien insects. Control of insect minds provided a key to fundamental religious and political questions. Writing in early 1838 in his first notebook devoted exclusively to the ‘Transmutation of Species’, Charles Darwin noted: ‘People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing. – the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful. its mind more different probably & introduction of Man. Nothing compared to first thinking being. although hard to draw line.’ As the minima of sentient beings, insects became an integral part of the search by transformationists (early evolutionists) for the origins of life. The last chapter argued that the autarkic ideology of Spence’s political economy supported Kirby’s agricultural entomology. This chapter asserts that the methodological assumptions that Spence derived from his political economy shaped his naturalistic interpretation of insect instinct and intelligence; and precipitated a decisive clash with the bedrock of Kirby’s being – his religion. Closer historical examination of debates about insect mind provides insight into some of the varieties of conservative science.1

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Miniature Minds Early nineteenth-century changes in classification systems focused attention on both insects and mind. An increased emphasis on physiology and anatomy as the linchpins of a hierarchical ‘natural system’ of classification elevated the significance of insects. In Georges Cuvier’s classic paper of 1812, the vertebrates as a whole became equivalent to each of the other three distinct groups or embranchements of the invertebrates (that is, molluscs, articulates (crustacea, insects, etc.), and radiates (starfish, jellyfish, etc.)). After Cuvier, comparative anatomy became a prominent aspect of zoological taxonomy. Instead of the traditional reliance on morphology (external structure), the functional integrity of the organism became the key to classification. Moreover, by establishing taxonomic categories based on four distinct plans of the nervous system, Cuvier infused physiological considerations into disputes about instinct and intelligence.2 Speculations on the nervous system became an important part of discussions about the hierarchy in nature, and about the distinctions between instinct and reason. In his chapter on the ‘system of insects’, Kirby reacted against Cuvier and J.-B. Lamarck, who placed the annulosa (articulates, which included insects) after the molluscs on the basis of their respective circulatory systems. Kirby asserted that the insects’ superior nervous systems gave the annulosa priority over the molluscs. Spence’s investigations into the ‘internal anatomy and physiology of insects’ led him to observe: Because, as . . . [Julien-Joseph Virey (1775–1846)] conceives after Cuvier, insects are not gifted with a real brain and spinal marrow, he would make it a necessary consequence that they have no degree of intellect, no memory, judgement or free-will; but are guided in every respect by instinct and spontaneous impulses – that they are incapable of instruction, and can superadd no acquired habits to those which are instinctive and inbred. These, he contended, were incorrect assumptions.3 In the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the early years of the nineteenth, discussions pertaining to instinct, reason, intelligence and habits became an ideological battleground. Social reformers and early

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evolutionists – such as idéologue Pierre-Jean Cabanis and transformationists Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin – sought to rupture the divide between man and beast by negating a mechanistic brute instinct. In direct contradiction to the Cartesian belief that animals were hardwired machines, these men maintained that they were capable of experience and learning. Furthermore, they saw the mind as an active agent in species’ adaptation or transformation. Cabanis, Lamarck and Darwin all employed variations of the theory of use inheritance to explain anatomical adaptation. The experience of different environments produced different habits in animals, which, through constant repetition, created new anatomical variations. In addition, argued Lamarck, shifting environments, and concomitant changes in habit, produced alterations in the sentiment intérieur, a nervous fluid active in the formation of new organs. If all ideas were simply manifestations of sensations, and if rational behaviour was simply the association of ideas, all sentient beings were capable of perfectibility. This depiction of an atomistic, self-developing nature had important social and political implications. Discoverable natural laws of behaviour sanctioned social and educational reform from the bottom up – from insects to elephants, from radical medical dissenters to Tory Anglicans.4 Consequently, Anglican priest William Paley clashed with freethinker Erasmus Darwin. With the Tory backlash against the Jacobin threat, Darwin’s science became suspect. Paley countered Darwin’s sensationalist theory of instinct with an argument from design. Whereas Darwin defined instinct as an action acquired ‘by the repeated efforts of our muscles under the conduct of our sensations or desires’, Paley believed that it was ‘a propensity, prior to experience, and independent of instruction’, which resided in the Creator. In the actions of bees, ants and wasps, Darwin discerned the power of reason: ‘Go, thou sluggard, learn arts and industry from the bee, and from the ant! Go, proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!’ Paley, in contrast, asserted that only man was endowed with the gift of reason. Rather than being a variant on intelligence, instinct, for him, was unique evidence of the divine watchmaker’s contrivance or design in animal creation.5 Surprisingly, Paley overlooked one of the most popular arguments from design – the construction of the cells of bees. In his ‘Dialogues on Instinct’, which formed one of the five volumes of his extremely popular edition of Paley’s Natural Theology, Brougham redressed this oversight, and found

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middle ground between Darwin and Paley. Two insects constituted the principal examples of the Dialogues. Defining instinct as a being’s execution of a design to perfection, without any instruction or experience, he concluded that a designing cause must exist. What else, he insisted, could explain the solitary wasp’s provisions for the sustenance of larvae that would hatch long after its death. Even more compelling was the bee’s immediate ability to construct geometrically precise, hexagonal cells with rhomboidal bottoms. Determined to promote the union of the method of induction with natural theology, Brougham deployed his skills as a mathematician to an analysis of these miraculous cells. At the behest of R. A. F. Réaumur, the mathematician Samuel Koenig had calculated the angles necessary to make the most economical use of space and wax. On comparison, Réaumur had found that the bees transgressed from Koenig’s calculations by two minutes. Repeating the calculations using a different method, Brougham discovered a perfect match between his solution and the bees’.6 The natural philosophy of William Smellie was instrumental in shaping Brougham’s position on instinct. As a printer, editor and writer, Smellie was a key figure in the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Although he depicted the construction of bees’ cells and the maternal endeavours of solitary wasps as instinctual acts, Brougham also granted these small creatures the power of reason. He thereby charted middle ground between conservative natural theologians, who maintained the distinction between intelligence and instinct but denied brute creation the former attribute, and radical reformers, who granted animals intelligence by negating any distinction. Unlike social reformers and transformists, who saw instinct as merely a form of intelligence founded upon sensate experiences, William Smellie argued that ‘the reasoning faculty itself is a necessary result of instinct’. Intelligence, he maintained, was just a bundle of assorted instincts.7 Smellie’s argument alerted Brougham, ‘the old drum-major of the army of liberty’, to the possible illiberal implications of a complete negation of the distinction between instinct and intelligence. Equating intelligence with instinct constituted a denial of free will. Brougham, therefore, maintained the distinction, but still granted insects the ability to act intelligently upon experience. He likened instinct to the physiological processes of secretion and absorption. ‘Intelligence or reason will sometimes interfere with Instinct, as our voluntary actions will interfere with the involuntary operations of secretion.’ Moreover, by maintaining the distinction, he averted the danger of sanctioning the worst elements of

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the status quo in human society by appeals to a necessary instinctual nature. Thus, he described the ants’ enslavement of workers as an act of animal intelligence, and not of instinct. Brougham – supporter of the anti-slavery campaign, co-founder of the University of London, friend of the Unitarians, and defender of Queen Caroline – saw the distinction between instinct and intelligence as a necessary adjunct to his strong commitment to the cause of freedom.8 Kirby’s and Spence’s different expositions on instinct highlight fundamental ideological tensions within early nineteenth-century debates in zoology. Although the Introduction to Entomology was a collaborative effort, Kirby inserted a significant disclaimer in volume 3: It will not be amiss here to state, in order to obviate any charge of inconsistency in the possible event of Mr. Kirby’s adverting in any other work to this subject, that though on every material point the authors have agreed in opinion, their views of the theory of instinct do not precisely accord. That given in the second and fourth volumes is from the pen of Mr. Spence. Almost a decade later, when Kirby produced his Bridgewater Treatise on instinct, he reiterated: ‘It is not without considerable reluctance that the author of this essay takes the field, in some degree, against his worthy friend and learned coadjutor . . .’ Years later, reflecting on this divergence of opinion, Spence stated: ‘Our book was always in our thoughts; and our reading, even on dissimilar subjects, was constantly furnishing facts, or hints, or illustrations, bearing on the portions of each other, which were duly noted and transmitted, and most generally adopted . . .’ Herein lay the roots of their differences. Different vocational pursuits exposed them to different intellectual influences and priorities. William Spence’s work in political economy convinced him of the importance of a science founded on facts and devoid of religious references. In contrast, William Kirby was a Tory High Church clergyman, who structured his science around his Christian faith in revelation.9 The Sceptic Spence Spence’s explanations of instinct seemed to place him in league with radical reformers and emergent evolutionists. William Spence eschewed

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the trappings of natural theology in his writings on both political economy and insect instinct. He seemed intent on establishing the scientific validity of his arguments by a strict adherence to the facts, and an avoidance of religious references. Spence, the merchant capitalist who embraced agrarian political economy, and the sceptical entomologist who formed an intellectual partnership with a Tory High Churchman, may have struggled under the weight of these ideological tensions. He first began to suffer bilious attacks while working in Banks’s library; and after the publication of volume 2 of the Introduction in 1817, he began to suffer from severe headaches. These became so intense that by 1820 he submitted his unfinished manuscripts to Kirby and removed his family and himself to Exmouth, Devon. Following the publication of the final two volumes six years later, they fled to continental Europe, where they enjoyed a semi-peripatetic existence for the next eight years. Although Spence found common methodological ground between his work on political economy and insect instinct, ideological compatibility was far more elusive. Albeit ‘simple-minded’, Spence’s work in political economy exposed him to the ‘Scottish methodological tradition’. He employed this philosophically informed methodology for his discussions on insect instincts and other entomological investigations. Volume 2 of the Introduction contained Spence’s chapter on instinct, and followed rapidly in the wake of his numerous publications on political economy. Consequently, he was sceptical about conjectures founded on unobservable causes. Moreover, in the opening pages of the Introduction, he made brief reference to Dugald Stewart’s belief in the necessity of creating a sound scientific nomenclature. Stewart stressed the methodological importance of language in science; he espoused the development of esoteric technical terminology. Stewart’s philosophical speculations on the role of hypothesis made an important contribution to early nineteenth-century British science.10 Spence’s cautious approach to various theories of instinct undoubtedly resulted from his knowledge of the ‘Scottish methodological tradition’. Rejecting nearly all the current materialist and theological explanations of insect instinct, he explained: The same objection applies to this as to so many other metaphysical theories, that it is not adequately supported by facts; and all theories not so supported are injurious to science in proportion as their plausibility

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is greater, by leading the student to relax in that observation of nature and attentive study of the instincts of animals, on which alone sound hypothesis on this subject can ultimately be founded. Unlike Henry Brougham, who subscribed to Thomas Reid’s ‘commonsense’ philosophy, Spence did not completely reject theories and hypotheses. In a similar, though more cautious, vein to Stewart, he recognized the priority of a knowledge of the facts while, at the same time, he accepted the role of hypotheses. The method of induction was not incompatible with their formation.11 Stewart, who was once a favourite of the High Church party, became increasingly suspect because of his defence of David Hume. Similarly, signs of a rift in the intellectual partnership of Kirby and Spence can be discerned from their respective references to the same Scottish philosopher. A quotation from Hume’s ‘Of Commerce’ served as the motto for Spence’s Britain Independent of Commerce. Spence concluded his rebuttal of Cobbett’s charge of plagiarism with a lengthened version of the same quotation. Significantly, he referred to the authority of Hume – the one British thinker who ‘can be numbered among the philosophes’ of the French Enlightenment – without any strictures. In contrast, Kirby ranked him alongside Lamarck as an Epicurean enemy of revelation. Indeed, Kirby must have been aware of Hume’s status among his theological fellow travellers. Hume suffered the wrath of George Horne in a pamphlet, entitled A Letter to Adam Smith on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his Friend David Hume, which attacked the latter’s irreligious philosophy.12 Spence demonstrated no reluctance in deploying the sceptical critic of natural religion in support of his exposition on instinct. An example drawn from Hume’s ‘Of the Reason of Animals’ furnished Spence with evidence for his investigation of insect instinct. Like his work on political economy, his contribution to the zoological debate on instinct was relatively exceptional because of his avoidance of any reference to religion. In a field that engaged strongly with a natural theological tradition, Spence presented a secular explanation of insect instinct. His commitment to sensationalist epistemology, shorn of any reference to revelation, placed him in league with radical reformers and emergent evolutionists and at odds with William Kirby.13 William Spence correctly recognized that insects were generally not granted the power of reason, except by those who completely rejected

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instinct. Like Brougham, he maintained the existence of both instinct and reason in insects. Brougham, who was more committed to natural theology than Spence, concluded ‘that instinctive action proves an interposition of the Deity at each moment’. According to Spence: Instinct, then, is not the result of a plastic nature; of a system of machinery; of diseased bodily action; of models impressed on the brain; nor of organic shootings-out: – it is not the effect of habitual determination for ages of the nervous fluid to certain organs; nor is it either the impulse of the Deity, or reason. Without pretending to give a logical definition of it, which, while we are ignorant of the essence of reason, is impossible, we may call the instincts of animals those unknown faculties implanted in their constitution by the Creator, by which, independent of instruction, observation, or experience, and without a knowledge of the end in view, they are impelled to the performance of certain actions tending to the well-being of the individual and the preservation of the species . . . By reference to the physiology of their nervous system, Spence affirmed the insects’ possession of memory and the ability to learn from experience and to communicate. He remained, however, cautious about explanations from secondary causes. These, he said, brought the investigator no closer to determining the essence of instinct or reason; they were simply an exercise ‘to teach us humility, and prevent our vainly fancying, that though allowed to discover some of the arcana of nature, we shall ever be able to penetrate into her innermost sanctuaries’. Whereas natural theologians used the limits of experimental science as a plea for a leap of faith or resort to revelation, Spence failed to draw the same conclusion from his doubts.14 Spence’s views on instinct shared more in common with Hume than with Brougham. Taken in this light, it is unsurprising that Charles Darwin paraphrased Spence’s definition of instinct in his ‘Big Species Book’. In addition, it sheds further light on Darwin’s footnote comments: ‘Kirby & Spence Introduction to Entomology seems to me to contain the best discussion on instincts ever published. – See, also, Lord Brougham’s Dissertation on Science Connected with Natural Theology 1839. vol. 1 . . .’15 Spence’s views on instinct were the same as Brougham’s, except they were shorn of the implications for natural theology. Darwin, therefore, accorded Spence

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priority over Brougham. Kirby, in contrast, openly dissociated himself from Spence’s opinions on instinct through a disclaimer that he inserted in volume 3 of the Introduction. He later produced two volumes on the subject of instinct, intelligence, reason and habits. In contrast to Spence’s writings on instinct, Kirby’s occupied the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. His allegiance to Hutchinsonianism, a Tory High Church form of natural theology, shaped his contribution to this significant zoological debate. ‘The Glory of God’ Kirby entered the fray through his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises, which arose out of an £8,000 bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Reverend Francis Henry Egerton. When the trustees fixed upon the subject of ‘The Habits and Instincts of Animals’ for the eighth and final treatise to illustrate the power, wisdom and goodness of God in natural creation, they naturally turned to the foremost British entomologist, William Kirby. Much maligned and almost universally misunderstood, Kirby’s Bridgewater Treatise On the History Habits and Instincts of Animals has suffered at the hands of critics and historians since its first appearance in 1835. ‘We shall not waste our time’, proclaimed the radical Medico-Chirurgical Review, ‘or the time of our readers, by dwelling on a lengthy and most unwise introduction, in which the learned and revered gentleman endeavours to illustrate natural history by Scripture.’ Similarly, the High Church Christian Remembrancer questioned the relevance of the introduction. The latter, which contained a lengthy discussion of the ‘physical cherubim’, caused greatest consternation among Kirby’s contemporaries. Although Fraser’s Magazine dismissively linked his Hutchinsonianism to his reference to the cherubim, it credited itself with inspiring Kirby to present a work of natural theology that was heavily reliant on revelation and biblical exegesis. The content and form of Kirby’s treatise and its long introduction owed their origins to Hutchinsonianism. This was a type of physico-theology (a combination of religion and physical sciences) which enjoyed its heyday in the 1790s, but had ‘fallen into oblivion’ by the 1830s.16 John Hutchinson, who was employed as land steward to Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, around 1694, developed a unique antiNewtonian physico-theology which was underpinned by a variant of

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Lockean theories of knowledge and analogical reasoning. Recognizing that all knowledge was the result of experience derived from the senses, Hutchinson argued that correct reasoning allowed man to perceive the immaterial, or revelation, by analogy to the perceived physical realm. Proper interpretation rested upon textual analysis of the Old Testament in its pure Hebrew form. According to Hutchinson, the original Hebrew had been corrupted by conspiratorial Jews, who had added vowels in the forms of points or lines. By removing the points, the original root could be equated with a physical manifestation. For example, the Hebrew word for ‘glory’, purged of its points, became the word ‘heavy’. By a series of analogies, ‘heavy’ signified ‘gravity’. Thus, ‘gravity’ became the ‘glory of God’, and Moses’s Principia usurped Newton’s: a biblical science of the natural world replaced Newtonian natural philosophy.17 Hutchinson objected to Newtonianism because he felt that it posited force without a mechanical cause or explanation. God, therefore, could become equated with an immaterial property acting within nature. Moreover, void space or a vacuum contradicted his belief that God left no gaps. Hutchinson’s system relied upon a material substance, which God had empowered at creation. This substance was the cherubim of Scripture. Through philological and etymological analyses, the cherubim became the physical agents light, fire and air, which, by analogical reasoning, revealed Christ, the Father, and the Holy Ghost. Hutchinsonianism colonized a small part of Oxford in the mideighteenth century. Writing in 1753, Horace Walpole noted: ‘Methodism is quite decayed in Oxford, its cradle. In its stead, there prevails a delightful fantastic system, called the sect of Hutchinsonians.’ At the centre of the group was George Horne, who became president of Magdalen College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Norwich. Other supporters included George Watson, his tutor at University College, and William Jones of Nayland, who became Horne’s chaplain at Norwich and editor of his works.18 Although educated for the clergy at Cambridge, William Kirby entered the intellectual milieu of the Hutchinsonians through his association with Jones of Nayland, whom he met in 1792, when the latter was endeavouring to form a Society for the Reformation of Principles. Aimed at the enforcement of proper manners, morals and behaviour, the society was a High Church counterpart to William Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society. High Churchmen, in fact, had their own equivalent to the

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Evangelical Clapham Sect. Taking their name from a village north-east of London, where most of their members resided, the Hackney Phalanx were a closely knit group of family relations and friends. The Phalanx actively campaigned and proselytized for the Tory High Church ideal of the preservation of the status quo in church and state. Their particular fusion of religion and Royal Supremacy supported the traditional Tory shibboleths of passive obedience and non-resistance. In short, the Hackney Phalanx were highly vociferous proponents of the ‘Anglican, aristocratic, monarchical regime’ of Jonathan Clark’s long eighteenth century.19 George III’s reign saw the early eighteenth-century undercurrent of Toryism rise unashamedly to the surface. In 1796, the Gentleman’s Magazine noted that Hutchinsonianism, and its battle against natural religion, was ‘hourly gaining ground’. The extreme patriarchalism of the re-emergent Hutchinsonians reflected the confluence of physicotheology and blatantly Tory High Church politics. In 1756, one of their detractors accused them of preaching the ‘exploded doctrine of absolute passive obedience, and this in terms so extremely gross’, as even to have outdone Sir Robert Filmer, the foremost apologist for patriarchalism. Four decades later, William Jones asserted that Hutchinsonians were ‘true Churchmen and Loyalists; steady in the fellowship of the Apostles and faithful to the Monarchy’. As parents derived power over their children from the Creator, he argued, rulers derived power over their subjects. The Wilkes demonstrations, the Gordon Riots, defeat in the American War of Independence, growing urbanization and endemic food shortages all contributed to the resurgence of Toryism. After 1782, the January 30th Martyrdom Day sermons assumed a ‘more conservative and authoritative’ tone. The events of the 1790s, however, raised Tory fears to a fever pitch by highlighting the threat that French Revolutionary politics and materialism posed to a church and State establishment.20 Nature’s Perfect Circles In the 1790s social theory displaced abstract constitutional and political arguments as the staple of fast day sermons and politico-religious tracts. The emphasis, therefore, shifted from discussions of political authority, obligation, and the right of rebellion to concerns about moral restraint and sanctions, and the social hierarchy. Defenders of the church and state

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establishment considered an appeal to the divinely ordained social hierarchy as the best defence against the apparent democratic sentiments of French and British radical reformers. A concerted effort to shield a static, hierarchical conception of nature from the materialistic and progressionist implications of French science formed part of this strategy. In his Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797), John Robison warned that the conspiratorial Illuminati ‘rejoice in every discovery that is reported to them of some resemblance, unnoticed before, between mankind and the inferior creation, and would be happy to find that the resemblance is complete’. J. B. Sumner contended that one of the greatest threats facing natural history was the ‘extraordinary pleasure in levelling the broad distinction which separates man from the brute creation’. One response among conservative naturalists was to use natural creation to reinforce the divinity of the social hierarchy.21 Perhaps the greatest support from nature for the social hierarchy came from the new commitment to a hierarchical ‘natural system’ of classification. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had created a standardized system for naming plants, animals and minerals. None had existed before his Systema Naturae (1735). In many ways, Linnaeus envisioned his mission as a continuation of Adam’s work (Genesis 2: 19) to name every living creature: he would fashion order from chaos. Consequently, he borrowed a model from human censuses and, in the years that followed, formulated a procedure for classifying plants and animals based on a simple two-word, or binomial, nomenclature. Significantly, he acknowledged that his early attempts were ‘artificial’ systems: they could not pretend to represent the true order in nature. In the early nineteenth century, however, naturalists became convinced of the existence of a natural order – that is, God’s plan. With patriarchal overtones, Kirby announced confidently: The Great Parent of the universe, when he furnished this terrestrial globe with its inhabitants, caused the earth and waters . . . to produce every thing ‘according to its kind’: an expression, which if taken in its largest sense . . . may be understood to signify the distribution of all created species, not only into Families and Genera, but also into Orders, Classes, and Kingdoms; and so into a harmonious system, every member of which, although it has a separate place and office assigned it, is connected, by certain common marks and characters, with those which precede or follow it.

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Etymological reasoning, of course, supported his entomological taxonomy: the root of the Hebrew word for ‘kind’ implied ‘distribution and orderly arrangement’.22 In the 1820s, insect morphology became ‘one of the most exciting new areas of research in comparative anatomy’ in France. Cultural antipathy towards post-Napoleonic France generated a desire among British naturalists to wrest from French hands intellectual leadership in zoology. The Linnean Society’s botanical bias was seen as an obstruction in their path. Consequently, in the early 1820s, a group of zoologists banded together to form their own institution. Adrian Desmond has charted the political vagaries of the resultant Zoological Club of the Linnean Society and its successor, the Zoological Society. Created in 1822, the club was a breakaway group of politically conservative natural theologians, who sought a forum for William Sharp Macleay’s quinary system of classification. Nicholas Aylward Vigors assumed leadership of these dissident members of the Linnean Society. Because the club was originally conceived as an ‘entomological society’, Vigors solicited the support of the doyen of British entomology, William Kirby. Committed to the ‘Banksian Learned Empire’, the latter individual would only sanction a ‘subordinate society’ or committee, operating under the auspices of the Linnean Society. These conditions satisfied, Kirby had the honour of addressing the first meeting of the ‘Zoological Club’ on 29 November 1823. Privately, Kirby informed Macleay: ‘I think as the other powers combined to put down the domination of a French Empire so they should combine to oppose their pretensions, when inconsistent with the just claims of the learned of other countries, to be dominant in Science.’ Parish duties in Suffolk precluded Kirby’s active involvement in the club, but, through his pen, he lent support to the quinary system.23 William Sharp Macleay struck upon his unique ‘quinarian’ approach to taxonomy in 1817, claiming to have discovered regularity in nature based on a series of five. Developed at length in his Horae Entomologicae (1819–21), Macleay’s quinarianism was initially conceived as a ‘Natural System’ for a particular grouping of beetles (Linnaeus’s genus Scarabaeus). Macleay asserted that to be truly natural groupings, series had to return on themselves to form circles. Each circle was founded on relationships of affinity (‘variation in structure’), and it was linked to other circles through relationships of analogy (‘difference in structure’). This system permitted him to construct a chain of continuous circles that were based on variations

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in the structure of insects (figure 3.1). Significantly, he acknowledged gradation of form in insects, but his circles effectively negated any Lamarckian notions of a linear temporal process of change. Possessing an intimate knowledge of French zoology, Macleay wielded a curious mixture of comparative anatomy, British natural theology and a classicist’s reverence for the perfection of a circle. His quinary system was a response to French temporal progressionism and German naturphilosophie: it aroused

Figure 3.1 Entomological Circles: In the early nineteenth century, W. S. Macleay’s quinary system of classification infused British zoology with ‘philosophical’ respectability. Founded on circular sets of five, the system appealed to William Kirby’s Tory High Church politics.

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passions in British natural history that endured for much of the nineteenth century.24 Kirby proclaimed that Macleay had ‘diffused a new and copious Light over the whole Science of natural history’. Several articles and a considerable portion of the Introduction attested to Kirby’s support for quinarianism. In it, he saw a powerful tool for the support of a static hierarchy in nature. By positing a continuous series of closed circles, Macleay rebuffed the temporalization of the chain of being. He maintained the animal series without succumbing to Lamarck’s transformism or progressionism. Kirby characterized the quinary system as one of ‘wheels within wheels’, and then combed Scripture for reference to the word ‘wheels’. Significantly, he declared that Ezekiel (1: 16) referred to the cherubic animals upon which the Deity sits as ‘wheel within wheel’. These, he claimed, ‘represent the whole System of Nature; the Living Creature of cherubic animals The great powers of Nature that act upon the system, for the spirit of the living creature is said to be in the wheels . . . & are the powers that represent the triune Godhead & are immediately acted upon by Him’. Kirby would later describe instinct in almost identical terms.25 According to Kirby, the proper distinction between analogies and affinities ensured that a graduated scale of the latter relationships would not be used to prove that ‘creatures were their own creators’. He maintained: According to this opinion, – which seems the most consistent of any yet advanced, and which reconciles facts which upon no other plan can be reconciled, – the series of beings is involved in the highest degree, rolling wheel within wheel ad infinitum, and revolving if I may so say, round its centre and summit – man. Quinarianism presented him with an anthropocentric, cyclical, biological cosmos.26 Like Spence’s political economy, the circularity of the quinary system supported the preservation of the traditional social order. As David Robinson observed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1824: In most other countries, society presents hardly anything but a void between an ignorant labouring population, and a needy profligate nobility . . . but with us the space between the ploughman and the peer, is crammed with circle after circle, fitted in the most admirable manner

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for sitting upon each other, for connecting the former with the latter, and for rendering the whole perfect in cohesion, strength and beauty.27 A taxonomic picture of nature, founded upon a harmonious series of circles, was compatible with a similar model of the social hierarchy. In light of his adverse reaction to Fabricius’s taxonomic changes, Kirby’s support for Macleay’s extensive reformulation of the system of classification demands further explanation. Undoubtedly to allay fears of unnecessary ‘innovation’, exponents of quinarianism went to great lengths to present it as a conservative reform of the Linnaean tradition. More important, it complemented Kirby’s theology. Its strong reliance on analogy and affinity meshed with his Hutchinsonianism. The Hutchinsonisns, who were the ‘largest single school of analogists’ in the eighteenth century, displayed a strong commitment to the allegorical and typological traditions of the ancient Fathers and the Caroline Divines. Consequently, Kirby’s only contribution to theological literature was a re-edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s Seven Sermons on Our Lord’s Temptation. Reflecting on the quinarian circles, Kirby noted: The number five, which Mr. MacLeay assumes for one basis of his system as consecrated in Nature, seems to me to yield to the number seven, which is consecrated both in Nature and Scripture. Metaphysicians reckon seven principal operations of the mind; musicians seven musical tones and opticians seven primary colours. In Scripture the abstract idea of this number is – completion – fullness – perfection. I have a notion, but not yet sufficiently matured, that Mr. MacLeay’s quinnaries [sic] are resolvable into septenaries. In volume 4 of the Introduction, Kirby offered a history of entomology divided into seven eponymous eras: ‘Era of MacLeay’ was the significant seventh. Convinced that the naturalist was ‘the Hierophant in the great temple of nature’, Kirby found quinarianism to be compatible with his particular mixture of scriptural literalism and rational taxonomic science.28 Angels and Insects Bound together by a common commitment to the quinary system, the Zoological Club also proffered an opinion on instinct. The lead article in

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the first issue of the Zoological Journal was John Oliver French’s discussion of animal instinct and intelligence. This was continued as two further ‘essays’, spread over four subsequent numbers of the periodical. The editor, N. A. Vigors, singled out French’s contribution as consistent with the club’s creed. French upheld the distinction between instinct and reason, and denied the hive-bee and the rest of the brute creation the latter attribute. Only man possessed moral, intellectual and rational consciousness. Seemingly intelligent behaviour among animals resulted from an intermediate ‘Divine Energy’. Through their ‘subordinate voluntary principle’, or perception, animals could be guided by ‘good and evil agencies under Providence’. Explicitly drawing on W. S. Macleay, French contended that naturalists too often described instinctive perceptions and conscious intelligence as relations of affinity, when, in fact, they were that of analogy. He, therefore, maintained the distinction between instinct and reason by employing the theoretical underpinnings of quinarianism.29 Historian of science Robert Richards correctly observes that Kirby rejected French’s resort to ‘good and evil agencies’, but he fails to perceive that Kirby was not rejecting French’s divide between instinct and reason. Nor was Kirby denying God a role in instinctive behaviour. Richards concludes: ‘Certainly compared to Kirby’s own rich explorations of animal behavior . . . French’s efforts were thin and very flat beer.’30 But Kirby’s beer was enlivened by even more fantastic, ethereal bubbles of biblical belief, for he wished to transfer Hutchinson’s physicotheology to zoology. Perceiving them as the proverbial demon and angel perched on opposite shoulders, Kirby rejected French’s evil and good agencies for the same reason that Hutchinson rejected Newton’s force: it represented an immanent God or Divine Being. As an infallible Being, God could not be held directly responsible for the flesh-fly that mistakenly deposited her ill-fated eggs on the blossom of the carrion plant rather than on a piece of flesh. Similarly, Kirby fervently attacked Lamarck’s transformism, or materialism, because it equated God with matter or body, if it allowed God a role at all. Lamarck, he warned, was zoology’s Laplace: from ‘nebulosities of masses or matter’, a ‘monad became a man’. In addition, he took exception to Spence’s belief that mind was some unknown entity. Drawing upon Joseph Addison’s analogy between instinct and gravity, Kirby – the Hutchinsonian – refuted any belief in an unknown action-ata-distance influencing the brain and nerves.31

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Kirby opposed French’s views on instinct because he perceived his intermediary agents to be Divine Beings. He did not, however, deny the role of intermediary agents in instinct. In the form of an ethereal fluid, the physical analogues of the Cherubim – light, fire and air – acted directly upon the brain and nerves of animals to produce instincts. Whereas Spence rejected Virey’s mechanical musical cylinder model of instinct, because it posited fanciful analogies in place of an adherence to facts, Kirby embraced it. If Hutchinson’s cosmos was a perpetual machine kept in motion by the direct contact action of the cherubim substances light, fire and air in the form of an ethereal fluid, instinct in the animal kingdom was a series of music cylinders, driven by those same physical manifestations of the Christian Trinity.32 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kirby made a distinction between intellect and reason. In the animal kingdom, intellect was synonymous with sensation. Senses, he stated, guided the bee to the flower and back to the hive, but then instinct took over: ‘Sight, hearing, scent, taste, touch, perception, influence the will, and direct each animal to the point in which its instinctive actions are to commence; and so far instinct is, as it were, mixed with intellect.’ The intellect of man, however, was coterminous with qualities unique to him alone – reason, faith and an immortal soul. After the Fall, these elements of man’s intellect were set in opposition to his senses. Only the development of a proper spiritual faculty allowed man to exploit his divine gift of rationality. William Jones defined this faculty as the imagination, and asserted that proper interpretation of sensate experiences depended on the state of a man’s soul. Like John Wesley, Kirby and Jones posited revelation as a special form of empiricism. The sensationalist underpinnings of their Hutchinsonianism should be seen in the context of their Christian epistemology. The latter explains the paradox of a Hutchinsonian – the avowed enemy of natural religion – contributing to the ‘desultory disquisitions of the Bridgewater Treatises’. And it sheds light on Kirby’s ‘anomalous’ stance on natural theology. Moreover, Kirby’s views on instinct shared more in common with French than with Spence or Darwin.33 Upon his retirement as rector of Barham in 1838, Kirby recommended Jones’s Scholar Armed against the Errors of the Time (1795) and John Potter’s Discourse of Church-Government (1707) as essential reading for his successor. These two books represent the marriage of Tory Hutchinsonianism and the ‘conservative aspects’ of the post-1714 Whig tradition. No better

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illustration of Kirby’s lifelong commitment to the High Church Toryism of the 1790s could exist. Formulated against the backdrop of the French Revolution, his theology and science were integral parts of his Tory ideology. When asked by the Bridgewater trustees to compose a treatise, he responded: ‘Nothing, certainly, would be more gratifying to me than to employ my talents . . . in the great cause of religion, especially in times like the present . . .’ With Chartist activities raising the spectre of the French Revolution there was a resurgence of ultra-Toryism in the 1830s. Kirby, therefore, turned towards his Tory ideology of science to preserve the divinely ordained order in society. Often the language of his physiology melded imperceptibly into political discourse: man was the ‘visible king and lord of all the rest’, for he ‘subdues and governs the planet that he inhabits’. Significantly, Kirby called the intermediary agents responsible for instinct ‘God’s vicegerents’. He thereby conjured up a term used for the ‘king’ in Tory High Church January 30th sermons. Critics of the latter had argued that the term itself implied passive obedience. Careful to maintain the hierarchy in nature by attention to the divide between instinct and reason, and matter and spirit, Kirby meant his Bridgewater Treatise to inculcate political loyalty, social harmony and good order.34 Originally drawn together by a common commitment to a conservative ideology of agricultural science and Physiocracy, William Kirby and William Spence found themselves at odds over their respective interpretations of instinct and intelligence. Ultimately, Spence’s exposure to the ‘Scottish methodological tradition’, through his work as a political economist, led him to adopt a liberal position, which conflicted with Kirby’s Hutchinsonian beliefs. A failure to distinguish the differences between Kirby and Spence runs the risk of misrepresenting a Tory High Churchman as a member of the Broad Church Network. A historical examination of Kirby’s and Spence’s writings on instinct and intelligence suggests that Kirby reacted against an independent natural theology, and that he was part of a circle of Tory High Churchmen who were the forerunners of the Oxford Movement. Moreover, as a committed Hutchinsonian, he represented the continuation of patriarchal ideology within the Anglican Church. Although natural theology may have been a tool of mediation, Kirby’s was a facet of his Tory High Church ideology. Doctrinal differences, with clear political implications, shaped natural theology and interpretations of the insect world. A Tory High Churchman embraced a natural theology that was weighted in favour of

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revelation and patriarchalism to combat the perceived evil influences of both liberal natural religion and radical progressive materialism. Fundamental differences between the relative roles of reason and faith – instinct and intelligence – in the natural world fractured a literary partnership; and displayed a spectrum of Tory beliefs that opposed the atheist science of radical anatomists. The struggle to understand the mental powers of insects defined significant changes in human interpretations of the natural world. As insects that demonstrated a human-like propensity for social organization, clever bees and ants occupied central ground in the contested terrain of nineteenth-century natural history and biology.35

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n one of his first cartoons for Punch, Richard Doyle sardonically recorded the royal acquisition of transparent beehives at Windsor Castle in 1844. Entitled ‘Prince Albert’s Bee-Hives’, the cartoon depicted Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort examining a glass skep or bell jar (figure 4.1). Doyle, uncle to Arthur Conan Doyle, used his skills as an illustrator of children’s books to bring a fantastic quality to the German prince’s efforts at rational experimentation and manipulation of nature. Closer inspection of the hive revealed small fairy-like creatures engaged in various laborious tasks: scything grass, hammering iron, shifting heavy loads and producing works of art. Taken from a newspaper report, the caption read: ‘These Hives are so constructed that the HONEY may be removed without DESTROYING THE BEES.’1 As a work of political satire, this cartoon is relatively easy to locate within the Condition of England question. Published in the midst of the ‘hungry forties’, it addressed the nature of power, and the relationships of the industrial poor to the ruling elite: the workers of Britain survived despite the fact that others enjoyed the fruits of their labours. Although they carried considerable political freight, the cartoon and caption made more subtle references to the nature of mechanical and social power and to the power of human artifice in the manipulation of nature. This cartoon encapsulated a broad spectrum of debate surrounding ‘improvement’ and beekeeping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The beehive, which was long regarded as the archetypal model of organicism, became a

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.1 Prince Albert’s Beehives: After Prince Albert had ‘rational beehives’ installed at Windsor Castle, Punch parodied the Queen and Prince Consort gazing upon miniature human workers of the British hive.

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physical manifestation of the ‘mechanization of the universe’: eighteenthand nineteenth-century apiarists and naturalists sought to categorize, control and discipline bees in the production of useful commodities such as wax and honey through a shift from the use of straw skeps (figure 4.2) to specially designed wooden boxes, or ‘rational beehives’. The rise of the rational beehive was analogous to the emergence of modern state management through rational planning of urban and rural environments. Moreover, as instruments of observation, rational beehives and artificial ant nests fostered organismic theories of society; they opened a window on the collective organization of social insects, and they offered hope of social stability through the application of science.2 As an analogue of human social organization, the beehive long occupied a curious place. Virgil celebrated bees in a didactic and agricultural poem, but he also helped to establish the enduring image of hive-as-city. The

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.2 Bee Cruel: The traditional coiled straw skep required the loss of the bees to harvest the honey.

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potentially oppositional forms and experiences of country and city, agriculture and industry, converged in the beehive. At a time when the industrial revolution and its concomitant changes in labour relations intensified these oppositional tendencies, the rational beehive tapped into veins of both agricultural improvement and urban reform. Proper management of the ‘streets and passages’ of bees would, it was claimed, augment profits and produce ‘an industrious, prosperous, and virtuous peasantry’, worthy of its apiarian exemplars. Through an examination of rational beehives and artificial ant nests, this chapter explores the use of social concepts in the systematic study of insects.3 The Rise of Rational Beehives Early modern innovations in beekeeping were inspired by the same managerial impulses of European statecraft that pushed towards ‘legibility’: they ordered nature to assist manipulation and control. Samuel Hartlib promoted the economic benefits of a new beehive design as part of his agricultural and horticultural reform. Pre-dating the Romans, hive beekeeping in England had remained virtually unchanged after the Saxon introduction of the coiled straw skep, in place of wicker hives, in the sixth century. Hartlib’s The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees (1655) contained several designs for new hives that departed from traditional methods of beekeeping. Among these was a multi-storeyed wooden hive, designed by Gloucestershire cleric William Mew, and drawn by Christopher Wren (figure 4.3). To harvest honey from the traditional skep, two options were available to the beekeeper. The bees could either be driven from the skep or killed with the aid of sulphurous smoke. Both options involved the loss of some or all of the bees, and often resulted in the vitiation of the honey. These techniques entailed the constant depletion of vital bee stocks. The Mew–Wren hive obviated the need for the smoking or the destruction of the bees. Consisting of stacked chambers, it permitted swarms to be transferred from one chamber to another as each became full. Once vacated, the old chamber could be removed to harvest the honey, and then returned to its original position. Hartlib envisioned these first steps towards rational beekeeping as part of a broader agricultural reform scheme that was designed to engender national self-sufficiency. Reforms to the practice of beekeeping would be coupled to new methods in arable agriculture, husbandry, horticulture and sericulture. In combination,

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.3 State of Nature: This wooden hive, which was designed by William Mew and drawn by Christopher Wren, promised rational management of the organic society of bees.

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these would alleviate poverty and unemployment. Similar sentiments inspired Scotsman John Gedde to obtain a royal patent for his octagonal wooden hives in 1675.4 Although the hives of Mew, Wren and John Gedde never became widespread apicultural tools, Hartlib established an important precedent in the control and manipulation of Hymenoptera. Equipped with small windows in each chamber, the innovative seventeenth-century wooden hives became natural philosophical novelty items in the circles of the Royal Society of London. In a pattern that would be repeated over the next two centuries, Hartlib wed agricultural innovation to experimental and observational science. Political circumstances led him to forsake the emblematic tradition, but he still sought moral, religious and political regeneration through his explication of the bees. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries redefined the use of analogical reasoning. Although metaphors from nature continued to be powerful cultural resources, beliefs in direct correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm largely disappeared. Falling in the wake of Hartlib, the search for a rational hive struggled to disentangle the effective control and manipulation of nature from the cultural baggage of the emblematic tradition.5 In this respect, the elucidation of reproduction biology and gender was intimately associated with the rise of the rational hive. Stretching back to antiquity, the literature on bees long acknowledged that unlocking the mysteries of biological reproduction within the hierarchy of the hive would yield benefits through increased production of honey and wax. But the inherently conservative hold of the rhetorical tradition discouraged observation directly from nature. Consequently, the hive long continued to be envisioned in Aristotelian terms as a city ruled by males. From the late sixteenth century, however, naturalists grappled with the realization that the ‘king’ bee was perhaps a ‘queen’. Admission that a patriarch did not rule the hive possibly threatened the order and stability provided by this natural model of a monarchical government. Moreover, the suggestion that the ‘queen’ might take multiple mates vitiated the dignity of the monarch. Nevertheless, throughout much of the eighteenth century, female monarchs in the hive were often celebrated as Amazonian queens – noble, honorable and heroic. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, a sea-change occurred in bee-texts and the apparent gender reversal within the hive became unacceptable. The

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queen, as fierce warring Amazon, was replaced by a pacific ‘mother’ whose principal role was that of egg-layer. Within British society, greater rigidity in depictions of femininity arose from essentialist definitions of maternity that were grounded in ‘natural physical-biological’ attributes. This ‘cultural revolution’ in gender definitions was transferred to the beehive, where the queen became a mother bee who was strictly defined by her reproductive role.6 Politics, gender and sex became inextricably entwined with the efficient management of swarms through the use of observation hives. At the turn of the nineteenth century, François Huber argued that the effective control of ‘artificial swarms’ was the key to honey and wax production. In the first instance, this required a thorough knowledge of the reproduction biology of the hive. In the early eighteenth century, Jan Swammerdam had provided definitive proof of the sex of the ‘mother bee’ and the workers; and several decades later, Adam Gottlob Schirach demonstrated that diet and space were the only things that separated the worker from the queen. Armed with this knowledge, Huber contended that beekeepers needed to inspect the hive carefully to determine whether it was populous enough to divide in half; whether the brood was of the proper age; and whether males were present and available. For this important work, he developed a hybrid observation and rational hive. According to Huber, R. A. F. Réaumur’s earlier transparent hives were too wide. By permitting two combs, they had created a space in which the bees could be lost from the human gaze. Huber rectified this shortcoming by constructing 30 cm square pine frames that were just 38 mm thick. This allowed the bees to construct only a single row of comb.7 The artificiality of the unicomb observation hive perpetuated a vision of industrial bees. The single-comb hive of the Reverend William Dunbar, Minister of Applegarth, Scotland offered tangible evidence of this. In 1820, he began a series of articles in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal that charted his ‘observations on the instinct and operations of bees’, using his glazed or ‘mirrored’ observation hive. It boasted ‘only one comb, and glazed on each side; the whole swarm therefore, half on each side of the comb, was exposed to my view; not a single bee escaped my notice, nor could even Majesty itself be secure from my observation’. As if to highlight the conflation of artifice and nature, the illustration of the single-comb hive appeared intermingled with schematic drawings of James Dickson’s patent water pressure engine (figure 4.4).8

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.4 Bee Machine: The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal juxtaposed its illustration of William Dunbar’s observation beehive with Dickson’s steam engine.

Huber, however, literally linked his mechanism for the ‘economic treatment of bees’ to the sacred endeavour of reading the Book of Nature. Sensitive to the artificiality of his frames, he hinged twelve of them together along their upright sides. He reasoned: It is true that by compelling these bees to be content with a habitation in which they could build but one single row of comb, I had, to a certain point, changed their natural condition, and this circumstance might alter their instinct more or less. Therefore, to obviate any kind of objection, I devised a hive which, without losing the advantage of thin hives, approached the shape of the common hives, in which bees construct several parallel rows of combs.

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Manipulation of bees for economic benefit required a close reading of the ‘book’ of hives (figure 4.5).9 Furthermore, this process rendered nature more pliable. The tiny insects, claimed Huber, ‘are in some way tamed by it, and at the end of three days one may open the hive, carry away parts of combs, substitute others, without bees exhibiting too formidable signs of displeasure’. But he was careful not to slip into the politically charged rhetoric of domestication: It is not necessary to add here that, when I say that I can render the bee tractable, I do not claim the silly pretence of domesticating them. . . . I ascribe their tranquillity, when their home is opened, to the manner in which they are affected by the sudden introduction of light; they appear rather to testify fear than anger . . . In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, domesticated animals provided conservative theologians with a natural model of social subordination. Kirby asserted, therefore, that carnivorous insects were analogues of the worst elements of the animal kingdom and of man; and that the gregarious, herbivorous bees and other domesticated animals were analogues of the best elements. In a similar vein, William Jones argued that ‘[f]rom the state of beasts under the dominion of man, as God hath wisely established it, the parallel is very strong for the benefit and necessity of government amongst mankind’. Although Huber managed to avoid these analogies, his hives contributed to the increasing trend towards placing nature under glass, and towards domesticating non-human organisms to a laboratory regime.10 Huber and his fellow proponents of rational beekeeping drew upon ideologically divisive Enlightenment sensationalist epistemology in the name of humane manipulation of nature. In their long review of Huber’s New Observations, the Edinburgh Review noted his caution when considering the wonderful instincts of bees: ‘He . . . disapproves both of Réauméur for ascribing wisdom and foresight to them, and of Buffon for considering them mere automata.’ Convinced, however, that bees were neither ‘stupid creatures’ nor ‘gross animal machines’, Huber promoted his leaf hives as an end to the cruel and needless massacre of bee colonies to obtain the harvest of honey. He thereby wed his apiarian science to social and agricultural improvement.11

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Figure 4.5 Reading the Bees: François Huber’s book hives permitted apiarists to read the hive and thereby control and manipulate the bees.

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Improvement Relationships between social and agricultural improvement were ambiguous in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. In part, this reflected the uneasy relationship between agricultural science, practice and ‘improvement’. Apicultural debates reflected these trends. Robert Huish, for example, firmly linked his treatise on bee management to agricultural science. Dedicating his book to Sir Joseph Banks, Huish promised to ‘simplify the mechanical operations of the Apiary’ through the application of bee science. He believed that the various wooden hives represented the tools of reason that would expunge the ignorance and superstition which shrouded beekeeping. Writing in the wake of the French Revolutionary wars, he perceived the control and manipulation of bees as essential ‘to render this Country independent of all foreign supply of the Produce of the Bee’.12 William Cobbett was equally inspired to promote self-sufficiency among the nation’s labouring classes, but he was decidedly less impressed by the fruits of science; he summarily dismissed such material as the useless products of ‘the frivolous French naturalists’. Economy, he declared, was simply management, and the latter could be defined as proper and adequate provision for a family. With this in mind, his Cottage Economy (1822) provided instruction for brewing beer, making bread, keeping cows and pigs, rearing poultry, rabbits and pigeons, and keeping bees. He envisioned his advice as part of an overarching programme in practical education. It ‘is always of great consequence’, he instructed, ‘that children be brought up to set a just value upon all useful things, and especially upon all living things; to know the utility of them’. For Cobbett, the value of a living thing lay in its utility. Convinced that overwintering of bees was inefficient, he saw no benefits to wooden hives, or to sparing the insects’ lives. He coached his readers to employ rye-straw skeps and to kill the bees upon the harvest of the honey. Estimating a good stall of bees to be worth about two bushels of wheat, he considered the economic benefits compelling incentive to pursue apiculture. Cobbett’s reactionary campaign against capitalism and industrialism manifested itself as opposition to the scientific improvers’ rational beehive.13 Whereas Cobbett’s straw skeps represented a return to an idyllic agrarian past, Thomas Nutt’s ‘collateral’ hive (figure 4.6) embraced a managed industrial order. In words that presaged Doyle’s cartoon caption, Nutt made bold claims for his hives:

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.6 Humanity to Honey Bees: Thomas Nutt’s rational hive adopted the principles of urban improvement to manage bees humanely.

my inventions . . . possess such conveniences and accommodation both for Bees and Bee-masters, that the pure treasure stored in them by those industrious, little insects, may at any time be abstracted from them, not only without destroying the Bees, but without injuring them in the least, or even incommoding their labours by the operation; – that they afford accommodations to the Bees which greatly accelerate the progress of their labours in the summer-season; – and that the Bees never leave them in disgust . . . as they not infrequently do leave other hives, after being deprived of their stores . . . His hives were attractive pieces of architecture that consisted of three wooden boxes arranged horizontally (figure 4.7). A middle box, containing the brood chamber, was flanked by two others in which either excess population or honey could be transferred or stored. In addition, a glass bell jar above the middle box could act as a further ‘super’ for the production of excess honey. The three boxes sat on hollow drawers that acted as entrance and feeding platforms. Movement between all the compartments could be regulated through connecting holes, fitted with tin separators. Shuttered windows on each of the boxes permitted observation within the hive.14

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Nutt, who trained as a grocer and draper at Moulton-Chapel, located his apiarian inventions within urban improvement and reform. Consequently, he turned to George Birkbeck, a leading light in the mechanics’ institute movement, for support and guidance. Most significantly, Nutt realized that architectural design modified the behaviour and efficiency of his ‘little labourers’. In this respect, his beehives were a striking parallel to trends in the management and control of the urban poor. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a contingent of Edinburgh-trained medical practitioners began to locate medical problems in a wider social context. They linked disease to overcrowding, and lack of cleanliness and ventilation. By the 1830s, this activist, environmentalist medicine had become subsumed within Chadwickian social engineering. Convinced that poverty, urban squalor, and disease were intimately connected, Edwin Chadwick and his associates amassed statistical evidence to support their case for reform. Encompassing cottage design and public works, this was social and technological engineering. To achieve the maximum efficiency from Britain’s labouring classes, Chadwick sought to control and to manipulate their environment.15

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.7 Bee Architecture: Thomas Nutt’s collateral hives promised to manage the swarming masses in the tumultuous 1830s.

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Like his predecessors, Nutt acknowledged swarming as a fundamental element of bee management. He contended, however, that ventilation was the key to controlling it. Having taken up beekeeping while convalescing from a serious illness, Nutt was sensitive to the environmentalist principles of disease prevention and avoidance. Each of his collateral boxes was equipped with a ventilation hole to regulate the internal temperature. Through the deployment of a thermometer, he amassed copious statistical tables to determine the optimum temperatures for the production of the purist honey, and for the effective deterrence of swarming. Sensitive to overcrowding, cleanliness and ventilation, the design and management of Nutt’s hives owed more to urban improvement commissions than to the tenets of agricultural improvement.16 Whereas philosophical radicals and activist evangelicals sought the control and reform of human nature, naturalists and apiarists sought the control and reform of non-human nature. At times, the two programmes converged. The rational management of bees relied upon the effective control and manipulation of ‘artificial swarms’; Jeremy Bentham applied the same principles to his Poor Plan of 1797. Managed colonization, he argued, would render his plan for relief a scheme for economic progress: Sooner or later the yet vacant lands in the country will have been filled with culture and population. At that remote but surely not ideal period the Company will have turned its thoughts to colonisation; and the rising strength of these its hives, will by art, as in other hives by nature, have been educated for swarming. Artificial swarms of the poor became a significant feature of Bentham’s social engineering. Perhaps more explicitly, his Panopticon wed the architectural principles of the observation hive to institutional reform. His transparent, circular structure, with its central high tower, rendered every cell visible to the observer. The Panopticon, as a ‘mechanism of power’ and a ‘laboratory’, did ‘the work of a naturalist’: ‘The seeing machine was at once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.’ For Thomas Nutt, his system of bee management was a contribution ‘towards the raising of a super-structure – namely – an asylum or sanctuary for Honey-Bees’.17

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Like Bentham, Nutt wished to manage populations expertly to maximize efficiency and economy. Bentham encouraged colonization to maintain a healthy balance between human consumption and production of natural resources. Nutt, who was interested exclusively in maximizing the production of bees, discouraged any form of population reduction as a loss of productive labour. At the heart of his apicultural system lay an appreciation of swarming: ‘Force them not to swarm: an emigration from a prosperous colony of one-half, or perhaps of three-fourths of its population cannot fail of being very disadvantageous, both to those that emigrate, who must necessarily be poor, and to those that remain, be they ever so industrious, or even wealthy’. Nutt bemoaned the fact that bees became inactive during summer heat at precisely the time ‘that that saccharine substance is most plentifully secreted by the vegetable world’: And – why? Because they want an enlargement of their domicile, – an extension of the dominion (or if it may be so termed) of the territory of the Queen; by which enlargement kept at a proper temperature swarming is superseded, and the Royal Insect, relieved from the necessity of abdicating her throne, retains it, continues and extends the propagation of her species, and of course increases the busy labours of her innumerable subjects. This accommodation is provided for Bees in my collateral-boxes. Whereas Bentham gained insight into human behaviour through his Panopticon, Nutt acquired his necessary knowledge of bee habit and instinct with the aid of his observatory hive: It is so constructed that plenty of light and the utmost transparency are afforded for observing and minutely examining the Bees and the works of the Bees in all their stages. Indeed the grand object of this contrivance is – to expose to view the labours of the Bees in the inside of their hive; and the machine may be moved around at pleasure, not a Bee can enter it, without being observed, nor can a single cell be instructed in secret. Morris Berman has argued that the Benthamite vision of an ordered society ‘was not an organism but a machine’. Nutt explicitly transformed the beehive – the traditional model of social organicism – into a machine.18

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Originally published in 1832, Nutt’s Humanity to Honey Bees described his collateral hives in terms that presaged Doyle’s cartoon. Convinced of his ‘improved mode of Bee-management’, Nutt dedicated his book to Queen Adelaide: as no colony of Bees, deprived of its QUEEN, ever prospers, or long survives such loss, – as this insect government, or government of insects, exhibits to man the most perfect pattern of devoted attachment, and of true allegiance on the part of the subject Bees to their Sovereign, and of industry, ingenuity, prosperity, and apparently of general happiness in their well-ordered state, – and as these most curious and valuable little creatures have hitherto been most cruelly treated . . . Explicitly designed to manipulate and to control one facet of nature, his mode of bee management reflected many of the intellectual underpinnings of the decade of Whig reform. If the 1830s did not usher in a ‘revolution in government’, they marked a move towards technocratic governmental machinery, based on rational, scientific expertise. With his interests in control, economy, ventilation and humanity, Nutt brought educational, agricultural, penal and sanitary reform to the government of bees. At a time when intellectuals, radicals and governing elites struggled to redefine social and economic relationships in an emergent, modern industrial society, Humanity to Honey Bees sought to wed the management of nonhuman nature to technological innovation. Driven by Enlightenment ideals of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’, this programme grappled with ethical concerns born of the realization that insects were the minima of sentient beings.19 Like glasshouses, glass beehives and ant nests sought to control and manipulate insect societies through architectural design. In his recent study of the nineteenth-century built environment and landscape, William Taylor contends that glasshouses were microcosms of human relationships to the environment. Whereas Stephen Hales and likeminded eighteenth-century natural philosophers pursued a reductionist study of plant morphology and physiology through the use of glass tubes and jars, J. C. Loudon and his nineteenth-century colleagues thought more holistically about the economy of nature: they sought to replicate a sustainable environment for living plants within glasshouses.

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Melanie Simo asserts that Loudon’s work in glasshouse and cottage design was a central plank of his Benthamite programme to improve the health and character of plants and people through management and control of heat, light and air. At times, the shared social vision for both the architecture of glasshouses and beehives became explicit. Loudon’s finest unrealized glass design was his circular ‘beehive’ hothouse for the Birmingham Botanical Garden (1831). And the Crystal Palace, perhaps the best-known glasshouse of the nineteenth century, was the architectural centrepiece of the Great Exhibition, which, proclaimed Henry Cole, celebrated ‘the working bees of the world’s hives’ (figure 4.8).20 Insect Societies Devoid of the sustained nature/culture correspondences of earlier centuries, Humanity to Honey Bees continued to discern insightful analogies in the behaviour of insect societies – in ‘the Queen of the Bees, and the wonderful attachment, and (if I may so express myself) the Tory loyalty of all her subjects’. Ostensibly, these observations arose from experience of a rational beehive, the function of which could be grounded in utility – that is, the conservation of bees and the efficient extraction of honey. The use of slightly altered observation hives to manage ants could not be explained in simple instrumentalist terms. In the absence of direct utilitarian applications, artificial ant nests were a clear demonstration that observation hives and nests permitted a systematic study of social organization in nature. They therefore provide considerable historical insight into interpretations of insect societies. Glass nests and colonies captured unseen worlds for the human gaze. As apiarists and myrmecologists (ant specialists) explicitly acknowledged, the glass hives and artificial ants’ nests, through which they studied the insect world, were Lilliputian islands. Like travel narratives, they offered an alternative world which could be endued with social and cultural meanings.21 Historical studies of ‘organismic’ theories of society in the nineteenth century highlight the manner in which biology and the social sciences exchanged concepts. The cell theory, for instance, proved especially fertile ground for interaction between the natural and social sciences because it seemed rife with analogical potential: individual identities; specialization of function; division of labour; and distribution and circulation of nutrients and waste. Similarly, bees and ants, as social insects,

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 4.8 ‘The British Bee Hive’: George Cruikshank’s mid-nineteenth-century engraving of the beehive as a model social organism.

provided natural and social scientists with biological analogues to social and cultural concerns, such as the governing principles of society, gender roles, the division of labour, cleanliness, funeral rites, altruism, character, slavery, and husbandry. An examination of nineteenth-century explications of ant agriculture and slavery demonstrates the manner in which prominent social concepts informed the study of insects.22

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Ants enjoyed a long history as exemplary agriculturists. Investigations of ant granaries provided the single greatest impetus to nineteenthcentury myrmecological investigations. Virgil, Horace, Pliny and an array of other classical authors credited ants with the foresight to hoard up winter stores of grain in the summer. The biblical wisdom of Solomon supported the classical texts, for Proverbs enjoined: ‘Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer or ruler, she prepares her food in summer, and gathers her sustenance in harvest.’ British and northern European naturalists refuted the notion that ants stored grain as part of the eighteenth-century rejection of scholasticism. Observation and experimentation upon their respective indigenous ants proved the contrary. Yet the growth of the British Empire, and the concomitant desire to acquire and describe foreign species, generated a degree of caution. By the mid-eighteenth century, the idea of different geographical regions, with unique fauna and flora, was an integral part of the intellectual armoury of British naturalists. William Gould and Kirby and Spence therefore qualified their denial of formicarium granaries in England with an acknowledgement that ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ ants might amass magazines of provisions.23 Evidence gathered by a colonial official in India supported their suspicions, and confirmed the truth of the classical texts. Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Sykes communicated his observations to the Entomological Society of London in 1834. Several years earlier, he had witnessed a species of ants – Atta providens – which stored grain, and dried it after the monsoons. The Rev. F. W. Hope made ambiguous use of this information to defend Proverbs. In combination with Sykes’s communication, this opened the floodgates to the subsequent literature on the harvesting ants of dry tropical and warm temperate regions of the world. Most notably, the Rev. McCook and John Traherne Moggridge authored books on the harvesting ants of Texas and southern France, respectively, in the 1870s. The Westminster Review perceptively acknowledged that the changing interpretations of the agricultural habits of ants appealed to the ‘sceptical age’ of the late nineteenth century. In a strange twist of irony, empirical evidence from the periphery of the empire vindicated biblical and classical sources of information. Even more ironic, intellectuals cited this apparent foresight of ants as confirmation of the insects’ possession of ‘greater wisdom than was ever contemplated by Solomon’; they were ‘almost on a par with the human race’.24

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In the early nineteenth century, naturalists discerned the practice of slavery within certain species of ants and thereby further confirmed the insects’ proximity to humanity. In 1810, Genevan naturalist Pierre Huber first described the manner in which Amazon (Legionary, Rufescent) Ants (Polyergus rufescens) launch concerted raids on the nests of Ash-coloured Ants (Formica fusca) to purloin pupae of the worker caste of the latter species. These pupae develop into their perfect form once taken back to their captors’ nest, and assume all the duties necessary for the daily functioning of the resultant mixed community. Huber contended that, in his leisurely evening stroll of June 1804, he had stumbled upon ‘a phenomenon . . . opposed to what the manners of insects and other animals have hitherto offered us’; for the Amazons, a colony of soldiers, ‘have but one object in their excursions, that of stealing the young from an industrious race, and making slaves of them’. Following the example of Kirby and Spence, Huber’s English translator, J. R. Johnson, endued the slave ant with further cultural meaning or significance. He explained: I shall take the liberty, when speaking of the dark Ash-coloured Ant [Formica fusca], occasionally to use the appellation of Negro, or Negro Ant; a term not inapplicable, when we consider the dark colour of this species, and the situation it holds in the colony, of providing for and administering to, the wants, &c. of the Amazons. The natural history of ants revealed a ‘prominent . . . feature in the history of man’.25 Furthermore, Huber identified the slave-making propensity in another European species of ants, the Sanguine Ant (Formica sanguinea). Frederick Smith, entomological Assistant to the Keeper of the Zoological Collections of the British Museum (Natural History), published the first notice of the slave-making activities of the Sanguine Ants in England in 1854, after observing them in Hampshire. This report piqued the interest of Darwin, who made his own exciting discovery in early 1858. He informed J. D. Hooker: ‘I had such a piece of luck at Moor Park: I found the rare Slavemaking Ant [Formica sanguinea], & saw the little black niggers [F. nigra] in their Master’s nests.’ After sending specimens to Smith for confirmation, Darwin began a series of observations on ants that lasted from May 1858 to July 1859.26

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In the Origin of Species, Darwin evoked ‘slave-making’ in ants as an example of modification of instincts by natural selection. He subsequently advised Henry Walter Bates that ‘every one cares about ants – more notice has been taken about slave-ants in the Origin than of any other passage’. This observation belied Darwin’s own fascination with ant slavery. He constructed a developmental framework by contrasting the different degrees of dependence on slaves in Polyergus rufescens and Formica sanguinea. Ancestral ants, he argued, had initially raided other nests for pupae as a food source. By chance, some of these pupae developed into their perfect worker form, and began to perform their instinctive tasks in the foreign nest. Because their presence benefited the entire colony, the gradual process of natural selection manifested itself in an increasing tendency to make raids on the nests of foreign species for the sole purpose of procuring slaves. Eventually – as in the case of Polyergus rufescens – an ant species developed to the point of being ‘abjectly dependent on its slaves’.27 One of the most intriguing aspects of Darwin’s discussion on the slavemaking instinct was his attempt to delimit the metaphorical implications of his use of words such as ‘slaves’ and ‘masters’. He was a long-time supporter of the anti-slavery movement, and he yearned to ‘see that greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished’. The abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, and the passage of the Act of Emancipation in 1833 did not obliterate the existence of the institution or its practices. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society continued to campaign against the slavers of the Southern states of the USA. The American religious revival, which some persons in Britain perceived to portend the abolition of slavery, was contemporaneous with Darwin’s investigation of ants. The subsequent outbreak of the American Civil War highlighted the struggle between the North and South in terms of Union versus slavery. And just as the Civil War drew to a close, the Governor Eyre controversy in Jamaica sent a rift through the Darwinian circle of scientific naturalists. Under these circumstances, Darwin had to be careful not to naturalize the human institution of slavery.28 The Westminster Review’s discussion of ant slavery illustrated the ambiguous position of ants as microcosms of human society. It returned to the question of race and colour: ‘Among the habits and customs of some species of ants is one which we dare not set down as a mark of civilization lest we should incur the censure of the Anti-Slavery Society . . .

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it is at least a curious coincidence that the slaves most frequently selected are black ants . . .’ American pro-slavery supporter Courtney Jenkins’s Catholic Mirror (Baltimore), in its short review of the Origin, chose to focus on Darwin’s discussion of ants, and noted the same curious coincidence. Darwin perpetuated a similar comparison through one avenue of his research, but he was careful not to engage in such explicit parallels. He distinguished the ants as household – and not field – slaves in both his private letters and in the Origin. In the Descent of Man, he employed the same distinction among human slaves in the American South to support his evolutionary theory of ‘the formation of races’. W. F. Kirby, Smith’s successor at the British Museum (Natural History), drew similar comparisons: ‘It seems to be to some extent a matter of colour, the slaveholding ants being generally reddish, and the slaves brown or black; in fact, the ants keep negroe slaves, as most of the white races of man who are in contact with negroes, and have not yet outgrown the custom.’ Negro slavery underpinned much of the ideologically charged discussions on race throughout the nineteenth century.29 Ludwig Büchner accorded slavery pre-eminence in his study of ants because all that has been told retires into the background as to psychological significance in the intellectual life of these animals, when we find or remember that the ants . . . for an unknown length of time have had a politico-social institution which had played and still plays a great part in the history of human nations and civilization. Büchner’s materialist, evolutionary agenda encouraged him to take a more exaggerated anthropomorphic approach to ants than most nineteenthcentury naturalists, but his emphasis on slavery was not untypical.30 Intellectuals, however, pursued various strategies to contain the unpleasant associations with human slavery. After lauding the socialdemocratic tendencies of the ant republic, Büchner thwarted cries of inconsistency by justifying the existence of slavery through reference to the use of slaves in the democratic republics of classical antiquity. Furthermore, he credited the ants with greater ‘humanity’ in their methods of enslavement, for they only captured pupae which ‘have never tasted the condition and the sweetness of freedom’. Through his own observations of Polyergus rufescens, John Lubbock verified Huber’s observation that these ants

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depended completely upon their slaves for survival. Without them, they were incapable of even feeding themselves. Lubbock concluded that this was ‘a striking lesson of the degrading tendency of slavery’. He reiterated, however, one of the standard justifications for slavery in his discussion of the character of different species of ants. Naturally, the slave ant ‘is, as might be expected, extremely timid’; and the slave-making ant ‘is, perhaps, bravest of all’. Robert Mann, in contrast, contended that ‘slavery’ was a complete misnomer when applied to ants. Ants, he asserted, were equipped with a natural propensity to carry something. Consequently, they would be inclined to carry off pupae if they strayed fortuitously into a foreign nest. Once home, ‘their simple code of ethics’ would guide them to nurse and rear these ‘babies’ as if they were their own. As superintendent of education (1859–66) and emigration agent (1866–86) for Natal, Mann was sensitive to the dangerous ambiguities implicit in the metaphorical language surrounding the literature on ants.31 Ant husbandry and slavery were just two prominent examples of the nineteenth-century myrmecological mixture of nature and culture. Descriptions of insect societies performed the same function as European travel and exploration writing: it produced self-affirmation and selfdefinition through likeness and unlikeness. Aware of the similarities, French entomologist P. A. Latreille had implored: Most travellers believe that it is their duty to inform the public of the very remarkable things that they have seen in the regions through which they have travelled. I have sought to inform myself about a remarkably good nation by the type of individuals which compose it, by their variety, their multitude, their industry; a nation which we count as one of our most bothersome enemies, which lives with us, and of whose history we are ignorant. Would I also not have the right to publish an account of my voyages; to relate what I have seen or what I believe that I have seen? The land that he explored was that of the ants beneath every French person’s feet. Both travel narratives and literature on miniature or microscopic worlds were beyond the realm of common experiences and perceptions. Whereas travel narratives carried readers to distant lands, glass hives and colonies transported observers to hidden subterranean realms. Travel narratives miniaturized and interiorized ‘contacts with

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the imperial frontier’, and the microscope revealed a miniature frontier amidst the material world. These two frontiers merged on the title pages of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels (1857) and H. W. Bates’s Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863), which featured a magnified tsetse fly and a magnified Sauba ant, respectively (figure 4.9).32 Perceived distance and differences between humanity and insects shaped naturalists’ attempts to control and manipulate beehives and ant nests. Whether for the purposes of legitimation or self-definition, humans often projected their own social and cultural arrangements on to their interpretations of nature. Harriet Ritvo discerns recurrent themes of domination and exploitation pervading zoological literature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Similarly, the collective organization of social insects provided analogies laden with social significance. Attempts to produce a rational approach to beekeeping confronted a dual challenge of technological and social engineering. Naturalists and apiarists realized that the effective management of bees required an intimate understanding of their social relationships. They self-consciously combined artifice and nature to maximize the production of honey. Although Enlightenment ideals of improvement and progress lay behind the promotion of beekeeping, the rational, architectural management of bees often found more in common with urban, industrial reform than with agricultural improvement.33 In many ways, the history of entomology charts a struggle to overcome estrangement from humanity. Insect morphology, after all, is utterly alien and offers no analogical or homological points of comparison for humans. Most often social insects provided entomologists with the required common ground: ‘The formation of organised societies by some kinds of Insects’, explained David Sharp, ‘is a phenomenon of great interest, for there are very few animals except man and Insects that display this method of existence.’ Although physically alien, social insects, through their collective organization, provided analogies laden with political and social significance for humanity. Nineteenth-century author Alice Bodington captured the ambivalent position of insects in relation to humanity through a subtle reference to the social Hymenoptera. She complained that she had grown weary of a type of science fiction which examined people from other planets who ‘always turn out to be distressingly like ourselves’. She would have experienced greater pleasure from a ‘planet inhabited permanently by a set of old maids, where gentlemen

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Figure 4.9 Savage Ants: The miniature world of ants and the vast world of foreign travel merged on the title page of H. W. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863).

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were grudged even a few days of life, and where one matron presided over the whole community, where there were no paupers, and no starvation, and children were brought up as in the Republic of Plato’. Often driven by anthropocentric scientific agendas, anthropomorphic descriptions of social insects were an integral part of the entomological enterprise. This rendered ants, bees and wasps powerful ideological tools for specialist entomologists. Purportedly detached experimental analyses of social insects could identify particular forms of governance as natural.34

5

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n mid-Victorian England, secular science underpinned a generalist intellectual culture. Rejecting natural theology, John Lubbock (1834–1913), T. H. Huxley and their fellow travellers were committed to the creed of ‘scientific naturalism’. They therefore believed that all phenomena in the material world could be reduced to naturalistic explanations: revelation had no explanatory role in the realm of scientific investigation. Dalton’s atomic theory, the law of the conservation of energy, and evolution were their holy trinity. Their rapid success as cultural leaders rested upon their skilful mediation between scientific and lay cultures. Entomologist Lubbock, therefore, brought disinterested experimentation to a subject traditionally rife with the trappings of natural theology through numerous lectures and a wide array of publications. His scientific naturalism was a continuation of the Whig commitment to the educational value of science as an inculcator of truth and reason. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, laboratory-based research underpinned the scientific naturalists’ claims for professional recognition. By naturalizing humanity and then locating nature in the laboratory, they claimed exclusive knowledge of fundamental philosophical problems. This chapter places professionalism and scientific naturalism within a liberal, centre-right intellectual culture. John Lubbock (figure 5.1) and entomology are excellent vehicles for this task because both are perceived as bastions of amateurism at a time when professionalism was in the ascendant. Although he never practised science as a paid career,

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 5.1 A Scientist at Home: John Lubbock, a prominent scientific naturalist, espoused rigorous experimentation, but he happily combined parlour and laboratory.

Lubbock employed scientific naturalism and a ‘professional ideal’ to fulfil his educative role as a member of an intellectual aristocracy. In retrospect, his programme is relatively transparent because he chose to infuse ‘disinterested’ experimentalism into entomology, a science dominated by collection and classification. In addition, he demonstrated the authority inherent in a purportedly objective and apolitical science by concentrating on a subject that carried considerable cultural and political freight – the social insects. He promoted a professional ideal of a science of progress, not to establish a closed scientific discipline, but to buttress the cultural authority of a ‘generalist’, Whig-liberal intellectual aristocracy. For Lubbock, ants could lead the progressive march towards the ‘moral regeneration of mankind’. Upon the death of his father in 1865, John Lubbock acceded to the baronetcy and the head of Robarts, Lubbock & Co. (established in 1772 as Sir William Lemon, Buller, Furley, Lubbock & Co.), which was one of the three most prominent established private deposit banks in late nineteenthcentury England. He rose from baronet to the title of Lord Avebury in 1900,

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and subsequently acquired a castle in Kent. But he was not simply intent on acquiring the trappings of traditional aristocratic privilege. Lubbock spent his entire intellectual career promoting meritocracy and the ‘gradual reform of accepted institutions’. Moreover, he actively engaged in rigorous experimental science to achieve his ends.1 John Lubbock continued the Broughamite Whig programme for science that began in the 1830s. As a ‘moderate’ or ‘Whig-liberal’, Lubbock used his secular science of insects to inculcate correct ethical and social behaviour.2 At the age of nineteen, he pondered the plight of the poor: there [sic] high wages do them no good, it all goes in drink so that their wives and families are as badly off as ever. There are fewer petty thefts but not fewer crimes. The delegates instil Chartism and infidelity, which are on the increase, into them. Education has not yet been able to counter this. Certainly there are thousands of Children yet, who go to no school. For Lubbock, education was the cornerstone of the ‘moral regeneration of mankind’. After all, illiteracy spawned the criminal classes, who were civilization’s savages. To maintain social stability, a Whig-liberal clerisy had to instruct the nation in good political behaviour. Lubbock was in an excellent position to affect such a programme. He was a member of the Senate, Vice-Chancellor and, finally, parliamentary representative for the University of London. He served on three royal commissions concerned with educational issues, the most significant being the far-reaching and comprehensive Devonshire Commission on scientific instruction and the advancement of science. And as principal of the Working Men’s College, and an active supporter of the university extension movement, he spread his educational panacea to the labouring classes and to the provinces. In an age steeped in the rhetoric of morality and character, John Lubbock proclaimed that ‘the true glory of a nation’ consisted ‘in the moral and intellectual pre-eminence of the people’.3 Darwin’s Neighbour Charles Darwin played a significant role in shaping Lubbock’s intellectual development. Lubbock was both intellectually and geographically close to Darwin. The latter took up residence at Down House just two

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years after the Lubbock family had purchased a considerable estate at High Elms, one mile from the village of Downe. Sir John William Lubbock, his wife, Harriet, and their eleven children – John Lubbock being the eldest – were the first neighbours with whom the Darwins became intimate.4 Darwin encouraged and directed Lubbock’s early work in the anatomy and physiology of marine life and insects. In 1850, he successfully proposed sixteen-year-old Lubbock for membership to the Entomological Society of London. One year later, Darwin contacted England’s leading insect physiologist, George Newport, to draw his attention to John Lubbock, who had ‘a strong taste for dissecting insects’. Through dinner parties at Down House, Lubbock met Francis Galton, J. D. Hooker and Charles Lyell in 1854; T. H. Huxley in 1856; and John Stevens Henslow in 1857. As a neighbour and mentor, Charles Darwin was a formidable influence on the intellectual career of John Lubbock.5 From his open support for the evolutionary theories of the Origin of Species at the famous 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to his parliamentary petition for the burial of Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey, John Lubbock was intimately associated with the circle of scientists who coalesced around their support for Darwinism. Within several decades of the appearance of the Origin, scientific naturalists achieved broad acceptance of a naturalistic world-view. Because they were very effectively organized, they were able to launch unified campaigns in favour of secularized science. They wielded biology as a ‘publicist’ science. In both the parlour and the lecture hall, Lubbock introduced lay culture to the fruits of Darwinian experimental entomology.6 Unlike many of his contemporary scientific naturalists, Lubbock suffered no crisis of faith, and lived happily with an intellectual marriage of science and religion.7 While courting his second wife, John Lubbock briefly deferred his proclamations of love ‘because it was good Friday’. Less than a month later, he continued to woo Alice Lane Fox Pitt Rivers with a reading from the Origin of Species. As an intellectualist anthropologist, he believed that science provided correct naturalistic explanations in place of the erroneous past attempts of superstition and dogmatic religion. With heady confidence, he declared: ‘The future happiness of our race, which poets hardly ventured to hope for, science boldly predicts. Utopia, which we have long looked upon as synonymous with an evident impossibility . . . turns out on the contrary to be the necessary consequence of

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natural laws . . .’ Committed to the belief that ‘men of science, and not the clergy only, are ministers of religion’, he associated with the broad church intelligentsia that defended a reformed Establishment.8 His closest friend was, therefore, Balliol-educated Mountstuart Grant Duff. And he sent his eldest son to Balliol, where he made frequent visits to the college’s master, Benjamin Jowett. Convinced that science exerted a purifying influence on religion, Lubbock used the tools of scientific naturalism to earn his place among the Whig-liberal intellectual aristocracy.9 Lubbock, and the circle of Darwinian supporters with whom he associated, concerned themselves with an amalgam of science, politics and religious beliefs throughout the 1860s. In the early years of that decade, for instance, they took up the cause of the authors of Essays and Reviews (1860), who were denounced by the Anglican Church for their historical and scientific criticism of the Bible. They also offered support to John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, who had been deposed for his ‘heretical’ arithmetical calculations of biblical food supplies and population figures in his Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862). One year later, they opposed the dissemination of the ‘Declaration of students of the natural and physical sciences’. Instigated by a coterie of men with a loose affiliation to the Royal College of Chemistry, the ‘Declaration’ recommended the continuance of a theology of nature, and affirmed the contiguous truths of the book of nature and the book of Scripture, the antithesis of the creed of scientific naturalism.10 Opposed to such ‘dogmatic theology’, and committed to the cause of science, nine men – John Lubbock, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Spottiswoode, John Tyndall, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, George Busk and Herbert Spencer – united to create an informal dining club in late 1864. Meeting the first Thursday of every month between October and June, the X Club wielded unparalleled influence within the scientific world for almost thirty years. In combination, the members of the X Club ‘conspired’ to promote their ideal of unfettered scientific research.11 Lubbock’s most significant contribution to the spread of scientific naturalism – Ants, Bees and Wasps (1882) – arose because of his association with the X Club. Throughout the 1860s, American Edward Livingstone Youmans was a frequent guest of the X Club. As Herbert Spencer’s official agent in the USA, Youmans engaged in proselytizing the creed of evolutionary naturalism. With the backing of the X Club, he

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successfully proposed to Appleton a publishing venture which would eventually encompass 120 titles in four languages in five European countries and the USA. Between 1871 and 1910, the ‘familiar red covers’ of the International Scientific Series represented one of the most successful efforts to meet the dual demand for specialized knowledge and general comprehensive textbooks. Lubbock’s association with the X Club made him an obvious candidate as a contributor to the series. Huxley, Tyndall and Spencer constituted the series’ London advisory committee. At their initial meeting in 1871, they discussed Lubbock as an author; but in a negative context. They decided that E. B. Tylor was ‘greater than’ him on the topic of ‘primitive man’. When Lubbock finally contributed to the series a decade later, his subject was the social insects.12 As the author of Pre-Historic Times (1865) and The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870), Lubbock was, in 1871, best known as an archaeologist and an anthropologist. Upon his death in 1913, however, Nature recognized his biological texts – the Monograph of the Collembola and Thysanura (1873), On the Origin and Metamorphoses of Insects (1874), Flowers, Fruits and Leaves (1886), Ants, Bees and Wasps, and On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals (1888) – as ‘five of his most illuminating books’. In a career that spanned half a century, he contributed countless papers to learned societies and their journals, made frequent public lectures, and produced some twenty books. His collections of loosely didactic essays – The Pleasures of Life, part 1 (1887) and part 2 (1889), and The Use of Life (1894) – sold in excess of 500,000 copies and were translated into forty languages. In 1891 alone, his books netted him a profit of £750; and he earned about £12,000 from them between 1869 and 1904. Remembered as ‘one of those gifted men who, without making any profound advances in science . . . succeeded in making science acceptable and even welcome to the ordinary man’, Lubbock successfully combined the roles of scientific naturalist and ‘public moralist’.13 Although it was seen as a popular departure from his earlier serious scientific work, Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps was considered innovative by contemporary comparative psychologists. In 1881, the Leisure Hour published a detailed biographical sketch of John Lubbock, which compared his work on social insects with his previous scientific contributions. The anonymous author stated that Lubbock’s earlier work had been devoted to obscure specialist points in the morphology and physiology of crustacea and insects, and that his more recent research on ants and bees was ‘much

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more popular’. The sheer success of Ants, Bees and Wasps guaranteed its recognition as popular: by 1929, it had passed through eighteen editions. But the specialist/popular dichotomy carried a number of implicit meanings. Most significantly, it implied that Lubbock’s hymenopteran studies were less rigorous and original than esoteric scientific literature. Arthur E. Shipley, therefore, characterized him as an unexceptional researcher, whose greatest contribution was his encouragement to others. And Nature described him as an unoriginal scientist who was best remembered as the ‘ordinary man’s’ interpreter of scientific knowledge. The use of accessible language and the absence of counter-intuitive concepts and holistic theories produced this perception of Ants, Bees and Wasps. Within the field of comparative psychology, Lubbock’s work received recognition and respect from his contemporaries. George J. Romanes, the man that Darwin handpicked to deal with mental evolution, based the clear majority of his Animal Intelligence (1882) on Lubbock’s hymenopteran experiments. And C. Lloyd Morgan – whose canon triumphalist Whig historians celebrate as the herald of modern psychology – felt that Lubbock’s experimental methods and techniques were the way of the future for comparative psychology.14 Nature’s Senses In the late 1870s, pots of earth dotted the study at Down House. Homes to Lumbricid worms, these pots and their inhabitants sustained a barrage of sensory phenomena from Charles Darwin and his family. At various times, the worms were exposed to red and blue light, and to a red-hot poker. Darwin breathed gently on them when chewing tobacco, or while sucking cotton balls which were saturated with perfume or acetic acid. He watched the worms attentively while the study reverberated from the bass notes of a bassoon, or shrieked to the shrill of a metal whistle, or echoed to the pianoforte. Finally, with his head close to the pots, Darwin directed his loudest shouts at the captive worms (figure 5.2).15 Less than a mile away, thirty to forty artificial ants’ nests lay strategically scattered throughout High Elms. John Lubbock, his family and Miss Wendland, their governess, subjected these nests and their inhabitants to a barrage of sensory phenomena. The ants were left to arrange their pupae under an artificially induced spectrum of colours. Lubbock dipped camel’s-hair brushes into essence of clove, peppermint and lavender water, and dangled them a quarter of an inch above the ants. He

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 5.2 Darwin’s Worms: For his final book, Charles Darwin turned his attention to the ecological and evolutionary significance of worms. A significant part of his research focused on the mental abilities of these lowly creatures. Like Lubbock with his ants, Darwin was searching for an evolutionary mental continuum between humans and other animals.

keenly observed the same insects’ reactions to the assorted sounds of a dog-whistle, tuning forks, a violin and a shrill pipe. In a final volley from his sensory arsenal, he hovered over the ants – like a bee above flowers – and screamed and yelled at his tiny subjects.16 Both Darwin and Lubbock engaged in experimental research on the physiological psychology of minute organisms. Considerations of animal

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instincts, intelligence and habits were an integral part of the development and final formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Prior to reading Malthus, in fact, Darwin accorded instinct and habit a central role in his explanation of ‘transmutation of species’. In the Origin, he devoted a single chapter to instincts to demonstrate that they were subject to gradual modification through natural selection, and that they were not evidence of a supernatural template implanted in animals as part of the beneficent design of the Creator. But in the Descent of Man, he tackled one of the central tenets of the opposition to evolution by natural selection, and its extension to man. A fundamental part of the ‘eclipse’ of Darwinian evolutionary theory was the contention that the mechanism of natural selection was incapable of explaining the development of man’s mental capabilities. Often willing to grant the existence of physical and anatomical homologies, critics argued that the human mind represented an unbridgeable chasm between man and animals.17 Lubbock became engrossed in these debates through his interest in social insects. He delivered his first lecture on ants in October 1854; and several years later, he assisted Darwin in the determination of the morphological differences between worker castes of the same insects. But almost two decades passed before he took up the study of ants in earnest. Between 1874 and 1882, he published nine papers in the Journal of the Linnean Society, and delivered two lectures at the Royal Institution. Drawn together into a single volume, these lectures and papers metamorphosed into Ants, Bees and Wasps. Although ants constituted the clear majority of the book’s subject matter, Lubbock’s first interest had been bees. His reasons for initially taking up the study of bees and subsequently shifting his emphasis to ants explains much about his unique contribution to myrmecological literature.18 Lubbock devoted a significant portion of his career to delineating the physiological psychology of social insects in order to demonstrate mental evolution. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his inspiration came from Darwin. In Lubbock’s presidential address of 1866 to the Entomological Society of London, he used Darwin’s evidence for the co-evolution of flowers and insects as a springboard for his own speculations regarding the physiological psychology of bees. Taking his cue from the pollination biology of Darwin, and Conrad Sprengel, Lubbock pondered the bee’s ability to perceive ‘bright and conspicuous flowers’:

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We obtain from these facts the best evidence that insects possess the faculty of perceiving and distinguishing colours. For as regards the vision, and indeed the other senses of insects, we have yet much to learn. We do not yet thoroughly understand how they see, smell, or hear; nor are entomologists entirely agreed as to the function or the structure of the antennae. This interesting subject offers a most promising field for study . . . He further speculated that insects possessed the power of reason, and were capable of feeling pain. More important, he employed ants and ‘savages’ to support his suppositions: Look, then, at the ants; they build houses, they keep domestic animals [aphids], and they make slaves; if we deny to them the possession of reason we might almost as well question it in the lower races of Man: insects cannot speak, indeed, but they evidently communicate by means of their antennae, just like certain North American Indians who cannot understand one another’s language, but who can yet converse together with ease and fluency by a code of signs . . .19 Insects and non-European savages both served as objectified and culturally distant ‘others’. Nineteenth-century social anthropologists, working within a developmental framework, used ethnographic parallels to discern vestiges of their primitive ancestors in contemporary savages. In opposition to the degenerationist assumptions of biblical anthropologists, social evolutionists, like John Lubbock, deployed savages as the missing link between apes and nineteenth-century European man. Notoriously, Lubbock denigrated savagery to emphasize its evolutionary proximity to animality. He, therefore, denied savages the possession of religion as part of his commitment to an unbroken evolutionary mental continuum from the lowest animal to humans. His edifice of evolutionary progress rested upon a belief in the psychic unity of animal, savage, and European man. The savage, the ant and the bee were perfectible: they could all be educated; they could all be civilized, domesticated or tamed.20 Thus John Lubbock, renowned armchair intellectualist anthropologist, embarked upon his studies of social insects with the intention of taming some bees. And in 1872, he created a sensation at the annual meeting of the BAAS when he presented a wasp that he had tamed. Punch likened him to

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a flea-tamer, and then proposed him for Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for he could surely ‘pacify the Irish hornets’ nest’ (figure 5.3). Like the flea-tamer, Lubbock brought the yawning infinity of the unseen insect world under his dominion. He established the continuity of mental evolution between animal and man; and affirmed the superior rationality of nineteenth-

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 5.3 ‘A Philosopher’s Pet’: Punch’s depiction of Lubbock after he presented a wasp, which he claimed to have tamed, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872. When the wasp died, Nature provided it with an obituary.

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century European man by demonstrating his control over nature. After nine months in the company of Lubbock, the wasp died on 18 February 1873. Nature accorded it an obituary as it came to its final resting place on a pin – the object of a collection – in the British Museum (Natural History). Evolutionary anthropologists and biologists grappled with the ambiguous relationship between objectified nature and the subjective experiences of consciousness inherent in both the observer and the observed.21 Scientific naturalists based their cultural authority on their ability to control and manipulate the natural world through rigorous experimentation. As part of a flourishing apicultural tradition, semi-domesticated bees seemed ideally suited to the scientific empiricist bent on subjecting insects to an experimental regime. The bees, however, did not submissively succumb to the experimentalist’s designs. In June 1873, Lubbock found the bees whipped into a fury by the summer’s heat; he was stung a number of times and driven away from the hives. The following month, he established a Marriot flat glass hive in his sitting room ‘so as to be able to observe them more continuously’. One month later, his abandoned hive required a new lot of bees. He later explained: ‘I originally intended to make my experiment principally with bees, but soon found that ants were on the whole more suitable for my purpose. In the first place, ants are much less excitable, they are less liable to accidents, and from the absence of wings are more easy to keep under continuous observation.’22 In contrast to his experience with bees, Lubbock maintained and manipulated ant colonies for considerable lengths of time. Writing for the Edinburgh Review in 1882, surgeon Robert James Mann reported: ‘The chief difficulty in the case of the ant is that it works principally in the dark. The most important operations of its social life are carried on underground, or in nests enclosed within dense and opaque walls. This difficulty, however, Sir John evades by the employment of glass nests which he has himself devised.’ These nests consisted of ‘two plates of common window glass, about ten inches square, and at a distance apart of from 1/10 to 1/4 of an inch . . . with slips of wood round the edges, the intermediate space being filled up with fine earth’. They were kept either in shallow boxes or on stands surrounded by trenches of water. In the latter case, six nests were placed horizontally, one above the other, upon a vertical rod, so that each could be turned out for observation (figure 5.4). Although others before him – most notably Pierre Huber – had employed bell jars and glass observation nests, Lubbock reduced the

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Figure 5.4 Lubbock Nests: Lubbock placed up to six ant nests horizontal, one above the other, on a vertical rod so that they could be turned out for inspection. Lubbock’s nests became standard equipment for myrmecologists.

space between the glass plates so that the ants’ activities would always be visible. Furthermore, by laying the frame flat, he rendered the upper plate mobile, so that it could be removed, replaced or cleaned. His plan of construction quickly became the model ‘glass apparatus’ for rearing and observing ant colonies; ‘Lubbock nests’ became standard equipment for myrmecologists.23 Artificial ant nests granted Lubbock, the experimentalist, freedom from some of the constraints of nature. He kept one colony of ants in the same glass nest from 1874 to 1890, and he shed new light on the longevity of ants by keeping a queen of Formica fusca for fifteen years. Moreover, his glass nests were transportable. In the autumn of 1875, he attempted to fill seventeen artificial ants’ nests while on holiday in Italy. And between 29 June and 10 August 1880, he made regular visits to the

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Royal Institution to perform experiments on ants using electric lights and spectra. In August 1886, Lubbock’s second wife, Alice, recorded that their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ursula, ‘is very fond of Dada’s ants, she recognized them out of doors one day’. John Lubbock’s ants made the transition from a semi-domesticated ‘second nature’ to a domesticated experimental regime (figure 5.5).24

Figure 5.5 ‘Dada’s Ants’: Two years after constructing his first artificial ants’ nests, Lubbock estimated that he had about 15 species and 30 nests in his home at High Elms.

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Darwin credited his cousin Francis Galton with producing experimental proofs of the variations and inheritance of human mental attributes. Through John Lubbock, Galton’s influence spread to comparative psychology. Building upon his ethnological work, Galton began, in the 1860s, to chart the inheritance of mental qualities in man. Most significantly, he recognized psychological differences among individuals, and created apparatus to measure them. Initially committed to anthropometric investigations, he made static bodily measurements of his subjects. But by the mid-1870s, he deployed his own psychometric instruments as part of his experimental physiological psychology. Like Darwin, Lubbock and most of his nineteenth-century British counterparts, Galton subscribed to association psychology. Rooted in Lockean epistemology, it consisted of the belief that all ideas emanated from sensations of the external world which were bound together in the mind through associations and memory. Consequently, Galton believed that an accurate assessment of an individual’s sensory physiology (sight, hearing, taste, touch) constituted a measure of his or her intelligence.25 A frequent guest at the weekend gatherings at High Elms, Francis Galton was also a participant in Lubbock’s experiments on ants and bees. Coming to the subject through the pollination biology of Sprengel and Darwin, Lubbock shared Galton’s interest in sensory physiology. He acknowledged in Ants, Bees and Wasps: ‘My object has been not so much to describe the usual habits of these insects as to test their mental condition and powers of sense.’ Moreover, as an arch-Individualist, Lubbock found Galton’s emphasis on the individual attractive. John Lubbock was the first naturalist to keep a ‘careful record of individual ants’, by placing dabs of paint on their backs. But Galton’s influence was most conspicuous through Lubbock’s use of his psychometric apparatus to determine the ants’ powers of sensory discrimination. Galton, for example, modified for Lubbock’s ants a whistle that he had devised for determining the upper limits of audible sound in humans.26 Although he studiously combined parlour entertainment and experimentation, John Lubbock emulated laboratory-based research in his work on ants, bees and wasps. Beginning in the 1870s, new physiology laboratories had sprung up to meet the latest demands for qualifying physicians. Prior to this, chemistry and physics had experienced considerable institutional or disciplinary success through laboratory-based work. Although apparently a gentleman amateur scientist, Lubbock

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supported the laboratory culture as part of his professional ideal. In 1883, he headed the committee, formed at the International Fisheries Exhibition, in favour of the establishment of a marine laboratory. And in 1897, Lubbock, Galton and five other men played a pivotal role in the creation of a psychology laboratory at University College, London.27 Serious Research Lubbock and his fellow scientific naturalists were bound together by a common commitment to serious research. Lubbock, therefore, explicitly distanced himself from the naturalists’ tradition of recounting the habits of insects. In a light rebuke to antecedent and contemporary myrmecologists, he argued that ‘it ought not to be necessary for us to rely on accidental observations; we ought to be able to test them by appropriate experiments.’ As early as 1856, T. H. Huxley had acknowledged Lubbock’s contributions to serious experimental research, when he informed him: ‘It is not very often that I find any one who can or will work philosophically . . .’ In the same year, Lubbock had contributed an article, ‘On the Objects of a Collection of Insects’, to the Entomologist’s Annual. He disparaged the myopic bias which entomologists placed on collecting. Insects in a collection, he stated, should be like books in a library: they must be studied to be of value. Entomologists paid too little attention to the habits, anatomy and physiology of insects. He warned that ‘collecting for the sake of collecting’ tended ‘to narrow the mind’. Moreover, the pursuit of money was an illegitimate reason for studying entomology. ‘Regular habits, temperance and industry’ provided the true motivations.28 Lubbock’s entomology represented the shift to professional society. ‘Specialized expertise and human capital’ displaced acquisition and blatant ‘materialism’. Thus Ants, Bees and Wasps was as much a narrative of the extensive labours of the specialist entomologist as it was a study of the sensory physiology of insects. Simple but copious lists and tables charted the times and incidents, which constituted elaborate experiments. Lubbock adhered to Francis Galton’s dictum that ‘until the phenomena of any branch of knowledge have been subjected to measurement and number, it cannot assume the status and dignity of science’. To elevate the professional status of his entomology as a science, Lubbock faithfully quantified. ‘A definite numerical statement’, he said, ‘always seems to me clearer and more satisfactory than a mere general assertion.’

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Furthermore, unlike Kirby, Lubbock never engaged in economic, or applied, entomology. He and his fellow scientific naturalists believed that utilitarian applications would taint their moralistic quest for Truth. They were part of the ‘anarchic or individualistic professions’, which coalesced for ‘intellectual and cultural rather than professional purposes’. They used the professional ideal to establish themselves as a scientific clerisy or an intellectual aristocracy.29 Scientific naturalists took the physical sciences as their model for serious research. Huxley disparaged the very word ‘Naturalist’, because it ‘includes a far lower order of men than chemist, physicist, or mathematician. You don’t call a man a mathematician because he has spent his life in getting as far as quadratics; but every fool who can make bad species and worse genera is a “Naturalist”!’ Sensory physiology was a propitious bridge between physics and the biological sciences. The first half of the nineteenth century was a productive period for work on the anatomy and phenomenology of sensation. By successfully distinguishing sensory and motor functions, Sir Charles Bell and François Magendie stimulated interest in the physiology of the nervous system. Because optics and acoustics were established research traditions within physics, they provided obvious avenues of research into the physics of sense-organs.30 Lubbock exploited this link with the physical sciences by drawing into his myrmecological investigations the expertise and apparatus of physicists. Throughout 1877 and 1878, William Spottiswoode and his assistant Mr Ward generated spectra for Lubbock, and provided him with access to electric lighting. Tyndall did the same under the auspices of the Royal Institution. In addition, he loaned Lubbock a sensitive flame apparatus – to detect any ant sounds – on one of his weekend visits to High Elms. Similarly, after attending a weekend gathering at High Elms in late August 1878, Alexander Graham Bell returned the following week with ‘a very sensitive microphone’ for Lubbock’s ant experiments. Finally, as a combination of parlour entertainment and the physics of sense-organs, Galton and Lubbock projected an image through the eye of an insect for the viewing pleasure of Lady and Sir James F. Stephen, Charles Dilke and Mountstuart Grant Duff, in February 1879.31 Although it was an acknowledged popular book, Ants, Bees and Wasps contained original and lasting contributions to the sensory physiology of insects. Using a rotating table devised by Francis Galton, Lubbock determined that ants followed scent trails, but that, in themselves, these trails

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provided no sense of direction. The latter attribute he linked to the incident light and, thereby, laid the foundations for the elaboration of the ‘sun compass’ reaction. To test the colour vision of bees, he trained them to visit honey smeared on glass that was laid over different coloured cards. Called ‘dressur’, his method of training became widely employed by the German school that was led by Karl von Frisch. And by observing where in the spectrum ants arranged their brood, he discerned that they were sensitive to ultraviolet rays. He did not concern himself with the contested distinctions between instinct and intelligence. His epistemology and related sensory experiments, and his Darwinian proclivities convinced him that the ants’ ‘mental powers differ from those of men, not so much in kind as in degree’. In total, he partially achieved his goal of penetrating the different world that insects perceived. Moreover, he presented the results of his experiments in an accessible, secular language. At a time when scientific disciplines drifted towards professional closure, John Lubbock believed that his contributions ‘need not, because they are popular, be the less truly scientific’. He popularized the scientific naturalists’ professional ideal to promote the ambitions of a Whig-liberal clerisy. His commitment to a mid-century generalist intellectual culture meant that he did not equate professionalism with disciplinary fragmentation.32 ‘The Ants Were Duly Visited’ As ‘microcosms in the parlour’, Lubbock nests shared much in common with aquariums. They differed in one important respect. The Lubbock nest never became a middle-class fad in late Victorian Britain. But through John Lubbock’s informal and formal expositions and demonstrations, the ant, as ‘domesticated nature’, achieved immense notoriety. Informally, Lubbock effectively combined experimentation with parlour entertainment. Beginning in the 1860s, he provided weekend gatherings for prominent members of Society circles and the educated classes at High Elms. Undoubtedly, a major drawing card was a Sunday visit to Charles Darwin, which Lubbock made a frequent feature. He truly was ‘Darwin’s Mercury’, introducing the reclusive naturalist of Down to a veritable pantheon of Victorian celebrities. In early March 1877, for instance, he took his weekend guests – Huxley, Lyon Playfair, John Morley and William E. Gladstone – ‘up to the hill-top’, where ‘the great statesman of liberalism met for the first time the great scientist of liberalism’.33

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With thirty to forty glass nests established in his rooms at High Elms, Lubbock’s ants were another feature of these weekend gatherings. His first artificial ants’ nests were, in fact, constructed with the help of friend and visitor Anna Grant Duff in December 1874. Over a decade later, Mountstuart Grant Duff noted that the ‘ants were duly visited’ as part of the weekend entertainment at High Elms. Even in the absence of his nests, Lubbock’s ants became a topic of interest in Society rounds. In December 1881, Lubbock, on request, regaled the Duchess of Cleveland, Count Bismarck, the Bishop of Ely and other fellow guests at Woburn Abbey with talk of his ants.34 John Lubbock was equally effective at reaching a broader popular audience. Although endowed with a weak voice, he drew large crowds to his lectures on ants. At the Dublin meeting of the British Association in 1878, the audience was so large that the organizers arranged for Lubbock to take his lecture outside. Rain prevented this course of action, and ‘hundreds’ were turned away. Lubbock proudly recorded in his diary: ‘My ants made quite a sensation.’ In November 1881, he drew a crowd of six or seven hundred at the Bow and Bromley Institute; he lectured on ants to an audience of 2,000 at the Victoria Theatre in November 1885; and, in spite of miserable weather, 1,500 persons attended his address to the Wolverhampton Literary Society in January 1887. Less than a month after he successfully delivered two papers at the Aberdeen meeting of the BAAS in 1885, the Queen sent Lubbock a request for copies of the papers and of his book, Ants, Bees and Wasps. The following year, Thomas Greenwood noted that ‘naturalists owe him a debt of gratitude for probably more than any other writer having familiarized the public with interesting facts respecting ants’. Naturally, when the Working Women’s College asked him to lecture in 1892, ‘they chose the Ants as subject’.35 Like Darwin, Lubbock sought to combine common and scientific language. This was, after all, the mandate of the International Scientific Series. But Lubbock published literature on ants, bees and wasps in a variety of different contexts. Articles appeared in the Journal of the Linnean Society, the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review and the London Magazine. And he devoted substantial portions of his collection of Scientific Lectures and of his Reader for the Anglicans’ National Society to his studies of the social Hymenoptera. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this apparent multiplicity of ‘imagined audiences’ was Lubbock’s consistency of content, presentation and style. Shortly after

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submitting his Scientific Lectures to Macmillan’s for publication, he requested the publisher to return briefly one of the chapters on ants, because he intended to use it, verbatim, for a lecture at the Athenaeum Club. He had no compunction about delivering one of his avowedly ‘popular’ lectures before the ‘metaphorical lodge of the intellectual freemasonry’ of late Victorian Britain.36 Contemporaries such as John Ruskin questioned Lubbock’s ‘popular’ educational programme. On 9 January 1886, Lubbock delivered an address ‘On the Pleasure of Reading’ to the Working Men’s College. The highlight of this lecture was his recommended list of ‘the best hundred books’, which spawned a flurry of discussion and criticism in the contemporary press (and left a legacy of ‘best hundred’ lists). Writing in the Pall Mall Gazette, Ruskin slashed his ‘pen lightly through the needless – and blottesquely through the rubbish and poison of Sir John’s list’. He then proceeded to question for whom and for what the books were intended: Young people or old, sick or strong, innocent or worldly – to make the giddy sober, or the grave gay. Above all, they do not distinguish between books for the labourer and the schoolman; and the idea that any well-conducted mortal life could find leisure enough to read a hundred books would have kept me wholly silent on the matter . . . As if to illustrate Ruskin’s criticism, Lubbock published his lecture to working men in the Contemporary Review, an organ of the new higher journalism.37 Like his list of the best hundred books, Lubbock intended his scientific literature to serve an educational and ameliorative purpose. His popular science was not targeted at a lower middle-class or labouring audience. He wrote his hymenopteran expositions in one ‘voice’ for a multiplicity of contexts. The commitment to the psychic unity of man, which underpinned his anthropology and comparative psychology, guided his educational approach. All persons were capable of becoming rational, civilized humans, in the image of the late nineteenth-century British, educated, elite man. They just needed training in the values and knowledge of the intellectual aristocracy. Lubbock’s literature was not, therefore, a tool of social control that was meant to produce cogs in the industrial machine. ‘Now we advocate Education’, he explained, ‘not merely to make the man the better workman, but the workman the better man.’ Lubbock used

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science to proselytize the professional ideal. Through his lectures and publications, he ensured that the ants’ ubiquitous presence in nature was duly reflected in their successful colonization of the many strata of Victorian society.38 Insect Socialists? As myrmecologists explicitly acknowledged, glass hives and artificial ants’ nests were Lilliputian islands that could be loaded with social and cultural meanings. And in the late nineteenth century, a convergence of biology and social theory played a prominent role in British thought. The publication of the Origin of Species, of course, was the single greatest factor behind this convergence. Darwin’s ambiguous ‘multivocal’ presentation of his theory made it prey to reappropriation by a broad spectrum of social and political groupings and persons. Although often characterized as an ideological buttress to atomistic individualism, unfettered competition and economic freedom, ‘social Darwinism’ was, in reality, politically more diverse. With the appearance of New Liberalism in Britain and Progressivism in the USA, ‘reform Darwinism’ displaced conservative social Darwinism. Social reform theorists adopted a cooperative, altruistic version of Darwinism as they looked to greater state intervention to address endemic social problems – poverty, disease, unemployment. Consequently, cooperation, or ‘mutual aid’, replaced the ‘struggle for existence’ or the ‘survival of the fittest’ as the engine of social evolution or developmentalism.39 In the wake of the Origin, biology carried unparalleled intellectual authority. Social theorists, therefore, amassed evidence from nature to support their arguments. The axis of political polemic spun on the antipoles of individualism and collectivism. Committed to addressing the nature of social relationships, collectivists most often resorted to nature’s social animals for evidence. Revolutionist J. Addison proudly proclaimed the existence of ‘a collective form of struggle as well as the struggle of the individual. The various colonies of insects and animals such as ants, bees, wasps and beavers, discover to us a process that the human species could well imitate.’ Although not a collectivist, Russian emigré geographer Peter Kropotkin developed the most sustained and systematic elaboration of cooperation or ‘mutual aid’. Between 1890 and 1896, he presented his argument over seven instalments in the Nineteenth Century, which he brought together as Mutual Aid in 1902. Building on the work

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of Professor Karl Kessler and Alfred Espinas, the ‘anarchist prince’ argued that cooperation, rather than competition and conflict, was the universal basis of ethical principles and the engine of evolution. He turned to nature for evidence: ‘And if the ant . . . stands at the very top of the whole class of insects . . . is it not due to the fact that mutual aid has entirely taken the place of mutual struggle in the communities of ants?’ The same, he continued, held true for bees.40 Although Kropotkin used it to affirm his own anarchist politics, the ‘cooperative’ behaviour of social insects was a staple of socialist and collectivist arguments. Huxley warned secularist William Platt Ball in October 1890: ‘Have you considered that State Socialism (for which I have little enough love) may be the product of Natural Selection? The Societies of Bees and Ants exhibit socialism in excelsis.’ Collectivists and individualists alike recognized the ants’ nest and the beehive as archetypal socialist communities.41 J. G. Myers, in his assessment of the entomological career of John Lubbock, asserted that ‘he missed practically entirely, or at least failed to develop the immense importance of the comparative study of animal and human sociology’. Although he did not engage in a systematic study of social Darwinism or social organicism, Lubbock’s political ideology shaped some of his entomological investigations. He summoned ants and bees in response to Alfred Russel Wallace, who had been nourished on an intellectual diet of Owenite socialism and Spencerian radicalism. Wallace began, in the 1860s, to challenge Darwinian biology and anthropology with his cooperative, collectivist vision. As co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, he posed a formidable challenge to Lubbock and his circle of scientific naturalists. Lubbock, in his Origin of Civilisation, challenged Wallace’s depiction of savage communities as commendable enclaves of perfect equality and cooperation. Taking a position Darwin adopted in the Descent of Man, he argued that Wallace had conflated social organization with ‘a high moral condition’. If we accepted Wallace’s argument, he stated, ‘we must equally credit rooks and bees, and most other gregarious animals, with a moral state higher than that of civilised man’. Lubbock repeated the same argument in Ants, Bees and Wasps: ‘Organised communities labouring with the utmost harmony for the common good’ did not necessarily possess moral faculties. Moreover, he devised experiments – using disabled, dead, and anaesthetized ants and bees – to prove that social insects were not paragons of mutual aid;

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they did not consistently come to the assistance of helpless comrades. Detecting a passionate hatred in some ants, he concluded that these insects, like man, were susceptible to a range of ‘individual differences’. More definitively, he concluded that hive-bees ‘appear to be thoroughly callous and utterly indifferent to one another’. In contrast to the collectivist ideological uses of social insects, John Lubbock’s disinterested experimentation cast doubts upon the utopian depictions of cooperative, altruistic communities of ants and bees: social insects often behaved like self-interested individuals.42 Lubbock’s extensive work on ants demonstrates that appeals to scientific objectivity were an integral part of the scientific naturalists’ attempts to establish their own cultural hegemony in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Insignificant insects, which showed an amazing propensity for social organization, were extremely effective demonstrations of the naturalization of human beings and their experiences. A naturalistic explanation of the mental capabilities of sentient beings could similarly represent a triumph for materialist science over natural theology. More particularly, it helped to vindicate the intellectualist evolutionary belief in ‘psychic unity’ that underpinned Lubbock’s myrmecology, anthropology and pedagogy. Lubbock had published his first in paper on the social insects in 1874. Within a decade, his commitment to the study of ants, bees and wasps came to dominate his public image. Punch produced a trenchant satirization of Lubbock’s multifaceted public persona as one of their ‘Fancy Portraits’ in 1882 (figure 5.6). Underneath a caricature of Lubbock, as a bee hovering above flowers, was the following verse: How doth the banking busy bee Improve his shining hours By studying on bank holidays Strange insects and wild flowers! By transforming him into the object of his studies, Punch captured Lubbock’s avowed campaign to promote industriousness and self-help through self-knowledge. His legions of ants supported ‘the great liberal party’ in the ‘battle of freedom’. Writing in 1888, Evangelical evolutionist Henry Drummond declared: ‘A few years ago, under the distinguished patronage of Mr. Darwin, the animal in vogue with scientific society was

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Figure 5.6 ‘Banking Busy Bee’: Lubbock was perhaps best known in the 1870s as the originator of the ‘Bank Holiday’. A decade later, he had gained sufficient notoriety for his experiments on social insects for Punch to parody him.

the worm. At present the fashionable animal is the ant.’ John Lubbock was the British scientist most responsible for the ants’ successful ascent to the lofty heights of fame. The ant, in return, provided Lubbock with a means to pursue and propagate a professional ideal grounded in the tenets of scientific naturalism.43 In the act of domesticating ants to a laboratory regime, John Lubbock brought a microcosm into his parlour. The ambiguous depiction of him as

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both ‘philosophical biologist’ and unoriginal popularizer was the result of his inability to separate the laboratory from the parlour. Although this ambiguity served scientific naturalism and the spread of evolutionary theory well, it impeded his recognition as a professional scientist. Lubbock promoted a ‘professional ideal’ as part of the generalist culture of a Whig-liberal clerisy. The forces of disciplinary fragmentation, however, increasingly equated professionalism with specialist institutions. Although he espoused a laboratory regime for nature, John Lubbock became lost in a no-man’s-land between laboratory and field naturalist science.

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mateurs have long been considered the lifeblood of entomology as a natural history pursuit. The limited tools required for collection, classification and nomenclature seemed to render natural history especially suited to enthusiasts and ‘devotees’ of nature. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, therefore, emergent professional scientists increasingly rejected the categories of ‘naturalist’ and ‘natural history’ as old-fashioned. T. H. Huxley and his fellow travellers promoted ‘biology’ as a unified medical and scientific study of the basic functions of all living organisms. Through the study of physiology and morphology, biologists brought the experimental method to higher education and thereby distanced themselves from amateurs. As educators, some of them had, by 1857, achieved recognition as members of an ‘occupational profession’. Although they aspired to the prestige of the old ‘status professions’, they did not wish their professionalism to be restricted to any qualifications other than a shared commitment to naturalistic science.1 The machinations of the X Club provide invaluable historical insight into the social practices and institutions that embodied scientific knowledge, but alternative visions of biology and associated networks of affiliations and rivalries are worth exploring. This is perhaps especially important for entomology because it is often characterized as quintessentially and obstinately amateurish, even in the face of the rise of ‘professional society’. Historians have acknowledged the late nineteenth-century growth of academic scientific disciplines as a defining moment for the professional

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biologist. This chapter examines a particular network of affiliations and rivalries which lay behind the emergence of ‘biological entomology’ at the reformed University of Oxford. Whereas Huxley and his circle excluded evolution from their biology teaching, Edward B. Poulton (1856–1943) made it central to his academic programme and a defining feature of his ‘party’ within the Royal Entomological Society of London. Recent scholarship cautions against Darwin-mania – especially in the light of the nonDarwinian revolution of the late nineteenth century – yet Poulton and his party brought rigour to entomological research through the study of heredity and adaptation. More important, they firmly grounded their academic discipline in a staunchly Darwinian explanation of evolution by natural selection; and they used this to challenge the intellectual and institutional limitations of a strict focus on classification and nomenclature. Poulton, however, rejected laboratory science. His evolutionary entomology was theoretically rigorous, but it relied upon the work of August Weismann and field naturalists such as A. R. Wallace and H. W. Bates. Poulton, therefore, sought to establish the philosophical entomologist as a professional ‘naturalist’.2 In its willingness to discuss Darwin’s theory openly, the Royal Entomological Society of London was untypical of many metropolitan learned societies, but this was not a function of lower scientific prestige and status. This chapter examines Charles Darwin as an entomologist. Furthermore, it charts the response of his fellow entomologists to evolution by natural selection in order to appreciate Poulton’s vision of a professional academic naturalist, and entomology’s significant and enduring contribution to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s Insects Speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Darwin–Wallace Linnean Society papers of 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace attributed his and Darwin’s shared conclusions on evolution to their common backgrounds as beetle hunters. Entomology may not have played a key role in Darwin’s elaboration of evolution by natural selection, but his passion for Coleoptera was his entrée into the network of naturalists who determined his future career. He was an inveterate collector of nature’s productions from an early age, and he became a devoted beetle hunter while at the University of Cambridge between 1828 and 1831 (figure 6.1). William Darwin Fox,

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Figure 6.1 Beetle Hunter: One of Darwin’s fellow students at Cambridge University drew this sketch of him to celebrate his passion for beetle collecting.

his second cousin and a student at Christ’s College, introduced him to the study of entomology. In the company of Fox and several others, Darwin tipped ‘many a glass of wine’ to the impassioned toast ‘Floreat Entomologia’! He later admitted: ‘No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness, or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow.’ In a now often repeated story, Darwin indicated the extent of his passion for beetle collecting. After tearing bark from a tree, he spotted two rare beetles and immediately grasped one in each hand. He then saw an entirely new kind of beetle crawling across the tree. Possessed by his collector’s instincts, he popped the insect in his right hand into his mouth and began to grab for the third on the tree. To his shock and surprise, the beetle in his mouth ejected an acrid fluid, thus forcing him to spit it out. Unfortunately, the third beetle was also lost in the ensuing confusion.3 Darwin later recalled the names of the students who were his fellow entomologists and noted their subsequent success in all walks of life. Half facetiously, he speculated that ‘a taste for collecting beetles is some

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indication of future success in life!’ His insect interest certainly led to introductions to prominent naturalists, who helped to shape his future career. In 1829, he accompanied the Rev. F. W. Hope on a one-week entomologizing tour through North Wales. His introduction to James F. Stephens in the same year resulted in his first entomological publication. After submitting thirty-four beetles and one moth to Stephens, Darwin declared: ‘No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing, in Stephens’ “Illustrations of British Insects”, the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”.’4 Darwin, however, acknowledged his friendship with the Rev. John Stevens Henslow as ‘a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any other’. Leonard Jenyns, in his memoir of Henslow, noted that insect collecting flourished under this Cambridge don’s informal tutelage: ‘So numerous, indeed, were the Entomologists in particular at that period in the University, that several persons among the lower classes derived a part of their livelihood during the summer months from collecting insects for sale, especially in the fens which abound with so many rare and local species.’ Through his entomological connections, Darwin obtained an invitation to Henslow’s weekly open houses. Henslow, who was Professor of Botany and formerly Professor of Mineralogy (1822–8), also possessed knowledge of entomology, which resulted in the publication of several articles and in his election to the Entomological Society of London in 1822.5 Henslow’s recommendation secured for Darwin the position of captain’s companion and unpaid naturalist aboard HMS Beagle (1831–6) and thereby provided the naturalist with invaluable experience of the global diversity and geographical distribution of insects and other fauna and flora. Although insects constituted the largest group of invertebrates that he collected on the Beagle voyage, Darwin never published a separate account of his insect captures. This task was left, principally, to F. W. Hope, George Robert Waterhouse, Francis Walker and Charles C. Babington. Geology occupied the clear majority of Darwin’s Beagle research efforts, but the sheer number and diversity of his insect collections undoubtedly contributed to the gestation of Darwin’s thoughts on transmutation.6 Although Darwin ceased to be an active collector of insects, he maintained an experimental and philosophical interest in them as the minima of sentient beings. On the eve of the publication of the Origin, he characterized himself as a ‘decayed entomologist’. Between 1854 and 1861,

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however, he and his children made detailed observations upon the flight routes of male humble bees. Darwin was intrigued by the consistency of the bees’ flight paths and by their ‘buzzing spots’. His work on humble bees was part of his evolutionary interest in instinct and intelligence. The chapter on instinct in the Origin was the longest continuous section devoted to entomological subjects in the book. Within the book as a whole, Darwin made approximately fifty references to insects.7 After the publication of the Origin, Darwin continued to draw upon his own investigations and the work of numerous entomologists for entomological evidence of evolution by natural selection and sexual selection. Several books – The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862) and Insectivorous Plants (1875) – required an intimate knowledge of insect behaviour and morphology. Although long in preparation, Darwin began to compose both books in 1860. He was, by then, painfully aware of certain entomologists’ strong commitments to the fixity of species, natural theology and a scientific method rooted in idealism. He may, therefore, have referred to the example of insects to goad or to convert his opponents. In the past, natural theologians employed ‘contrivances’ in nature as evidence of God, the Architect. Thus Darwin employed the standard idiom of natural theology for the title of a book that aimed to purge natural history of the argument from design, or of a Final Cause. Darwin responded to Asa Gray’s praise of his book: ‘Of all the carpenters for knocking the right nail on the head, you are the very best; no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a “flank movement” on the enemy.’ Full of intricate descriptions of homologous parts of different flowers, his elaboration of pollination biology was a very subtle ‘flank movement’. He later described the book as a kind of secular Bridgewater Treatise because he replaced the transcendent design of God with the immanent design of Nature.8 Initially conceived as an elaboration of his theory of sexual selection, the Descent of Man succumbed to mounting pressures through 1869 and 1870, and came to include several chapters on the evolution of man’s rational and moral faculties. As evidence for his assertion that ‘there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties’ (emphasis added), Darwin deployed insects – specifically ants and bees – as polemical tools; they were extreme examples in support of his argument. Like savage people from distant lands, insects provided him with a ‘safe’ comparison and affirmation of his dangerous – perhaps

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taboo – theories. Insects were part of nature, but not a part of the immediate nature with which Darwin concerned himself. They, therefore, were useful analogues. Thus ‘even insects’ displayed happiness, as Pierre Huber had demonstrated with his description of ants that frolicked like puppies. Similarly, Darwin refuted the possession of memories and language as attributes which distinguished man from animals; for ‘even ants’ recognized fellow inhabitants of the same nest after four months of separation, and communicated with each other using their antennae. He contested the belief that animals were guided by instinct while man followed reason. The behaviour of man and other animals was, he argued, a mixture of both instinct and reason; the two did not exist in some Cuvierian inverse ratio to each other. After all, the most intelligent insects also possessed the ‘most wonderful instincts’.9 Darwin used the ants’ relationship to other insects as analogues of man’s biological and mental relationship to primates. While they were clearly far superior in mental and social constitution to all other insects, no one classified ants as a separate kingdom. Yet ‘the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man’. When, in his last book, Darwin turned his attention to the ecological significance of worms, he could not resist investigating their mental powers, ‘as few observations of this kind have been made . . . on animals so low in the scale of organization’. Moreover, after a thorough examination of the manner in which worms plugged up their burrows, he concluded that they possessed a small amount of intelligence. This, he stated, was not inconceivable when we considered the remarkable abilities of the tiny worker ant. The reader could not help but recall Erasmus Darwin’s sardonic directive: ‘Go, thou sluggard, learn arts and industry from the bee, and from the ant! Go proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!’ Both like and unlike animals ‘closest’ to man, ants, bees and worms were powerful polemical tools for the support of the evolutionary continuum between man and animal.10 Insects provided Darwin with further information on geographical distribution, sexual polymorphism, and mimicry. The latter two subjects elicited two chapters in the Descent of Man (1871). In the same book, Darwin cited over eighty-five different entomologists. When he turned his attention to inheritance and artificial selection in the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), he garnered supporting evidence from semi-domesticated insects. Mary A. F. Whitby and

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William B. Tegetmeier, therefore, supplied him with information on silkworms and honeybees, respectively. In general, the study of the insect world provided Darwin with empirical evidence, and contained no inherent conceptual barriers to his theories.11 ‘Enough to Keep the Subject Back for Half a Century’ Traditionally, however, entomologists have been depicted as intransigent opponents of Darwin’s ideas. This assessment has been derived from the contents of a single letter. In March 1863, Darwin informed geologist Charles Lyell that the ‘entomologists are enough to keep the subject back for half a century’. The immediate context of this statement was significant. The central purpose of Darwin’s letter to Lyell was to express his disappointment with Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man. ‘I so much wish’, declared Darwin, ‘that your state of belief could have permitted you to say boldly and distinctly out that species were not separately created.’ Dismayed by his friend’s lack of forthright support, Darwin attempted to evoke nationalistic sentiments. He informed Lyell that German and French naturalists seemed favourably disposed to the Origin. Nevertheless, acceptance of his ideas would require ‘two or three lifetimes’; the entomologists, in particular, were a severe impediment to the progress of his subject. His friend and fellow countryman had failed him at a time when he was besieged by opposition.12 Whereas his disappointment with Lyell might explain Darwin’s predisposition to emphasize the opposition that he faced, it does not account for his exclusive emphasis on entomologists. Darwin based his assessment of entomologists on three prominent, hostile reviews of his evolutionary publications. In November 1860, he confided in Henry Walter Bates that he had ‘been thoroughly well attacked & reviled (especially by entomologists Westwood, Wollaston & A. Murray [who] have all reviewed & sneered at me to their hearts’ content)’. None of these three men could be dismissed as mere bug hunters.13 Although he did not write a review, John Obadiah Westwood (1805–93) published several notices in the Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette in early 1860 which challenged ‘Mr. Darwin’s theory of development’. Westwood was the most renowned British contemporary entomologist, with a litany of honours to his name: Conservator of the Hope Entomological Collections at the University of Oxford; former Honorary

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Secretary (1834–47) and President (1851–2) of the Entomological Society of London; and author of An Introduction to the Modern Classification of Insects (1838–40). He argued that variations in species were simply hybrids that would soon return to their original form: products of ‘artificial selection’ – such as Swedish turnips and hive-bees – are ‘monsters, and nature will get rid of them to revert to the old true type of the species’. Francis Darwin noted that his father’s published response was ‘one of the very few cases in which . . . [he] was enticed into anything resembling a controversy’.14 The opposition of Thomas Vernon Wollaston (1822–78) was probably a disappointment, but not a surprise. Darwin had invited Wollaston, T. H. Huxley and J. D. Hooker to a gathering at Down House in April 1856 to air his evolutionary ideas and to consolidate his support. Wollaston, who had established his reputation with Insecta Maderensia (1854), was included in the select circle because of his impending publication of On the Variation of Species (1856), which he had dedicated to Darwin. Darwin soon discovered that Wollaston’s strong theological commitments only permitted him to concede that species varied within very circumscribed limits. As the son of a clergyman and a firm believer in divine creation, he would not subscribe to any form of transmutation of species. After the publication of the Origin, he informed Darwin: ‘I admire your pluck in proportion as I detest your Theory.’15 He registered his abhorrence with a rather lengthy and ‘fierce attack’ in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He began with the observation that ‘opinion amongst naturalists that species were independently created, and have not been transmitted one from the other, has been hitherto so general that we might almost call it an axiom’. Admittedly, he observed, there was no definitive proof for this opinion, just as there was no convincing proof for Darwin’s theory. Wollaston appealed to a standard methodological criticism: Darwin had underrated ‘collectors’ in favour of speculative ‘generalizers’; he had produced ‘bold hypotheses’ that were ‘unsupported by the majority of facts’. In this respect, the fossil record lacked intermediary forms to confirm gradual evolutionary change through natural selection. Moreover, chance selection could never adequately explain the pure aesthetics of organic form. How, he asked, could natural selection account for the beauty of the colours of butterflies? More generally, Wollaston remained firm in his contention that species were, by nature, ‘unpliant’. In spite of the numerous varieties of domesticated animals, dogs and cats, for instance, had made ‘no

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progress from their original starting points’. Individual variations within species did not lead to transmutation.16 Andrew Murray, the final representative of the triumvirate of entomological opponents whom Darwin cited, was a naturalist of some renown in Scotland. Murray had forsaken a career in law in 1857 to undertake a one-session interim appointment as Professor of Natural Science at New College, Edinburgh; and after 1860, he would become Assistant-Secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. He was principally a prolific entomologist, publishing thirty-eight natural history papers between 1852 and 1863. He accepted the presidencies of both the Royal Physical Society and the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1858–9 so that he could address broad-ranging and pressing philosophical questions. In his presidential address to the Botanical Society, he critically assessed Darwin’s and Wallace’s Linnean Society papers of 1858. This marked the beginning of Murray’s opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. He published articles on the subject in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, and began a minor correspondence with Darwin. He contended that modification, hybridization, reversion to type and attraction were all elements of inviolable laws that had been set in motion by the Creator. His principal argument stressed the absence of intermediate evolutionary forms of organisms. He asserted that eyeless insects of the same genera existed in caves separated by vast geographical barriers. Because examples of the genus were not found outside the caves, they must have been created for their specific ‘physical conditions’. They were not descendants of a common ancestor. Darwin privately acknowledged that this objection to evolution by natural selection was an ‘ingenious difficulty’.17 Published in prominent journals by respected naturalists, the articles of Westwood, Wollaston and Murray represented formidable opposition from entomologists. More important, they were not alone. John Edward Gray, former President of the Entomological Society of London (1858–9) and Keeper of the Zoological Collections of the British Museum (1840–75), was a rabid opponent. ‘You have just’, he scolded Darwin, ‘reproduced Lamarck’s doctrine, and nothing else, and here Lyell and others have been attacking him for twenty years, and because you (with a sneer and laugh) say the very same thing, they are all coming round; it is the most ridiculous inconsistency, &c. &c.’ Gray’s colleague Frederick Smith, entomological Assistant to the Keeper of the Zoological

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Collections and President of the Entomological Society of London (1862–3), made a more subtle attack. In a paper delivered before the society in April 1864, he returned to the problem of the bee cell to affirm that it is ‘the plan laid down by the great Architect, and the bees are the builders that carry out His designs’. H. T. Stainton’s Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer asserted: ‘Occasionally Mr. Darwin’s propositions are held up to ridicule: we believe that this will give great offence to the followers of Mr. Darwin, but is it really possible altogether to avoid doing so?’ Evidently, Stainton felt that it was not: the following year he reprinted a sardonic ditty – entitled ‘The Origin of Species’ – from Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘From reptiles and fishes to birds we ascend, And quadrupeds next their dimensions extend, Till we rise up to monkeys and men – where we end . . .’ Similarly, Edward Newman, founder and editor of the Entomologist and the Zoologist, used his publications to deny the scientific validity of Darwin’s ‘hypothesis’. Wollaston’s attack, he felt, had not been fierce enough because it failed to dismiss entirely Darwin’s notion of variation. Charles Darwin clearly faced opposition from entomologists who held influential positions in publishing and in various institutions.18 The Entomological Society of London Historical assessments of the relationship between entomology and Darwinian evolution always qualify Darwin’s negative letter of 1863 with his more optimistic verdict four years later. Writing to Ernst Haeckel in 1867, he declared: ‘No body of men were at first so much opposed to my views as the members of the London Entomological Society, but now I am assured that, with the exception of two or three old men, all the members concur with me to a certain extent.’ As Darwin noted earlier, German naturalists were more receptive to his evolutionary theory than their British counterparts. Consequently, he was more likely to be positive about his progress when corresponding with Haeckel. Significantly, however, Darwin’s focus shifted from ‘entomologists’ to ‘the London Entomological Society’. A succession of Darwinian presidents at the society between 1866 and 1875 buoyed his hopes for the bug hunters.19 The Entomological Society of London engaged in lively discussions that were directly relevant to Darwinian evolution under the presidencies of John Lubbock (1866–7), Henry Walter Bates (1868–9), and A. R. Wallace

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(1870–1). On three separate occasions – 4 March 1867, 17 February 1868 and 2 March 1868 – Wallace or Bates acted on Darwin’s behalf, and presented to the society queries relevant to his research on sexual selection.20 Endowed with a relatively democratic constitution, the society demonstrated a greater willingness to discuss Darwinian principles than any other metropolitan learned society. In 1866, for instance, a discussion on mimicry, which involved Westwood, Wallace and David Sharp, spilled over from the society proceedings into the pages of the Athenaeum. Presciently, this debate invoked natural theological, Darwinian, and Spencerian explanations of mimicry, respectively. Most significantly, the society had direct access to the ‘first important independent application of descent with modification by natural selection’ through the agency of Bates and Wallace.21 Mimicry Shared formative experiences in the tropics underpinned Bates’s and Wallace’s subsequent commitment to evolution by natural selection. Bates was a brewer’s clerk, and formerly a hosier, when he first met Wallace in Leicester in 1844. The two men discovered that they had in common a passion for natural history. Inspired by W. H. Edwards’s A Voyage up the River Amazons, Including a Residence at Pará (1847), they departed for South America in 1848 to cultivate their commitment to observing and collecting nature’s products. Wallace, however, returned to England after four years, and then voyaged to the Malay Archipelago, where he independently struck upon the theory of evolution by natural selection. Bates remained in South America for a total of eleven years, surviving on the sale of duplicate insect captures and other natural history specimens. This provided him with a modest income with which to pursue natural history in tropical South America: in 1851, for instance, he calculated that his 7,553 insect specimens, at fourpence each, would bring him £125 17s 8d, less 25 per cent for his agent’s commission and the cost of shipping. It also provided him with the experience and intellectual foundation to become a first-rate philosophical biologist.22 After his extended ‘glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species’, Henry Walter Bates produced a paper with strong Darwinian implications. He presented ‘Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley, LEPIDOPTERA: HELICONIDAE’ to the Linnean

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Society in November 1861. Ostensibly it was a taxonomic study which grappled with the geographic distribution of varieties and the related problem of speciation. It also contained a unique confirmation of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. While collecting in the Amazonian region, Bates had captured, within the same net, butterflies from two completely different families which resembled one another. Normally Leptalis butterflies were white, yellow or orange. Bates, however, captured Leptalis butterflies, of the family Pieridae, which were black, red, yellow, blue or crimson and looked identical to Ithomiae, a genus from the family Heliconidae. Even more surprising, the Pierids and Heliconids coexisted, and the mimics (Pieridae) changed across a geographical region to resemble the varietal forms of the models (Heliconidae). Working from Darwinian premises, Bates concluded that the brightly coloured Heliconids must enjoy some advantage in the struggle for existence. The heliconids’ conspicuous coloration acted as a marker of avoidance; it warned potential insectivorous predators of their acrid taste. Normal variability of species would ensure that the more palatable Leptalis butterflies would achieve greater protection from predators as their outward appearance approached that of the foultasting heliconids. This, in turn, would render them a greater chance to survive and reproduce. In effect, insectivorous predators acted as the agents of natural selection (figure 6.2).23 Bates founded his explanation of mimicry in butterflies on Darwinian principles of divergence, heritable variations and natural selection through the struggle for existence. ‘In my opinion,’ enthused Darwin, ‘it is one of the most remarkable & admirable papers I ever read in my life.’ Moreover, Darwin was impressed with Bates’s explorations of biological species and geographic speciation. He recognized that this entomological study was a powerful affirmation of the ideas expressed in the Origin. It used the theory of evolution by natural selection to explain the beauty of the colour of butterflies. Concerned that the paper would be missed because of its unassuming title in the Transactions of a learned scientific society, Darwin produced a review of it for the Natural History Review, a publication then under the editorial control of T. H. Huxley. Darwin was so emboldened by the strong supporting evidence that he launched an assault on the design explanations of mimicry given by the ‘creationists’. ‘Not many naturalists’, he declared, ‘will be content thus to believe that varieties and individuals have been turned out all nearly made, almost as a manufacturer turns out toys according to the temporary demand of

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Figure 6.2 Natural Mimic: Charles Darwin embraced H. W. Bates’s naturalistic explanation of mimicry in Amazonian butterflies as a victory over creationist design arguments.

the market.’ Bates’s theory of mimicry provided a secular naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon traditionally celebrated as evidence of providential design.24 Bates’s publication of The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863) introduced a broad audience to his naturalistic explanation of mimicry: It may be said, therefore, that on these expanded membranes Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modification of species, so truly do all changes in the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole organic world; therefore, the study of butterflies – creatures selected as the types of airiness and frivolity – instead of being despised, will some day be valued as one of the most important branches of Biological science.

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Pointedly, Bates had taken Lepidoptera, the traditional embodiment of entomological collectors, and transformed them into theoretical proof of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. ‘It is most curious . . .’, he observed, ‘all find pleasure in the book, Darwinians, Calvinistic church ministers, Dissenting parsons, hard-headed men of business; women, old men and boys; philosophic naturalists and species grubbers.’ A stream of evidence which supported Batesian mimicry poured in from naturalists working in Central America, South-East Asia, Africa and North America. And from their observations on butterflies of the Malay Archipelago and Africa, respectively, Wallace and Roland Trimen added to the complexity of the theory by introducing evidence of polymorphic species. They provided evolutionary explanations for the occurrence of two or more distinct forms of a species within a single butterfly population.25 In 1879, Fritz Müller offered a completely new form of mimicry based on evolution by natural selection. From his observations of South American butterflies, he discovered two unpalatable genera, Ituna and Thyridia, which mimicked one another. His explanation of the phenomenon hinged on distinctions between instinct and intelligence. Convinced that insectivorous predators learned from experience which species were distasteful, Müller argued that two different species of unpalatable insects could share their losses through common conspicuous coloration. Instead of each species losing a constant number of individuals to the ‘education’ of predators, they would divide their losses under one colour pattern.26 Müllerian mimicry provided the bridge between Darwin and his entomological supporters who guided one facet of the academization of their discipline. Darwin’s Entomological Bulldog Darwin actively encouraged a network of entomologists. Prominent among these was Raphael Meldola, with whom he engaged in a correspondence after 1871, and to whom he introduced the writings of Müller and of August Weismann. Meldola translated Müller’s paper for the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London, and became the foremost defender of Müllerian mimicry in Britain. He had been educated at the Royal College of Chemistry, and had worked for the commercial dye industry before assuming his position as Professor of Chemistry at the Finsbury Technical College in 1885. A devoted ‘field naturalist’ since his youth, he turned his attention to mimicry in 1871, and became a Member of the Entomological

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Society of London the following year. Within a decade, he had become a central figure for a circle of British entomologists who coalesced around their support for Darwinian explanations of mimicry.27 Edward Bagnall Poulton (figure 6.3), second Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, credited Meldola with playing a pivotal role in the translation of Darwinian ideas and concerns to British entomology. Meldola was, he claimed, Darwin’s entomological bulldog:

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 6.3 ‘Philosophical Biologist’: Edward B. Poulton, second Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, promoted neo-Darwinian entomology as part of his vision for a professionally respectable naturalist.

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‘The great change in relation to these opinions which has gradually come over the Society and over British entomology generally is especially due to the energy, zeal, and ability of a single man. Darwin described Huxley as his “general agent”; in relation to entomology his agent was Raphael Meldola.’ As Poulton acknowledged, Meldola inspired him to take up the study of insects in earnest. The two men first met at the Entomological Society of London in November 1883, when Poulton delivered a paper which was heavily influenced by August Weismann’s ‘Origin of the Markings of Caterpillars’. He had read Weismann’s essay in Raphael Meldola’s English translation of Studies in the Theory of Descent (1882). This book, he asserted, convinced him to abandon his research on the lower mammalia in favour of insects.28 Although Poulton, Meldola and Wallace became the core of the neoDarwinians in England, Poulton’s initial attraction to Weismann could not have been a strict commitment to the mechanism of natural selection. As his own preface to the English translation demonstrated, Weismann still espoused a belief in Lamarckian use inheritance in 1881. Consequently, he still believed that changes in an individual’s characteristics, acquired during their lifetime, could be inherited directly by the next generation. Weismann’s research provided Poulton with a reputable methodological approach to entomology. Weismann completed his postdoctoral dissertation Habilitationsschrift on the metamorphosis of Diptera in 1863, and his Studies in the Theory of Descent represented ‘one of the most complete recent contributions to the theory of Evolution as applied to the elucidation of certain interesting groups of facts offered by the insect world’. As Darwin acknowledged in his ‘Prefatory Notice’, Weismann provided important experimental observations on the nature and causes of variability. Poulton, in turn, devoted his entire entomological career to an elucidation of the adaptiveness of coloration in animals, and of mimicry as an exemplar of natural selection. These intellectual commitments lay behind Poulton’s rejection of laboratory-based biological science, and his determination to establish an ecological approach to natural history – or ‘bionomics’ – as a scientific discipline.29 Poulton, Meldola and Wallace campaigned for the ‘utility of specific characters’: true naturalists, who studied insects in their natural environments, realized the adaptiveness of every feature of an organism. This placed these men firmly in the neo-Darwinian camp which explained evolutionary change solely through the mechanism of natural selection.

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And it challenged the traditional adherence to the type concept, which emphasized the non-adaptiveness of characters used in describing and naming insects. Weismann, their intellectual inspiration, had trained initially as a histologist and embryologist, but trouble with his eyesight forced him to spend a decade working in natural history. He had been able to appreciate natural selection because he combined rigorous research in biology with considerable experience as a naturalist. Poulton, therefore, built on the traditional antipathy between ‘field’ and ‘closet’ naturalists to launch an attack against the collectors, classifiers and the laboratory scientists: ‘The vast majority of those interested in nature are either anatomists, microscopists, systematists, or collectors. There are comparatively few true naturalists – men who would devote much time and the closest study to watching living animals amid their natural surroundings, and who would value a fresh observation more than a beautiful dissection or a rare specimen.’30 Hope and the Entomological Society Poulton was able to produce a strong programmatic vision for the Hope Professorship of Zoology by constructing a debate around a conflict of ‘systematists’ versus ‘philosophical biologists’. Formerly a tutor in natural science at Keble and Jesus colleges, Oxford (1880–9), Poulton applied for the position of Hope Professor on the death of J. O. Westwood in 1893 (figure 6.4). A. R. Wallace, Raphael Meldola, August Weismann and Fritz Müller all supplied testimonials for Poulton’s application for the professorship. As the names of his supporters indicate, Poulton’s vision for a naturalistic academic study of insects was a stark break from the natural theology of Westwood, the first Hope Professor. Westwood occupied a position of pre-eminence among entomological systematists. He had been appointed Curator of the Hope Collections seven years after Convocation had accepted the Rev. F. W. Hope’s Deed of Gift in 1850. Further financial beneficence from Hope resulted in Westwood’s election as Hope Professor of Zoology in 1860. He found the university slow to embrace his subject, however. In 1863, he confided to a fellow entomologist that he regularly attended meetings of the Entomological Society of London just to break the tedium of Oxford: ‘I should die of Ennui here – There is no sympathy for Entomology or even general Zoology among the heads of houses &c. & the professors & tutors &

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 6.4 Hope among the Insects: J. O. Westwood was first Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford. His Quaker background shaped his commitment to natural theology and his opposition to Darwin.

fellows of Colleges have something else to do & do not care for an interloper among them as I am . . .’ From a Quaker background, he never relinquished his devotion to a natural theological paradigm. In a curious letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1873, he suggested the creation of assistant professorships for zoology and comparative anatomy, and of a readership in palaeontology. Moreover, he stated:

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I cannot conclude this letter without mentioning another subject which has long forced itself on my attention, namely the want of a Professor or Reader in Natural Theology, whose duty it should be to counteract the atheistical demoralization resulting from the unlimited teaching of Darwinism, in which Design in Creation, and even Creation itself, are openly or virtually denied or ignored. Aware of the forces of disciplinary fragmentation in science, Westwood made the paradoxical suggestion that natural theology become a specialist subject.31 With attachments to the University Museum, which opened in 1860, the Hope Professorship was one manifestation of the university reform movement. The ancient universities moved towards recognition of the natural sciences as examinable subjects in the mid-nineteenth century. Created in 1851, Oxford’s Natural Science School became one of the optional schools required for a degree. Poulton, a student of George Rolleston (Lee’s Reader in Anatomy), was a product of these reforms. Oxford, in fact, had a strong tradition of ‘experimental teaching’ in chemistry and comparative anatomy. The university subsumed these sciences within its commitment to a ‘liberal education’ by emphasizing the value of demonstrations in honing powers of observation. Poulton’s firm rejection of laboratory-based science integrated well with Oxford’s dislike for vocational training, and with its apparent unwillingness to train scientists who sought academic careers.32 Cognizant of an impending election to the Hope Professorship, Poulton used the 1892–3 presidential election at the Entomological Society to push into prominence a ‘party’ of Darwinian ‘philosophical biologists’ which included Colonel Charles Swinhoe, James Tutt, Raphael Meldola and A. R. Wallace. At the beginning of 1892, Westwood had fallen gravely ill and was forced to suspend his lectures. He was able to visit the museum on several occasions only with the aid of a bath-chair. As early as October 1892, Swinhoe contacted Meldola in preparation for the January election of the president. Swinhoe, who was a retired army officer, worked on cataloguing and arranging exotic moths at the Hope Collection. As a convinced Darwinian, he also wrote several papers on mimicry. He had gained access to the Hope Collections in 1890 on Poulton’s recommendation. Two years later, when he fell foul of Westwood, the latter man informed Poulton that his own involvement in the matter was ‘quite premature’. Poulton’s ambitions were clearly evident by 1892.33

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By contesting the presidential election, Poulton energized a politics of entomological science. He first privately suggested to Meldola that he stand for president of the Entomological Society in 1890.34 Two years later, in December 1892, Poulton and Swinhoe proposed to the council of the society that Meldola’s name be substituted for that of Henry J. Elwes as forthcoming president. Although within their constitutional rights, Poulton and his fellow-travellers were breaking with tradition, which dictated that the majority decision of the council determined the nomination for president. Claiming that it was time to end the hegemony of the systematists, they pleaded for proper recognition of ‘biological’ entomologists. Poulton declared that he had been entirely motivated by principle: ‘how can I consent to the permanent effacement of my subject without a struggle?’ Lord Walsingham, a vice-president, implored Poulton to reconsider, and denied any split between systematists and biologists. Moreover, he contended that Meldola was inappropriate because he was ‘not specially or notably an entomologist’.35 Stung by this remark, Meldola confided to Poulton: ‘I may claim that my edition of Weismann having led to your work, Merrifield’s, Dixey’s, &c. is at least as worthy of being considered as Elwes’ systematic work.’36 Elwes, in contrast, claimed: Considering that I have been an extensive breeder of sheep cattle & horses since 1878 I should be the last to doubt that hereditary transmission of characters is one of the most certain & important forces in nature, but I do think that both among animals birds & plants, these forces can be more accurately studied & exclusively exhibited than among insects of which our knowledge is so very much smaller & less accurate and which require so much more observation, study & classification before they can be well enough known to be largely used for such studies as you prefer. Elwes relied on a common methodological objection to evolutionary theory: far more empirical work was necessary before such speculation could be undertaken. Ironically, his methodological focus meant that he considered the sheer diversity of insects an impediment to their use in evolutionary study.37 With battle lines drawn between classifiers and ‘philosophical biologists’, Poulton and Swinhoe issued a letter to all members of the society

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in early January 1893. They reiterated their nomination for Meldola and declared: For many years the Presidential Chair of the Entomological Society has been filled by gentlemen more or less representative of the systematic and descriptive side of our science. We have observed, however, with much satisfaction, the gradual increase in the number of Fellows who take interest in the biological and physiological aspects of Entomology, and the increase in the numbers of workers in this department. Knowing that there was a strong feeling in the Society that this side of the subject should be occasionally represented from the Presidential Chair, we were and are of the opinion that the present opportunity is one which should be made use of . . . Through the agency of vice-president David Sharp, the contested presidential election forged links with the Weismann–Spencer controversy over the mechanism of biological evolution. Sharp issued his own open letter to members, in which he threw his support behind the council and Elwes. His claim of complete methodological neutrality, however, was disingenuous. Several decades earlier, Sharp had clashed with Wallace over Darwinian theories of mimicry, which, he contended, were no match for Spencerian explanations. Sharp had known Herbert Spencer since boyhood, when the philosopher had been a boarder in his home. His entry into the fray added complexity to the struggle because it highlighted the neo-Darwinian allegiances of Meldola’s supporters. With the publication of Weismann’s germ-plasm theory, Das Keimplasma, in 1892 and its translation into English one year later, the debate between the ‘all sufficiency of natural selection’ and inheritance through acquired characters was coming to a head. The Weismann–Spencer controversy was played out in the pages of the Contemporary Review between 1893 and 1895. It represented a struggle to define the true mechanism of evolution: Darwinian natural selection versus Lamarckian use inheritance. Sharp, the Spencerian, was sensitive to the fact that Poulton, Meldola and Swinhoe acted in 1892–3 as part of a Weismann-inspired neo-Darwinian assault on the Entomological Society of London.38 Elwes, the self-proclaimed lepidopterist, triumphed at the annual meeting of the society on 18 January 1893, but it was a pyrrhic victory. He used his presidential address the following year to affirm the place of

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collectors and classifiers: ‘I feel . . . that however great and important is the knowledge which we may ultimately attain by endeavouring to discover the laws which govern the development, variation, and distribution of insects, the knowledge we have of the actual facts is in many cases quite insufficient to bring such speculations to a definite end.’ Although he surrounded himself with like-minded vice-presidents for his first year, his nominated vice-presidents for the following year were Walsingham, Poulton and Swinhoe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meldola was elected president in 1895, and he responded to Elwes with an address on ‘The Speculative Method in Entomology’.39 Poulton’s challenge to the presidency added legitimacy to his programme for entomology; he was part of a tangible party. Both in timing and strategy, the presidential election and the competition for the Hope Professorship were inseparable. In early December 1892, Swinhoe informed Poulton that he had been rebuffed by Westwood when he approached him about the Hope Curatorship. A favorable curator would potentially strengthen Poulton’s hand for the professorship. In the same letter, Swinhoe began to map a strategy to muster support for the presidential election. One week later, Meldola cautioned Poulton about his involvement in the contested election because it might jeopardize his chances for the Hope Professorship. Meldola contended that Poulton’s actions had already ensured that he would face an ‘organized opposition’ to his appointment.40 Poulton would have been more reassured than deterred by Meldola’s injunction. He knew that there were better qualified systematists than him who were available for the post. He may already have known about George Hampson’s intention to stand for the professorship, with the backing of Elwes and Walsingham. Hampson implored his supporters to impress upon the Oxford electors the importance of careful arrangement of large insect collections. Poulton realized that his best strategy was to place himself at the front of an alternative ‘party’ of ‘philosophical biologists’. On the day following Westwood’s death in early January 1893, Swinhoe reported that he had been approached by the Oxford electors to supply the name of an appropriate eminent entomologist to assess Poulton’s work. Swinhoe suggested Meldola as ‘one of the Leading Biological Entomologists in the Country’, and Meldola duly announced the following week that he had completed a requested reference. The defeat of Meldola in the presidential election strengthened Poulton’s position. In the spirit of conciliation, Elwes

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and the rest of the officers of the Entomological Society provided a short letter of support for Poulton’s Hope application.41 Poulton and his supporters provided the university with a strong programmatic statement for an evolutionary approach to academic entomology. In his letter to the electoral board, Poulton declared that he would not ‘encourage the growth of a great centre for the exclusive study of Systematic Entomology and the description of new species at Oxford’; nor would he teach comparative anatomy. Instead, he would devote the collections and his professorial lectures to instruction in ‘philosophical biology’: Evolution, and the various theories by which its explanation has been attempted, especially the theory of Natural Selection with the three principles on which it depends – Variation, Heredity, and the Struggle for Existence; the relations, comprehended under the term zoonomics (Lankester), between the living organism as a whole and its inorganic environment, including, for example, such questions as Protective and Aggressive Resemblance, Warning and Signalling Characters, Mimicry, Secondary Sexual Characters, &c. – all these are best illustrated from the group of animals to which the Hope Collections are chiefly devoted. T. H. Huxley informed the electoral board that they had two choices: they could appoint a systematist to build an impressive collection; or they could appoint a person ‘well versed in the philosophy of Biology’ to grapple with some of the most pressing questions in zoology. Meldola reiterated Huxley’s general statement, but he also explicitly acknowledged that Poulton’s programme would be a departure from Westwood’s. In June 1893, Poulton was elected Hope Professor of Zoology and spent the next forty years establishing Oxford as a world centre in the study of insect coloration.42 The Evolution of Entomology The Entomological Society of London underwent no coup d’état in the fifteen years following the publication of the Origin. Darwinians and antiDarwinians served together on the council and as vice-presidents. This state of affairs continued largely unchanged until 1914. For those entomologists intent on collecting and classifying, the theory of evolution did

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little to alter their taxonomic labours. Often drawing indiscriminately upon a number of morphological characters to classify a specimen, they could attribute resemblances to affinity just as easily as to descent from a common ancestor.43 The underlying rift between systematists and ‘biological’ naturalists, however, was always present. In fact, it predated the Origin. In 1856, Lubbock – always the quantifier – complained that the Transactions of the Entomological Society showed a great paucity of biological work: of four previous volumes, descriptions of species and genera occupied 818 pages, and the habits of insects claimed only 208. Not a single paper, he bemoaned, addressed physiology or internal anatomy. But the division between biologists and systematists did not necessarily translate into one between Darwinians and anti-Darwinians. As conciliators at the society pointed out in 1892–3, H. W. Bates’s entomological career was a testament to the happy marriage between solid systematic work and important theoretical contributions.44 E. B. Poulton forced the potentially divisive undercurrent to the surface. His aggressive push to redefine the naturalist as a reputable biologist threatened the status quo. Collectors and classifiers feared that entomology would become the preserve of experimental scientists, who espoused a deep understanding of general zoological issues. Poulton claimed that his programme represented a renaissance for true natural history: The result has been a return of the spirit which animated the older enquiries before zoological science became locked in the paralysing grip of pure systematics. When we read Réaumur or De Geer, the whole point of view is entirely familiar. . . . These men were naturalists, interested in the infinitely difficult and infinitely numerous problems presented by living nature. He was both a reactionary naturalist who wished to return to the days of Réaumur and De Geer, and a radical professionalizer who wished to establish a reputable discipline of ‘bionomics’. At a time when Darwinian evolution suffered an eclipse, Poulton’s programme for serious, academic ‘philosophical biology’ demonstrated a remarkable grasp of evolution by natural selection. In the case of Poulton, his intellectual foundation in coloration of insects played a significant role in shaping his career as a neo-Darwinian.45

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Poulton’s ‘Introduction’ to the centenary History of the Entomological Society of London, written at the end of his career in 1933, focused almost exclusively on the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the first instance, he compared the society’s centenary with its jubilee of 1883, the year in which he was proposed as a Fellow. He charted the success of the society in numerical terms: whereas there were 238 Contributing Members in 1883, membership had swollen to 684 Fellows by 1933. Moreover, he established the general tenor of his historical reflections through his musings on Westwood. Having evoked a comparison between the celebrations of 1883 and those of 1933, he constructed an implicit contrast between Westwood and himself. Westwood, after all, was elected an honorary life president in the jubilee year; and Poulton received the same honour fifty years later. But, as Poulton now reminded his readers, Westwood had been opposed to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Westwood was renowned for his Introduction to the Modern Classification of Insects, a work which impressed Darwin sufficiently to propose the author for a Royal Society medal in 1855. Significantly, this reference to Westwood was Poulton’s only acknowledgement of systematic work in the society. Although Westwood dismissed Origin of Species as a dangerous book, its author generously acknowledged the value of Westwood’s work in insect systematics. Poulton devoted the remainder of his introduction almost exclusively to an anecdotal tale of mimicry and the society. Meldola assumed a central place in his narrative. More important, Poulton contrasted the presidential addresses of Elwes and Meldola without providing any historical context. Elwes, he noted, had been a retrograde step for the society because, in contradiction to the example of Henry W. Bates, he discouraged entomologists who were ‘endeavouring to discover the laws which govern the development, variation, and distribution of insects’. Two years later, Poulton observed, Meldola responded with his ‘admirable’ address, which ‘referred to the example of H. W. Bates’. Meldola promoted the speculative method as an addition – not a substitute – to ‘older’ methods of collection and classification. With the advance of biological science, systematic investigation of nature required greater rigour. Ostensibly, Poulton was reflecting on his fifty years of involvement with the society, but he chose to highlight the incidents and debates surrounding the contested presidential election of 1892–3. Consequently, he emphasized the achievements made through explications of mimicry.

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Contrasting himself with Westwood, and Elwes’s speech with Meldola’s, he presented a triumphal account of the inevitable progress of Darwinian entomological science. Although he remained silent on the presidential election itself, he clearly considered it a defining moment for entomological science, and, undoubtedly, his career. Through the agency of Poulton and his Darwinian fellow-travellers, insects helped to define the role of life sciences as an accredited programme of study within one of England’s ancient universities. This programme shared the scientific naturalists’ commitment to new materialist biology, but it eschewed laboratory-based research and teaching. Whereas Huxley worried that Darwinian evolution might harm his reputation as a professional educator of biology, Poulton posited neo-Darwinian entomology as the central plank of his vision for academic science. He grounded his neo-Darwinism in the work of field naturalists and argued that serious experimental work should not be restricted to the laboratory. He thereby brought the professional respectability of both an educator and a ‘philosophical biologist’ to natural history. Although he campaigned for scientifically rigorous science, his reactionary appeal to natural history meant that his entomology could be subsumed within a traditional Oxford vision of a liberal education.46 J. W. Tutt was among the very few individuals whom Poulton acknowledged in his fifty-year retrospect. In particular, he praised Tutt’s influence at the turn of the twentieth century. In his own assessment of a century’s progress in entomology, Tutt had commended the work of lepidopterists, who, through close observation and careful experimentation, had added to the theories of the phenomenon of life. Weismann and Wallace were, he argued, towering figures in this work; and Meldola and Poulton were among the leaders in the field. Tutt made these observations in 1901, in the special ‘century’ issue of the Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation of which he was founder and editor. In the same issue, another author assessed Weismann’s contributions to entomology, and bemoaned the fact that work of such immense importance had only attracted the appreciation of ‘a minority of entomological friends’. This puzzled him because he felt that the rejection of acquired characters was far more relevant to entomologists than to students of the vertebrata. By invoking the name of Tutt, Poulton reinforced his commitment to neo-Darwinism. He also unwittingly provided the bridge between late nineteenth-century neo-Darwinians and the early twenty-first century contested example of evolution in action. In 1896, three years after the prominent debates about

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insect mimicry, Tutt became the first person to connect industrial pollution, bird predation and peppered moths to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.47 The academization of entomology was part of discipline building. After the 1870s, entomology and other sciences sought to break the hegemony of a Classics-dominated system at Oxbridge. At Oxford, however, the Classics retained a firm grip, and Poulton appealed to an early nineteenthcentury acceptance of science as an ‘ornamental accomplishment’ to a liberal education to promote his biological entomology. Increasingly, however, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘public scientists’ also campaigned to establish themselves as leaders of industrial society. In his Romanes Lecture of 1915, Poulton scolded the government for its failure to embrace science and scientists for the successful prosecution of war: much, for example, could be learned about military camouflage from naturalists’ research on protective coloration in animals. Poulton argued the case for technocratic government – government guided by expert science and technology. Entomology was well placed to provide knowledge, practices and personnel in aid of the welfare of nation and empire. In the wake of increased trade, travel and exploration, expert entomologists sought to manage rationally insect pests of agriculture and insect vectors of disease.48

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n July 1877, Funny Folks parodied an ‘impending invasion’ of England by a small bug: ‘We recognize in him the pioneer of an army who will soon attempt to ravage our fields, bringing desolation to our hearths, and comport itself generally like a conquering force in a subjugated country . . .’ A New World insect, the Colorado potato beetle (Doryphora (now Leptinotarsa) decemlineata), seemed poised to launch an assault on the potato crops of Britain (figure 7.1). The ensuing response to this threat of ‘biological invasion’ provides historical insight into the relationships between scientific knowledge and politics at a time of crisis. Moreover, it demonstrates the complex ways in which a natural enemy could be reconfigured according to different nationalist agendas.1 The Colorado beetle was a catalyst for technological and governmental innovations: it gave rise to technocratic science. Phytosanitary legislation and environmentally degrading large-scale pesticide applications began with campaigns to control this New World insect. As the Colorado beetle marched across the USA and into Canada, and seemed perched to make an oceanic crossing, it left a legacy of mass applications of inorganic insecticides on food crops. Poison became a tool of agriculture through the haphazard discovery and adoption of a paint pigment, called Paris green, as an insecticide. The rise of Paris green left a historical legacy of ambivalence to toxic insecticides. Furthermore, the rise of mass application of insecticides was intimately connected with the emergence of expert

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 7.1 Invading Aliens: A Funny Folks cartoon from 1877 that depicts a British force as it confronts an army of Colorado beetles at the cliffs of Dover. The only weapons against the flag-waving American invaders are Paris green and the ‘sword’ of legislative action.

agricultural entomologists – entomologists who placed their science in the service of farmers and horticulturists. The global spread of the Colorado beetle in the latter half of the nineteenth century marked the rise of an insect pest. ‘Pest’ is not a natural category – it refers to those species that interfere with human activities: much like gardeners refer to a weed as a plant growing where we do not want it. Pests constitute only a very tiny portion of the vast insect world:

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about 2 per cent of the 800,000 known insects. Arguably, however, we know far more about insect pests than their less conspicuous relatives. Through reference to natural history reports, exploratory surveys, government documents and newspaper accounts, the rise of the Colorado beetle as a ‘pest’ can be precisely charted. Approximately 400 years after the introduction of the potato to Europe, the Colorado beetle threatened the future of this ‘useful’ tuber.2 Extraordinary entomological crises which beset France and the USA were the engines of interest in insect pests, and in the creation of government-oriented entomology. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American phylloxera aphid threatened to destroy world viticulture. Facing the imminent destruction of the French wine industry, French agriculturists proposed legislation that compelled landlords and tenants to destroy all harmful insects, or suffer the penalty of fines. Between 1873 and 1876, American farmers west of the Mississippi River faced equally insidious insect invasions. In the wake of the scourge of the Rocky Mountain locust (Caloptenus (now Melanoplus) spretus), the governor of Missouri proclaimed a day of public prayer and fasting, and the federal government sent food, clothing and seeds. Locust plagues had struck the Great Plains in 1855–7 and 1864–7, but their attack in the 1870s coincided with expanding farm acreage and capital investments in labour-saving machinery. Locusts threatened the settlement of the North American West. Consequently, Congress appropriated $18,000 in 1876 to establish a three-man – C. V. Riley, Cyrus Thomas, A. S. Packard – United States Entomological Commission. The latter evolved into the Bureau of Entomology, within the Department of Agriculture. Both France and the United States reacted to actual large-scale insect incursions with legislative responses.3 British lobbyists who sought to replicate French and American provisions for agricultural entomology grappled with a glaring difference: Britain lacked insect devastation on the same scale as the Rocky Mountain locust or grape phylloxera. Taking his cue from the USA and France, Andrew Murray launched a concerted campaign in 1877 for government supervised, simultaneous destruction of targeted pests across selected districts of England. In a communication to the Privy Council, Murray proposed the destruction of onion and carrot flies in Cheshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire as part of a trial run. The proposal met with government inaction. Onion and carrot flies could hardly compare with locusts and phylloxerae.4

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Inspired by Murray, and undeterred by the Privy Council, the Society of Arts called a meeting on 5 June 1877 of all agricultural societies of Great Britain to discuss the ‘extirpation of injurious insects’. Within a month of this meeting, learned discussion gave way to a veritable public panic surrounding the imminent invasion of a New World insect. Insect scourges were not an entirely new experience for the people of Great Britain. In 1574, swarms of cockchafers (Melolontha melolontha) seized up water mills along the Severn, and in 1868, they blackened the skies over Galway. Residents in the south of England, in 1782, offered prayers to avert further evil from the brown-tail moths (Euproctis chrysorrhoea), and employed the poor to destroy webs. Woolly aphis (Eriosomo lanigerum) stopped cider production in Gloucestershire in 1810. By comparison, the Colorado beetle scare of the 1870s evoked a unique legislative response. The events of the 1870s provide a historical window on the state of agriculture and entomology in Great Britain, and on a late Victorian reaction to the perceived threat of an alien insect pest.5 ‘The Eyes of Our Potatoes Are Weeping’ A potentially virulent strain of insect fear – entomophobia – infected the inhabitants of Great Britain in 1877. The object of their fears was the Colorado beetle, a small yellow insect adorned with ten black stripes down its elytra (figure 7.2). Described in 1824 by Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, the Colorado beetle remained an innocuous Coleoptera, of probable Mexican origin, that fed upon the burweed (Solanum rostratum) of the American West. Westward migration and penetration of the Rockies by speculative miners introduced potatoes to the Colorado beetle in the early nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the beetle had developed a voracious appetite for the new foodstuff, and began a relentless march towards the Atlantic at the rate of about seventy miles per year. It crossed the Mississippi into Illinois in about 1864; in 1870 it was reported in Ontario, Canada; and by 1874, the insect had reached the Atlantic seaboard. Two years later, the New York Times reported from Grinnell Station: ‘The rails were covered with them for a mile, and after a few revolutions of the drivers the wheels lost the friction and slipped as if oiled . . . they had to be swept off and the track sanded before any progress was made.’ The insect was presumably aided in its eastwards expansion by railways: ships offered another possible means of transport. Having

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 7.2 Degree of Concern: J. O. Westwood, Hope Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, prepared this illustration in June 1878 for a lecture on the Colorado beetle.

reached the Atlantic coast of the United States, the Colorado beetle seemed poised to make an oceanic crossing.6 As early as 1871, Charles Valentine Riley, state entomologist for Missouri, observed that if the Colorado beetle reached the east coast of North America, it could gain passage on board ships destined for Ireland, ‘the land of Murphies’ (potatoes): But . . . when once the beetles swarm in the streets of New York as they did in those of St. Louis last spring, some female, loaded with fertile eggs, and hidden in the nooks and crannies of some vessel, may be safely borne over to the land of ‘Murphies’ . . . In giving, through Sir Walter Raleigh, the precious tuber to Europe, America conferred

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upon the Old World an everlasting boon. She may yet unwittingly be the means of bequeathing as great a bane, by sending across the ocean the deadliest enemy of that tuber! When the beetles did swarm in the streets of New York, the secretary of England’s Central Chamber of Agriculture sent a letter to the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, highlighting the impending insect invasion, and the special threat faced by Ireland. Under these circumstances, the Chamber of Agriculture called for a prohibition of the importation of potatoes from North America.7 American entomologists had devoted considerable attention to the Colorado beetle since about 1864. The best evidence suggested that the beetle probably would not be transported with potatoes, because the haulm and leaves of the plant were not shipped with the tubers. Both the perfect beetle and its larvae reap their destruction by stripping the potato plants of their leaves: they do not feed upon the tuber. And the larvae would not last the transatlantic voyage without the requisite diet of leaves. Similarly, the eggs are laid on the surface of the leaves, and are very fragile. Almost all agreed that if the insect found its way to Great Britain, it would do so in its perfect beetle form, which could survive lengthy periods without a food source. Moreover, the extremely tenacious beetle could gain passage on board any ship plying between the USA and Great Britain.8 With this evidence before them, the British government did not heed the Chamber of Agriculture’s advice. Undoubtedly, their decision was not strictly rooted in faith in expert opinion. Several continental countries – Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Russia and Spain – severely restricted or denied the importation of American potatoes. Continental countries also displayed a greater propensity for high tariff barriers to dissuade the importation of competitive agricultural produce. In contrast, Britain eschewed protectionism after mid-century. As population growth continued to outstrip domestic agricultural production, Britain increasingly turned towards foreign imports of grain and meat. By 1873–5, 50 per cent of the nation’s supply of wheat – the traditional staff of life – was imported. A large proportion of this came from the Great Plains of America. Reliant upon American imports to feed the nation, the government was reluctant to restrict the importation of potatoes. Instead, the Commissioners of Customs issued to their officers engravings of the beetle and memoranda in March 1875 and November

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1876, instructing them to destroy by fire any haulm or soil found with the potatoes. The caption below the engraving authoritatively instructed: ‘The insect if seen, to be at once crushed’ (figure 7.3).9 Concrete evidence of the potato beetle’s successful passage to Germany began a chain of events which stirred the government to pass potentially interventionist legislation. On 25 June 1877, several Cologne

Figure 7.3 A Beetle Crush: This customs poster from 1877 drew complaints from expert entomologists, who claimed that the instruction to ‘crush at once’ was impairing their ability to offer a definitive identification.

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newspapers reported that Colorado beetles, larvae and eggs had been found on a potato field at Mülheim-am-Rhein. The field, which measured about twenty acres, was owned by a butcher who imported American bacon. Officials believed that the beetle arrived with the bacon shipments. On 28 June 1877, J. A. Crowe, Britain’s consul general at Düsseldorf, sent the government a foreboding telegram: ‘Colorado beetle was found with larvae numerous in a potato field near Mülheim. Yesterday, before the authorities, the field was fired with sawdust and petroleum. One beetle was seen on the wing. It is feared the plague may spread.’ Through newspaper reports, such as those in the Pall Mall Gazette, that one lonely beetle managed to gnaw its way into the public imagination. Indeed, it flitted through the proceedings of the House of Commons when Viscount Sandon retold the story of the single errant insect on the same day that the telegram was sent.10 Throughout 1877, newspapers buzzed with reports of Colorado beetle sightings, and agricultural societies discussed in earnest the perils of insect pests. On 27 February, Mr Phillips of the Ixworth Farmers’ Club decried, ‘the eyes of our potatoes are weeping in anticipation of the advent of the awful beetle from Colorado’. Dr Hollick of New York wrote to J. E. Mayall of Stork’s Nest, Lancing, Sussex with the warning: ‘They are no joke, I tell you. I saw them this morning on the Docks falling into the sea by thousands and all heading due east; so look out.’ In late July, an investigation under the instructions of the Privy Council reidentified a reported Colorado beetle in Hereford as a common seven-spotted ladybird. To aid proper identification, the German firm of Messrs Stollwerk produced models of the Colorado beetle in all its stages of development. Demand in Germany, Belgium and Holland outstripped the manufacturer’s production capacity. Consequently, Stollwerk appointed a firm in the United Kingdom to supply consumers. The Farmer’s Magazine offered to supply models of the beetle to any farmer’s club or chamber of agriculture. By mid-July, the beetle had gained enough notoriety for Punch to parody it: Attend all ye lieges! This is to give notice A foe’s on your track, and a terrible foe ’tis . . . Their crossing the Danube drove BETSY half frantic; But Britons, that Beetle has crossed the Atlantic! . . . And Science herself has no present suggestion

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For finally solving this great Western Question . . . And if PAT doesn’t wish sans his MURPHIES to starve, he Must keep sharp look-out for the eggs and the larvae, Whose jackets, red-brown, like an iron nail rusted, When twigged, should with Paris Green promptly be dusted. And that, up to date, seems about the sum-total Of what can be done in a way antidotal To minimize, localize, limit the ravages To be dreaded from these coleopterous savages . . . Foreign, six-legged ‘savages’ threatened invasion. At the reopening of Kirkham Church in September, the Bishop of Manchester preached a sermon in which he identified the Colorado beetle as one of the four tokens of God. And when the Christmas pantomime opened at the Prince’s Theatre in December, the Colorado beetle appeared as the Demon in Chief in the first scene of a reworking of Babes in the Woods. ‘Beetle mania’ had struck Great Britain (figure 7.4).11 Wielding Darwinian theory, emergent experts equated Colorado beetles with ‘savages’. According to accepted theory – which neatly wed ‘conquest, dispossession, and civilization’ with science – plants and animals would suffer the same fate as ‘primitive’ native Americans and Australasian Aborigines and Maoris. They would be displaced by more ‘fit’ and ‘civilized’ Europeans. Experts argued, therefore, that an inevitable consequence of imperial expansion was the spread of ‘European species, which have, through “natural selection” for centuries, most effectually conformed to . . . [conditions of civilized settlement], and which, by virtue of this greater adaptation crowd out the endemic forms’. The Colorado beetle was one of the exceptions to this rule: a possible ‘savage’ manifestation of the empire striking back. Although American entomologists took some national pride from the near certain global triumph of this New World insect, the British public suffered considerable worry that a ‘primitive’ beetle might soon wreak havoc among Europe’s cultivated lands.12 Although the threat of the Colorado beetle seemed to transcend political boundaries, these biological invaders became socially and culturally dangerous aliens within particular national contexts. They were, in this respect, similar to the threat of the Hessian fly a century earlier. Americans had associated the Hessian fly – as its name implies – with Germanic invaders: both ‘armies’ brought devastation to the farms of

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Figure 7.4 Beetle Booked: When this tiny insect – the size of a ladybird – threatened to invade Britain, George Routledge & Sons rushed into print this American book on the Colorado beetle, without the author’s consent.

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New York and New Jersey in the 1780s. Both were adversaries who had to be overcome in the cause of nation-building. In England, however, the Hessian fly was a pestiferous rebel from a former colony. Xenophobia, born of wounded imperial pride, elicited a protectionist response from the government: it banned American imports of wheat for fear of contagion from Hessian flies.13 Almost a century later, the Civil War threatened to tear asunder the USA, and Americans confronted an internal insect threat – the Colorado beetle – that marched ‘in many separate columns, just as Sherman marched to the sea’. The New York Times speculated that the insect had been driven by manifest destiny to reverse the course of empire by marching west to east: They will avenge the Anglo-Confederate piracy, and humble an effete aristocracy literally in the dust. No green thing escapes their maw; and, before the panic-stricken statesmen of perfidious Albion can patch up a new extradition treaty, their miserable island will be pervaded by the all-devouring Colorado beetle, from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End. More generally, the recurrent use of military metaphors to describe insect pests presaged the close relationship between applied entomology and the technology and discourse of war.14 In Britain, the Colorado beetle became a harbinger of the dangers of free trade and laissez-faire government. Free movement of persons, plants and animals, and increasing democracy, threatened to vitiate decent society with lower forms of human and insect life. Taking his cue from Thomas Carlyle’s paternalistic racism, John Wallace depicted leaders of the Irish Home Rule movement – Joseph Biggar, John O’Connor Power, and Charles Stewart Parnell – as Colorado beetles who warranted extermination. Similarly, Britons envisioned the Colorado beetle as a potential weapon of Irish republican insurrectionists. The East Anglian Times, in 1881, reported that the Board of Customs had instructed its officers to be extra vigilant because intelligence had been received that the Fenians were collecting Colorado beetles in the United States with the intention of releasing them on English crops. Insect pests embodied fears for the safety of the nation-state in the face of internal and external threats.15

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Paddy’s Pest Although characterized as a ‘craze’ by a correspondent to The Times a decade later, the ‘Colorado beetle scare’ was grounded in true fear. The Irish potato famine of 1845–50 – ‘the last large-scale natural demographic disaster to strike Europe’ – was still within living memory. Moreover, some people may have remembered Alfred Smee’s speculation that an insect, an aphid, was responsible for the disaster. Caused by a fungus known as Phytophthora infestans, the potato blight claimed 1–1.5 million lives, and resulted in the emigration of approximately another 1 million people. The potato famine dramatically demonstrated the risks of reliance on this single staple. After the famine, the potato regained its pre-eminent position in much of the county’s diet. An elderly Donegal man reminisced of his boyhood in the 1870s: ‘it was spuds, morning, noon and night.’ In addition, the acreage under potatoes in England, Wales and Scotland was increasing. In 1867, potatoes accounted for 493,000 acres; by 1875, the total had increased to 523,000 acres. In 1881, a committee appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to examine the British diet concluded that potatoes were clearly the most important vegetable food. With a large portion of the population still dependent upon the potato, the possible invasion of the Colorado beetle provoked a very real concern.16 The earliest notices of the Colorado beetle acknowledged the special threat faced by Ireland. In early 1874, Hardwick’s Science Gossip alerted the British reading public to the dangers of the insect through the translation and republication of an article on the subject by American naturalist and political agitator Colonel F. Hecker. In early 1875, Freeman’s Journal published a notice of the article and concluded that the Colorado beetle was a greater threat than the blight: ‘What Ireland suffered from the partial destruction of her potato crop is one of the most horrible chapters in the world’s history. What Ireland is now threatened with is not partial destruction but the utter annihilation of that crop.’ John F. McArdle later reduced these fears to a ‘coleopterous comicality’ for the music hall: The Colorado Beetle is the hero of the day For it’s in ev’ry body’s way Since some simpleton imported it to have a little fun But if the farmers catch him wont he have to cut and run The Beetle is a leetle Insect that eats ev’rything . . .

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Its appetite is awful if it ever makes a stand There wont be one Potatoe left in all of Paddy’s land. Fear for the possible destruction of Ireland’s dietary staple formed the backdrop for much of the anxiety surrounding the Colorado beetle scare (figure 7.5).17 But the experience at Mülheim and the subsequent identification of Colorado beetles at Liverpool were the events that precipitated a government legislative response. Two of the three occasions on which the Colorado beetle question was raised in the House of Commons in 1877 concerned the plight of Ireland. On one occasion, the Chief Secretary for Ireland had to dispel an erroneous report of the beetle’s appearance on the Dublin Quays (figure 7.6). Fears became corporeal when two living specimens from the Liverpool docks were positively identified as Colorado beetles. On 8 August 1877, a beetle was captured climbing a wall aboard the SS Carolina, which was transporting about sixty head of cattle from Texas. About the same time, a second beetle was discovered upon the sail of another craft at Liverpool. The Privy Council immediately sent entomologist Andrew Murray to investigate; and introduced a bill in the House of Lords the following day.18 Governing Bugs Potentially a very interventionist piece of legislation, the Destructive Insects Bill passed quickly through both Houses of Parliament, with virtually no debate. In introducing the bill for second reading in the House of Commons, Viscount Sandon reiterated its special relevance to Ireland, and invoked the precedent set by cattle diseases legislation. The Destructive Insects Act 1877 gave the Privy Council power to restrict or prohibit the landing of potatoes, haulm, leaves, or any other article that might introduce the Colorado beetle into Great Britain. The Act further empowered the Privy Council to destroy or remove any crop suspected of sheltering the beetle, or of promoting its spread. Administratively, the local authorities, who might be instructed to pay compensation for destroyed crops, were named as synonymous with the local authorities under the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act 1869. With the chance of a repetition of a demographic disaster looming before them, the government drew upon the legislative precedent and administrative structure created by the cattle plague of 1865–6.19

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 7.5 A ‘Coleopterous Comicality’: An Irishman confronts a travelling Colorado beetle on the cover of John F. McArdle’s musical score from 1889.

In an era of free trade that followed the repeal of the Corn Laws, cattle plague legislation challenged the orthodox belief in the sanctity of unhindered trade in agricultural produce. Furthermore, the cattle plague ‘revolutionised the British veterinary profession’. Exponentially increasing cattle

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 7.6 Potato Pest: This Punch cartoon refers to the suspected sighting of the Colorado beetle in Dublin in 1877. The spear alludes to the contested classification of the beetle as Doryphora (i.e., ‘spear-bearer’) decemlineata.

deaths, and pressure from the farmers’ organizations and parts of the veterinary profession motivated the government to pass the Cattle Diseases Prevention Act in February 1866. Participation in the implementation of cattle diseases legislation meant that the veterinary profession became associated with a technological success story. Rinderpest is easy to diagnose and contain through a policy of slaughter and isolation. After the passage of the Cattle Diseases Prevention Act, the spread of cattle plague rapidly abated. Subsequent outbreaks in 1872 and 1877 were vanquished quickly. As the livestock industry and the fresh milk trade increased during the depression years, successful control of cattle diseases assumed great significance.20

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At the most obvious comparative level, the Colorado beetle scare failed to promote a profession of agricultural entomology because the beetle menace did not materialize. Two perambulatory pests could hardly compare with 120,000 dead cattle. Between its passage in 1877 and its amendment in 1907, the government invoked the full force of the Destructive Insects Act only once. In 1901, the Board of Agriculture substantiated the first incident of the Colorado beetles’ successful colonization in Great Britain. After finding beetles in all their stages of development, inspectors of the board destroyed an infested plot of potatoes, owned by employees of the India Dock Company at Tilbury. A single success over a thirty-year period was not enough to guarantee entomological expertise an active place in government administration.21 Cool Climate of Reason Unlike veterinarians – who had the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and the Royal Veterinary College (established 1792) – entomologists lacked professional ‘reputational organizations’. Moreover, the dominant image of them, reinforced by various naturalist and entomological societies, prejudiced agriculturists’ perceptions of entomologists. At a meeting held on 28 July 1877, the York Chamber of Agriculture passed a resolution regretting ‘that our over zealous naturalists are having [Colorado] beetles brought over alive from America, and are keeping and experimenting with them as to their habits and the food they will eat’. Part of the Destructive Insects Act 1877 was a deterrent for entomological collectors and dealers. On one of the very few occasions on which the Act was invoked, local authorities in South Devon forced an obstinate entomologist to destroy live Colorado beetles in his possession, and fined him £5. In the absence of a body or organization to represent them, agricultural entomologists suffered from the image of callous collectors.22 Throughout the Colorado beetle scare, British entomologists, in general, displayed no real propensity to promote agricultural applications of entomology. Henry Walter Bates was one of the few British entomologists to proffer an opinion on the Colorado beetle. Although he enjoyed a prodigious scientific career, Bates displayed no particular affinity for agricultural entomology. Undoubtedly, his interest in Coleoptera, ‘on which he specialised in later life’, inspired him to address the Colorado beetle question. In an article that appeared in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural

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Society of England in 1875, Bates boldly proclaimed that the Colorado beetle could never become acclimatized to Great Britain. Two years later, at the height of the scare, another renowned entomologist, Robert McLachlan, echoed Bates’s sentiments. In a paper delivered before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1877, McLachlan asserted that the British climate was too damp for the beetle.23 Unabashed faith in a climatic barrier did not emanate from superior entomological erudition: no definitive evidence supported the position at that time. C. V. Riley, who had perhaps the greatest first-hand knowledge of the Colorado beetle, explicitly refuted Bates’s contention. The contrasting opinions on both sides of the Atlantic may have been grounded in respective national pride: Americans sure of their bug’s victory, and Briton’s certain of the upstart’s irrelevance. Alternatively, Bates and McLachlan may have been inspired by the dictates of circumstance. Britain experienced some of the coldest and wettest weather of the nineteenth century at precisely the time the Colorado beetle threatened an imminent invasion. Between 1875 and 1882, rainfall was 14 per cent above average.24 Possibly prompted by exceptional weather conditions, ‘nay-saying’ more likely encompassed status-related concerns. In the years following the ‘decline of science’ campaign of the 1830s, aspirants for scientific careers gained government support through appeals to ‘national security, internal need, and intermittently, sheer prestige’. The Colorado beetle scare provided fodder for each of these requisite conditions. Neither Bates nor McLachlan exploited the opportunity. But this does not indicate a lack of interest in attainment of professional status. Their response to the Colorado beetle question reflected the relative underdevelopment of agricultural entomology in Great Britain. Their denials of an insect threat, however, were the acts of men at the height of their careers who wished to reinforce their status as recognized scientists, or intellectuals, by a display of ‘superiority, aloofness, and detachment’ amidst a wave of public panic. McLachlan, therefore, chastised the government for instituting legislation in a climate of fear, when the cool reason of science indicated that the beetle could not survive in the climate of Great Britain. As renowned representatives of metropolitan entomology, neither Bates nor McLachlan displayed any propensity to promote the speciality of agricultural entomology.25 Andrew Murray, a committed proponent of agricultural entomology, stood in stark contrast to Bates and McLachlan. On 3 July 1877, Murray

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presented a paper on the Colorado beetle at a meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society. He dealt with the topic within the framework of agricultural entomology. Significantly, he also located himself within orthodox natural history by raising issues of classification. He challenged Thomas Say’s description of the beetle within the genus Doryphora (‘spear-bearing’) as it clearly lacked a spear. Unfortunately, informed systematists would have realized that Say’s classification had been altered in 1858 and 1874, and that this was no longer a contested point. Murray may, however, have unwittingly demonstrated his limitations as an entomological systematist when he was seeking to convey an entirely different impression. Arguably, classification was the foundation of nineteenthcentury natural history. Within entomological circles, therefore, a taxonomic dilemma would represent the ‘frontier’ of scientific investigation. By discussing issues of classification in the context of agricultural entomology, Murray sought to legitimize a nascent profession or discipline.26 In addition, Andrew Murray used the Colorado beetle scare to present himself as an expert agricultural entomologist. As early as October 1876, he sent a communication to The Times pertaining to reports of the Colorado beetle in Germany. The following year, he displayed specimens and drawings of the beetle at the Bethnal Green branch of the South Kensington Museum. When live specimens of the beetle were found on the Liverpool docks, the Privy Council sent Murray to investigate. And after the Destructive Insects Act 1877 was passed, the government selected him as an inspector, in the event of further beetle reports.27 The beetle, of course, never invaded, and Murray died within a year of the unusual appointment.28 Insect Poison More than any other insect, the Colorado beetle was responsible for the close relationship that soon developed between emergent expert entomologists and insecticides. The knowledge and use of insecticides, however, had an ancient ancestry. Most often meant for small-scale household and garden applications, a variety of organic materials were commonly employed. The use of animal and vegetable oils and tars stretched back to antiquity. From the late seventeenth century, tobacco, white hellebore, quassia, derris, pyrethrum, soap and lime all became recognized pest control substances. Late nineteenth-century insecticide technology, however, was a response to monocultural mass production and increased international trade in

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agricultural produce. Due to high costs, many traditional insecticides (such as pyrethrum) were only appropriate for small-scale applications. With the increasing commercialization of farming, agricultural scientists sought effective insecticides which could be applied easily on a large scale. V. Vermorel of Villefranche began in the 1880s to produce knapsack pumps for the application of sprays. Campaigns against the downy mildew of the grape in France and the Colorado beetle in the North America pushed spraying to the forefront of pesticide technology. Thus the ravages of the Colorado beetle, the gypsy moth and the cotton boll weevil evoked the introduction of the best-known arsenicals – Paris green, lead arsenate and calcium arsenate.29 When the Colorado beetle struck potato crops, insecticides were not the first recommended remedies. Entomologists suggested an array of cultural control methods: hand-picking; the use of trap crops; planting of less preferred potato varieties; and the encouragement of natural predators. Despite these control measures, potato crops continued to suffer severe damage. Then, in the late 1860s, a farmer accidentally discovered the insecticidal properties of a paint pigment. After painting his shutters a shade of green, he threw the excess paint on potato plants infested with Colorado beetles, and killed the insects almost instantly. The wonders of Paris green, an arsenic-based pigment, were soon broadcast far and wide.30 Although perhaps apocryphal, the story of the farmer and his paints was not a stretch of the imagination. Nineteenth-century European and American scientists often noted that the search for new insecticides was very unsystematic. Generally turning to known human poisons, scientists and agriculturists resorted to ad hoc applications to meet specific insect emergencies. Moreover, arsenic had been used for insect control in China as early as the second century BC. At first, however, Charles Riley, one the leading American agricultural entomologists, was sceptical about Paris green and saw little need for its application. Within several years, it became his preferred remedy. Paris green, he declared, permitted the American farmer to become master of the potato beetle.31 North American farmers and the agricultural press experienced an equally rapid conversion. Initially, they opposed the adoption of Paris green as an insecticide. They raised fears for foliage damage, soil contamination and the health of livestock and farmers. Scientific experts quickly dismissed each of these concerns, and agriculturists were rapidly converted. In the USA, the publication American Agriculturist objected to the first notices of

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Paris green as an insecticide. Within three years, the same journalists were enthusiastically promoting the substance as the best remedy against the Colorado beetle. In the summers of 1895 and 1896, the Ontario provincial government in Canada set up a campaign of spraying trials for horticulturists. Combinations of Bordeaux mixture (copper sulphate, lime and water) and Paris green were applied in twenty-nine orchards throughout the province. Effusive testimonials followed. Horticulturists estimated that their yields of apples increased between 80 and 100 per cent. John Taylor of Dunnville reported: ‘Spraying the trees is certainly the only way to obtain apples perfect in shape, delicious in flavour, unblemished in spots, and an abundant yield.’ Undoubtedly, the farmers’ conversion was born of a combination of expert assurances and the visible efficacy of the insecticide.32 By the close of the nineteenth century, conversion of North American farmers was almost universal. In fact, they began to complain that commercially obtained Paris green was often not poisonous enough. In Canada, the Gardeners and Florists’ Club of Ottawa successfully petitioned the government to legislate against the adulteration of Paris green. And in 1896, potato farmer John Lahmer wrote to the Canadian Minister of Agriculture to complain about continued adulteration of Paris green. He concluded his letter: Never in the history of the country has Paris green become such a staple article as of late years and there is no question of doubt the amount consumed each year must increase, as there seems to be no end of practical uses for it with good results! In fact no farmer, gardner [sic], or any one with a residence and private grounds can well do without it. At about the same time, an American agricultural journalist contended that Paris green was like an axe: both were dangerous if used incorrectly, but they were indispensable tools. Insecticide had become an acknowledged tool of agriculture.33 Britain lagged behind North America in the use of Paris green – indeed, in agricultural entomology – because it lacked insect devastations on the same scale, and consequently lacked the same economic imperatives. A massive expansion in mechanized, capital-intensive agriculture occurred in nineteenth-century North America. Many of the crops brought under cultivation were non-indigenous. New insect life often accompanied these novel crops. Without their native predators to keep them in check, insect

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pests ran rampant. In 1898, US federal entomologist L. O. Howard found that thirty-seven of the seventy worst insect pests in the United States were imported.34 Although it was the engine of economic growth and expansion in nineteenth-century USA, agriculture suffered economic decline in Britain. Its portion of the national income dropped from about 30 per cent at the beginning of the century to approximately 5 or 6 per cent by 1900. Whereas in Britain the area of agricultural land fell by 1.5 million acres between 1830 and 1900, the Americans doubled the amount of their improved land from 189 million to 414 million acres in the last two decades of the century alone. Herein lay one of the greatest differences between American and British agriculture. Land, for the Americans, was a temporary and expendable resource: soil exhaustion was not a concern. In contrast, Britain faced the demands of feeding a burgeoning population on diminishing lands. In the United States, agricultural entomology developed as a response to the immediate and visible depredations of insect enemies, brought on by a huge-scale ecological upheaval in the countryside. In Britain, agricultural entomology trailed on the coat-tails of an agricultural science devoted to improving the output of a limited amount of land.35 The highly visible yellow and black beetle ‘served as a conspicuous herald of a whole horde of potential invaders’ in Britain. Increasing trade and improved communications resulted in the spread and introduction of insect pests from one country to another: migrations, science and national pride converged (figure 7.7). American entomologist Howard Evans wryly noted: ‘The Colorado potato beetle . . . is our gift to Europe – a recompense, so to speak, for the gift of the asparagus beetle, the Hessian fly, the cabbage worm, the gypsy moth, and so many others.’ Efforts to exclude the Colorado beetle from British ports (1877) metamorphosed into a broader legislative mechanism to exclude all pests and diseases under the rubric of the Destructive Insects and Pests Act 1907. Entomological science obtained legitimacy in the political realm through Colorado beetle campaigns. Furthermore, scientists were forced to confront the interactions between organisms in a dynamic environment; and the elision of nature and culture. Now firmly ensconced in potato fields in parts of Europe and throughout North America, the yellow and black beetle has only managed to colonize small patches of Britain’s collective imagination.36 But if the Colorado beetle never successfully colonized Great Britain, it left an enduring legacy of technocratic science. The beetle’s impending

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Figure 7.7 A Dangerous Tourist: This Punch cartoon anticipated the imminent arrival of the Colorado beetle in Britain. Petroleum and Paris green seemed to be the only hope of stopping this intrepid traveller.

invasion in 1877 convinced an independently wealthy woman, Eleanor Ormerod, to become Britain’s de facto government agricultural entomologist. Furthermore, the American response to the beetle acted as a cogent example of an effective remedy against insect pests. In the late 1880s, emergent agricultural scientists in Britain drew upon the American example to justify the use of arsenic insecticides in their battles against insect pests. Between 1890 and 1920, British agriculturists began to deploy large-scale applications of inorganic poisons as insecticides. Usually associated with the post-1940 explosion of chlorinated hydrocarbon substances such as DDT, insecticides were intimately linked to the mid nineteenth-century renaissance of agricultural science, and the subsequent rise of entomological experts in Britain and throughout the empire. The Colorado beetle helped to usher in an age of industrial agriculture.

8

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lowing tributes in the popular press and learned journals marked the death of Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828–1901) in 1901 (figure 8.1). The Times indicated the breadth of Ormerod’s reputation by noting the death of ‘the accomplished entomologist’ as a ‘loss . . . not to this country alone but to the whole civilized world’. Other obituaries recognized her as a pioneer in a particular field of work ‘on which the best years of her life were lovingly expended’. Robert Wallace, Professor of Agriculture at the University of Edinburgh, contended that ‘she was universally acknowledged to be the greatest authority on economic entomology that this country has possessed in recent years, and one of the inner circle of the highest authorities in the world’. Similarly, the Canadian Entomologist concluded: ‘Miss Ormerod was one of the most remarkable women of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and did more than any one else in the British Isles to further the interests of farmers, fruit-growers and gardeners, by making known to them methods for controlling and subduing their multiform insect pests. Her labours were unwearied and unselfish; she received no remuneration for her services . . .’ ‘So passed away a life of altruism,’ observed the Entomologist.1 An examination of the life and career of Eleanor Ormerod provides insight into the place of women in Victorian society and their participation in the making of science. Ormerod, a wealthy spinster, achieved notoriety in late nineteenth-century Britain as an ‘economic’ – or applied – entomologist. She was an expert scientist, who placed her knowledge

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Figure 8.1 ‘Pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green’: Eleanor A. Ormerod, a wealthy unmarried woman, became Britain’s de facto government entomologist in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

of insects at the service of agricultural applications. A review of her posthumously published Autobiography and Correspondence compared her to Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville, the first female honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. But recent scholarship on the history of women in science suggests that gender alone represents an inadequate source of comparison. Full and rounded biographical studies are required in order to appreciate the place of women in the making of science and in scientific communities. Ormerod’s scientific career, for instance, differed markedly from that of Herschel or Somerville. Unlike for them, the emotional or intellectual support of a brother, husband or other male family relation made no considerable contribution to her commitment to her specialist study of science. Similarly, her life as a spinster offered no positive proof for Frances Power Cobbe’s dictum that

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independent women showed a tendency with age to become ‘women’s rights women’. Ormerod publicly accepted or internalized the dominant, masculine ideology of science, and, as her obituaries attest, she achieved success.2 Her obituaries indicate ‘success’ as measured by the standards of the scientific community. She publicly accepted these male standards and rebuffed women’s attempts to make her a model for feminist causes. But within the private domestic sphere, where she produced all of her work, she carefully guarded against any male intrusions. For most of her active career in entomology, Ormerod shared a house with her older sister, Georgiana, and a ‘female amanuensis’ (figure 8.2). As a spinster living under these domestic arrangements, she escaped some of the trappings of the sexual division of labour that underpinned the ideology of separate spheres. Moreover, as a wealthy, socially conservative woman, she did not suffer from the prejudice faced by working-class women. Nature dubbed her ‘a lady entomologist’ and thereby affirmed her femininity as a member of the gentry and as a scientist. For similar reasons, obituarists celebrated her altruism as much as her contributions to science. But recent literature on class and race in women’s history has demonstrated that the prescriptive ideal of womanhood and the reality of women’s experiences were complex and multifaceted. Regardless of class, for instance, contemporary racial ideology relegated all women to one of the ‘lowest rungs on the social ladder’. Moreover, Ormerod’s status as a spinster rendered her sexually suspect beyond the bounds of institutions – patriarchal household, religious or philanthropic sisterhoods – which guarded accepted ideologies of feminine purity.3 Eleanor Ormerod was socially marginalized because of her gender. This chapter explores the ways in which a woman could employ science to achieve social legitimacy and prestige. Moreover, it argues that Ormerod’s marginalization was fundamental to her development of a new specialty – economic entomology – which lay on the borderlands of natural and agricultural science. Although the term ‘economic entomology’ had been used interchangeably with agricultural entomology before Ormerod, she was the person most responsible for defining the discipline in Britain; and, as the short title of her autobiography indicated, her identity became Eleanor Ormerod, L.L.D. Economic Entomologist. Her public acceptance and dissemination of a masculine ideology of science did not negate her gender consciousness. An analysis of her life and career demonstrates the manner

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in which a woman confronted the prescriptive ideal of a spinster. Her wealth permitted her to disseminate the fruits of her entomological knowledge without remuneration. She thereby nurtured a public career as a technological scientist under the guise of accepted feminine philanthropy. But when some of her entomological campaigns clashed with accepted notions of feminine purity, she shielded herself behind her professional status. The Spinster Entomologist Born 11 May 1828, Eleanor Anne Ormerod came to maturity at a time when the commentators of genteel Victorian society confronted a perceived increase in the number of unmarried women. Harriet Martineau, the renowned Radical, raised the alarm with an article that appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1859. She employed the census statistics for 1851 to draw attention to the large disproportion between the sexes: in excess of half a million ‘redundant’ women faced no hope of marriage. A plethora of articles and pamphlets addressing the ‘spinster problem’ appeared in the 1850s and 1860s. In a society faced with the stormy vicissitudes of rapid social and economic change, well defined ideological parameters and social institutions were the anchors of stability. A doctrine which relegated woman to the private sphere and left man to the public sphere was increasingly espoused after the mid-eighteenth century. Falling beyond the veil of marriage and the patriarchal household, the spinster represented a challenge to the Victorian ideal of domesticity and dependence.4 At a time when social commentators and early feminists alike grappled with the redefinition of woman’s role in society, Eleanor Ormerod charted a unique course. According to her own account, she began her intensive study of entomology in 1852. At twenty-four, she would not have faced the inevitable prospect of spinsterhood through the constraints of age. Although commentators depicted old maids in their mid-twenties and thirties, in reality the age of marriage in Victorian Britain was highly dispersed. But Ormerod faced further delimiting factors that made marriage an unlikely eventuality. Born into a wealthy county family, her sole avenue to marriage would have been through the increasingly rigid rites of upper-class ‘society’. Ironically, society authors most often employed the metaphor of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis to describe a girl’s transition into society: Ormerod never emerged, as such. Although her father, George Ormerod, attended to his

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duties as magistrate for the counties of Cheshire, Gloucester and Monmouth, he cared little for ‘society’. An amateur historian, he occupied himself with ‘literary and topographical’ interests and led a reclusive life. This decision bore important repercussions for the entire family: none of his three daughters, and only three of his seven sons married.5 Deprived of access to ‘society’, Eleanor Ormerod, like countless other unmarried women of her class, lacked any alternative institution to escape the strict family discipline. Like Constance Maynard (1849–1935), a pioneer in higher education, Ormerod must have sought out the far reaches of the family estate just to attain privacy, and to flee the autocratic rule of her father. She spent more than half of her life on her father’s 800-acre estate in Gloucestershire, between the Severn and Wye rivers. Natural history pursuits lent purpose to her flights for privacy. In March 1852, her studies became more specialized when she embarked upon a study of the Manual of British Coleoptera or Beetles (1839) by James F. Stephens (1792–1852). Presciently, she began by dissecting her arthropodal prey and learning the intricacies of its anatomy.6 The precipitating event that shot Ormerod beyond the confines of familial privacy was the death of her father in 1873. She was among one of the fortunate 20 per cent of Victorian spinsters supported in later life by some form of inheritance. Upon the break-up of the family home, she and her older sister Georgiana removed themselves to Torquay to be near an uncle. After three years, the two sisters moved to a home of their own at Spring Grove, Iselworth, where they could be closer to London, and to Joseph D. Hooker, Director of Kew Gardens, and his wife. Until she and her sister made their final move to Torrington House, St Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1887, Ormerod exploited her intimacy with the Hookers to continue her entomological investigations in the gardens at Kew.7 A half century earlier, Britain’s ‘queen of science’, Mary Somerville, required the independence and freedom of widowhood and an inheritance before she could seriously devote herself to her mathematical studies. Ormerod’s entomological contributions to a wider audience began after the death of her mother in 1860, and in the final years of her father’s protracted illness. Ormerod responded to a plea from the Royal Horticultural Society and the Science and Art Department in 1868. Through the pages of the Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, these two organizations requested aid in the creation of a collection illustrative of insects baneful and beneficial to British agriculturists and

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horticulturists. For approximately ten years, Ormerod submitted insect specimens which either she or the estate’s agricultural labourers had procured. This activity, however, was merely a prelude to her later efforts. Her entomological endeavours ‘were not approved of nor taken seriously by some of her elders, and could not have been carried out until after the break up of the home on the death of Mr. Ormerod’.8 In Victorian England, marriage was a social definition of singular importance for women. In the late nineteenth century, the proportion of women who were, or had been, married was about 88 per cent. Pruned for the narrow confines of the private and personal spheres, a girl’s education was, therefore, usually restricted to the honing of talents – drawing, music, foreign languages – necessary for the society setting. ‘The wealthiest class very generally do not send their daughters to school,’ reported the Schools Enquiry Commission in 1867. Eleanor Ormerod was no exception. She received instruction from her mother at home while her brothers enjoyed the musings of Thomas Arnold at Rugby. Moreover, although the Ormerod family participated little in society rounds, they restricted their daughters’ educational curricula to society skills – moral precepts, French, drawing and music.9 Single women confronted the plight of ideological and economic marginality in mid-Victorian Britain. Spinsterhood was referred to as ‘failure in business’ among the middle classes. As the number of spinsters grew, ideologues and social commentators sought new roles for them that would not rupture the underpinnings of the division of the sexes. Early feminist Anna Jameson offered a solution in two private lectures, delivered in 1855 and 1856. Women, she suggested, could bring the domestic world into the public sphere. By helping the sick and weak, they could devote their natural, maternal skills to the regeneration of society. Institutional communities, such as sisterhoods, and roles such as deaconesses offered alternatives to the patriarchal household and, at the same time, permitted single women to undertake a nurturing, public role. Their feminine purity intact, single women could enter new forms of work.10 When taken in this historical context, the achievements of Eleanor Ormerod become remarkable. In 1892, the wealthy philanthropist and anti-vivisectionist Baroness Burdett-Coutts wrote to Ormerod and requested an account of the ‘genesis of her organization’. Proudly bemused, she confided to a correspondent, ‘What could I say? There is

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not a woman but myself and my sister in it.’ Eleanor Ormerod was of the same ‘heroic generation’ as Florence Nightingale. Both were exceptional Victorian women who placed their faith in individual efforts and had no time for vocal feminist causes. After Ormerod delivered a paper on ‘Injurious Insects’ at the Richmond Athenaeum in March 1882, Lydia Becker (1827–90) – an accomplished botanist, the first provincial school board woman and a vocal proponent of feminism – publicly praised Ormerod as ‘proof of how much a woman could do without the help of man’. Ormerod deftly responded that she relied upon the generosity and support of men to accomplish her tasks.11 In 1877, with the freedom of spinsterhood and the independence of an inheritance, Eleanor Ormerod ‘captured an unclaimed area’ upon which she built a public career. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there were numerous calls for the creation of a government entomologist in Britain. Before the Select Committee on Wild Birds Protection (1873), entomologist Albert Müller and ornithologist C. O. Groom Napier invoked the example set by the United States in a call for the establishment of a British government entomologist. In 1876, several articles in The Times highlighted government-sponsored economic entomology in the USA and in France, and concluded: ‘What course will be followed in England has not yet been announced.’ At the behest of Dr Maxwell Masters, editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, and John Chalmers Morton, editor of the Agricultural Gazette, Eleanor Ormerod responded to the calls for an entomologist and issued a short, seven-page pamphlet, entitled Notes for Observations of Injurious Insects, in early 1877.12 Notes for Observations of Injurious Insects was, in fact, a questionnaire. As such, it harkened back to at least the seventeenth century. In 1665, for instance, the Royal Society’s ‘Georgical Committee’ issued its ‘Enquiries’. By the nineteenth century, the questionnaire had become part of the standard methodological tradition within natural history. When Dawson Turner and Lewis Weston Dillwyn needed information for their Botanist’s Guide (1805), they circulated a four-page questionnaire throughout the country. George Greenough and Arthur Aikin distributed their Geological Inquiries to members of the newly established Geological Society in 1807. Charles Darwin, in 1839, distributed his Questions on the Breeding of Animals in an early, unsuccessful attempt to gather information on artificial selection. With these models before her, Eleanor Ormerod began to build a career in entomological network research. In the autumn of 1877,

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b a Figure 8.2 Miss Ormerods: This is the calling card of Eleanor Ormerod and her sister, Georgiana, from about 1877. The reverse side of the card carries a depiction of the Colorado beetle. Eleanor Ormerod launched her career as unofficial government entomologist in the wake of fear of an imminent invasion of the Colorado beetle.

she published and distributed a compilation of the information she had gleaned in the form of her first semi-official annual report. The reports, which ran continuously until 1900, were sold for 1s 6d. Because this price was below the cost of production, Ormerod retained the respectability of a gentlewoman, through the pretext of philanthropic work, and at the same time nurtured a publicly visible career.13 Significantly, eminent agriculturists and horticulturists initiated Ormerod’s first public foray into the field of economic entomology. The ‘unclaimed area’ that a socially marginalized person could capture was the borderland between natural and agricultural science. The greatest representative of metropolitan entomological science – the Entomological Society of London – played only an incidental role in the promotion of economic entomology. Andrew Murray, the most active exponent of economic entomology in the years surrounding the Colorado beetle scare of the 1870s, rarely attended Entomological Society meetings. John Curtis, the ‘father of economic entomology’, joined the Entomological Society after his reputation had already been made, and quickly resigned. And Eleanor Ormerod, who probably did more than any other individual to promote economic entomology in Britain, placed little faith in the Entomological Society of London because it had ‘no special bias towards applied Entomology’.14

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Economic Entomology Although little studied by entomologists before Ormerod took up the subject, economic entomology could trace its roots back to both agricultural improvement and changes in gardening practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The relationship between gardening and economic entomology deserves attention because it provided a possible precedent for Ormerod’s chosen field of study. A shift in gardening aesthetics in the early nineteenth century generated interest in economic entomology. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the prevailing aesthetic dictated that the garden should represent nature, devoid of any evidence of man. But like biological science, which began to concern itself with the reduction of organisms to their elemental parts, gardening aesthetics moved from a holistic concept of the landscape to consideration of a series of autonomous gardens – the kitchen garden, the flower garden, the cottage garden. An emergent class of gardeners who addressed issues of training, education, employment and status for their vocation emphasized the artificiality of cultivation. They linked the garden as artifice to technical knowledge and skill in order to promote their expertise. Humphry Repton, therefore, challenged the eighteenth-century predominance of the ‘picturesque’. Functionalism, he argued, rather than imitation of the visual arts, should be the standard for gardening. The garden should reflect man-made neatness rather than natural disorder. In 1832, John Claudius Loudon dubbed this new aesthetic the ‘gardenesque’.15 Joshua Major, landscape gardener and designer of the Manchester Parks, was a strong proponent of the new gardening aesthetic. As a disciple of Repton, he declared: But, because these picturesque enthusiasts would have us copy nature in her rudeness, are we to be deprived of the advantages of art to improve her? Is the gem to remain unpolished because it is a gem withal? Are we not to alter the form of the materials which she gives us to our ideas of taste and use? Are we not to interfere, screen, divert, and convert, the raw material of the soil into the comfort of cultivation? Yes, we may say . . . One manifestation of Major’s commitment to the notion of ‘clean as a drawing room’ was the appearance of his A Treatise on the Insects Most

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Prevalent on Fruit Trees, and Garden Produce in 1829. He suggested traps, hand picking and the application of lime as interventionist measures against insect pests.16 J. O. Westwood forged a bridge between entomologists and gardeners. In 1834, a programmatic paper which he had read before the Entomological Society appeared in J. C. Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History. Openly praising an earlier economic entomologist, ‘Rusticus’, Westwood acknowledged possible natural theological limitations on the application of entomological knowledge. Science, for instance, might discover means of vanquishing insect vermin, but its precocious disregard for the ‘designs of Providence’ might simply magnify the attendant evil. Westwood, however, conceded the possible necessity of remedial measures, but these, he claimed, were the province of the agricultural scientist. First and foremost, the entomologist’s duty was to delineate accurately the habits and life history of the offending insect so that the agriculturist could effectively form a plan of attack.17 Westwood actively participated in such a division of labour in 1840. He supplied entomological annotations for the English translation by Jane and Mary Loudon (J. C. Loudon’s sisters) of Austrian V. Köllar’s Treatise on Insects Injurious to Gardeners, Foresters and Farmers. Westwood’s publishing venture with the Loudon sisters established an important precedent for Eleanor Ormerod, who later looked to Westwood as her mentor. The Loudons, in fact, represented an affirmation of the accepted role of women in gardening. The garden was, after all, an extension of the household. But traditionally, the woman’s sphere only encompassed the kitchen garden; orchards and fruit were the man’s domain. Ormerod, however, did not promote herself as a gardener: she was intent on gaining recognition as a technological scientist. Nevertheless, she described herself as the domestic helpmate to the entomological and agricultural communities, and thereby applied her feminine role to the ‘house of life’.18 Ormerod instructed: ‘Our course is not to pick up a few insects, and by wearisome research find whether they do us any harm but the reverse. We find the harm being done, and thus we are securely led to the causes of the mischief.’ Launching her career in the aftermath of the Colorado beetle scare, insects as ‘pests’ lay at the heart of Ormerod’s definition of economic entomology. The tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica later defined economic entomology as ‘the study of insects based on their relation to man, his domestic animals and his crops, and, in the case of

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those that are injurious, of the practical methods by which they can be prevented from doing harm, or be destroyed when present’.19 Exponents of economic entomology routinely recited the economic losses due to the ravages of insects such as the phylloxera aphid, the Colorado beetle, the ox-warble fly, the codling moth and the turnip flea. Reluctant to focus strictly on pests, they also included within their field of study insects which produced useful items: beeswax and honey, silk, shellac, medicines and dyes. Economic entomology constituted the control or eradication of insects for the economic gain of humanity.20 Now ‘Everybody Farms’ Ormerod explicitly distanced herself from the nineteenth-century natural history tradition of collection and classification. The knowledge of insect habits and structures applied to the control and reduction of insect depredation of agricultural and horticultural crops was her stated concern. She thereby allied herself with an emergent group of agriculturists who were intent upon using science for purposes of social mobility or for the affirmation of cultural hegemony. Although the roots of this ideology of agricultural science lay in the late eighteenth century, science was not firmly wedded to agriculture until the Victorian era. Justus Liebig’s Organic Chemistry and its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (1840) played a central role in the institutionalization of agricultural science. The debate that Leibig spawned over the origins and functions of nitrogen in plants created what he termed ‘rational agriculture’. By this, he meant that the role of minerals in plant nutrition necessitated scientific analyses of fertilizers and soils by chemists: farmers could no longer rely on their own trial-and-error fertilizing. This generated a demand for trained chemists, and a call for the provision of higher agricultural education. In the 1840s, promoters of agricultural education presented it as a salve for Malthusian fears for feeding a burgeoning population; and as a viable alternative to agricultural protection.21 Armed with – and emboldened by – Liebig’s Organic Chemistry, a new generation of landed gentry and aristocracy adopted the ideology of agricultural science as part of the new spirit of professionalism. Burdened with the increasing complexity and volume of government and landed estate business, and infused with the Clapham Sect’s moral solemnity, the aristocracy subsumed the professional commitment to ‘laborious activity’ in an

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effort to maintain their social leadership. By 1849, the Quarterly Review declared: ‘In England everybody farms.’ Landowners looked to artificial manures and new drainage techniques to place them at the forefront of agricultural progress with the return of prosperity in the late 1840s.22 One of the most prominent manifestations of the new and serious commitment to agricultural science was the establishment of the English Agricultural Society (the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) after 1840) in 1838. As a prelude to this, Henry Handley, Member of Parliament for Lincolnshire, published his influential Letter to Earl Spencer . . . on the formation of a National Agricultural Institution. The substance of Handley’s Letter bears a striking resemblance to the ideology of science that sustained the agricultural improvers of the late eighteenth century. Handley asserted that agriculture must follow the lead of enterprising manufacturers, and apply science and capital to improvements: Science – by which is to be understood, that knowledge which is founded upon the principles of nature, illustrated by demonstration – is the pilot that must steer us into these hitherto imperfectly explored regions, where I am well convinced a mine of wealth is still in store for British agriculture. Chemistry, Botany, Entomology, Mechanics, require but to be invited, to yield us a harvest of valuable information to guide and warn us. (emphasis added) With its motto – ‘Science with Practice’ – the resultant RASE was a triumph for the Baconian technological conception of science. Among its objectives were ‘to encourage men of science in their attention to the improvement of agricultural implements . . . the application of chemistry to the general purposes of agriculture, the destruction of insects injurious to vegetable life, and the eradication of weeds’.23 John Curtis, who was desperate to earn a living as an entomologist, exploited the new commitment to agricultural science, and forged a path that Ormerod could later follow. Born in Norwich in 1791, he had forsaken a career in law to pursue a vocation in entomology. Through his association with wealthy amateur entomologist Simon Wilkin, Curtis met William Kirby, who employed him to produce some of the engravings for the Introduction to Entomology, and who introduced him to Joseph Banks and the scientific circles of London in 1819. Curtis subsequently chose to pursue a career as a writer, illustrator and as a commissioned entomological agent

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for wealthy patrons such as James Charles Dale. In 1824, Curtis embarked upon the publication of a collector’s work entitled, British Entomology, Being Illustrations and Descriptions of the Genera of Insects found in Great Britain and Ireland. Illustrated and written by Curtis, this serial publication ran to a total of 193 issues, and took fifteen years to complete. It left him a bitter and financially impoverished man. Upon his failure to gain a position at the British Museum in 1840, he spitefully decried: ‘I am sick of London & of Entomologists with a few exceptions, but love the Science as much as ever. . . . If I could afford it I would pile up my 3000£’s worth of stock [of British Entomology] in the Garden & set fire to it & then People would know the value of it.’ In the same letter, he announced his intention to take up economic entomology. Curtis’s pioneering efforts in economic entomology must be seen in this context. In a sense, he forsook metropolitan entomological science, and turned to agriculturists for support and legitimation.24 John Lindley may have been instrumental in Curtis’s reorientation. Lindley and Joseph Paxton began publication of the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1841. To this periodical, John Curtis submitted numerous articles on economic entomology between 1841 and 1855, under the pseudonym ‘Ruricola’. The Royal Agricultural Society also commissioned him to contribute articles on injurious insects to its journal in 1841. The series ran until 1857, and culminated in the publication of Curtis’s Farm Insects in 1860. Curtis explained to Dale in 1841: ‘engaged as I am with two periodicals besides many other affairs . . . my hands are pretty full of what must be done to keep the Wolf from the door.’ The following year, Prime Minister Robert Peel awarded Curtis a civil list pension of £100 a year. Because Peel was committed to both agricultural improvement and the extension of government provision for science, his acknowledgement of Curtis was a significant harbinger of the rebirth of an ideology of agricultural science. In marked contrast to the late eighteenth century, however, promoters of agricultural science now linked it to the free trade lobby. For Curtis, of course, it was a vehicle of economic and social mobility.25 Following in Curtis’s footsteps, Ormerod constructed a large portion of her career upon an association with the Royal Agricultural Society. As a woman, however, she faced obstacles unknown to her predecessor and to her colleagues. In the absence of a formalized system of institutions which determined career patterns, the sanction of voluntary institutions was particularly important for the budding, nineteenth-century British career scientist. In May 1882, Eleanor Ormerod became Honorary

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Consulting Entomologist to the RASE. This followed her election to the Entomological Society of London in 1878, and the publication of five annual reports, a Manual of Injurious Insects, with Methods of Prevention and Remedy (1881), and a special report on the turnip fly (1882). As Honorary Consulting Entomologist, she prepared annual and periodic monthly reports, and responded to queries from members. She declined the RASE’s offer to receive any remuneration for her work.26 Ormerod’s national and international reputation was largely based on her annual reports, which had arisen in response to unsuccessful calls for the creation of a government-funded agricultural entomologist. She, therefore, considered herself the de facto government entomologist. Consequently, when another insect crisis pushed the government towards formal support for entomology, Ormerod fought to affirm both her independence and her pre-eminence in the field. She refused to be subordinated to a male botanist. Economic entomology found its way into the re-established Board of Agriculture through the agency of botanist Charles Whitehead. In 1884, he proposed that reports on injurious insects should be published by the Agricultural Department. Ormerod assisted Whitehead with this government entomological work, but fractures began to appear in this partnership in 1886–7 when fear of an invasion of a familiar insect foe gripped the country. Almost exactly a hundred years after Joseph Banks contemplated the possible consequences of an exogenous attack of the Hessian fly, British farmers reported the presence of the insect among their crops. As her contemporaries later noted, Ormerod was ‘strong-minded, selfconfident, [and] possessed of untiring energy’. She soon reminded her readers that she was first in the field when this crisis presented itself. Mr Palmer, of Revell’s Hall near Hertford, raised the alarm in July 1886 when he communicated to Ormerod the discovery of strange, darkcoloured objects on the stems of his barley and wheat. After inspecting the fields, she speculated that the foreign objects were the pupae of the Hessian fly. The following month, the Agricultural Department of the Privy Council issued circulars, with suggestions from Whitehead, to the local authorities of Essex and Hertfordshire. In September, the government extended the distribution of this information to the local authorities of every county in Great Britain. Whereas in 1788 the government responded to fears of the Hessian fly with a protectionist Order, in 1886–7 the government limited its actions to the distribution of information. ‘All

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that can be done’, asserted W. H. Smith, ‘must be done by the individuals themselves by the exercise of the greatest possible vigilance.’27 Ormerod struggled to realize her professional aspirations as the government became involved in initiatives in economic entomology. In 1887, she issued her own report on the Hessian fly as a direct response to government work on the subject. She explained to Westwood that it was ‘an endeavour to record what did happen last season’. In the same year, the government had appointed a two-man commission of enquiry to investigate the Hessian fly: Charles Whitehead and Charles Wing Gray had duly toured the country before presenting their report.28 As Whitehead later noted, this report ‘added no new features or suggestions’ to his previous contributions. But the choice of Gray, a tenant farmer and Conservative Member of Parliament for Maldon, Essex, was an indication of the government’s drift towards ministerial responsibility for agriculture. Although there had been calls for the creation of a minister of commerce and agriculture in 1879, 1881 and 1887, the government did not establish the Board of Agriculture until 1889. Gray actively lobbied in support of the Board of Agriculture Act. The Hessian fly pushed the government towards technocratic management of the nation’s agriculture, yet Eleanor Ormerod found her expertise ignored in favour of two lesser qualified men. Politics, science and gender converged and frustrated the scientific ambitions of a woman.29 Upon the formal creation of the Board of Agriculture, Whitehead received the paid position of Agricultural Adviser. Within two years of the appointment, Ormerod ceased her ‘underground (unacknowledged) Government work’. She explained: I regretted very much indeed not continuing help I could give to Mr. Whitehead about his entomological Government work, but it was too severe a task, and it prevented my giving proper attention to my own, and likewise when the post of Agricultural Adviser was avowedly a paid one, I felt, and my friends felt, that if aid were needed it ought to be on a business footing and obtained from professional helpers. Ormerod’s entomological work was not a form of disinterested philanthropy, and she was not interested in being the private helpmate of a male agriculturist.30 Shortly after her withdrawal of assistance from Whitehead’s government work, Ormerod once again declared her defiant independence.

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When the diamond-back moth threatened the turnip and swede crops of Great Britain, the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society responded with a resolution to lend its assistance and its officials to a Board of Agriculture enquiry. Charles Whitehead, a member of the Seeds and Plant Diseases Committee of the RASE, vocally supported this resolution: Eleanor Ormerod threatened to resign over it. Clearly, she felt that the RASE resolution of 29 July 1891 was an attempt to force her back into the service of the Board of Agriculture. Entomological work on the diamondback moth was not at issue. Ormerod had already produced an extensive report on the subject for the RASE. Status and recognition were the crux of her grievances. She refused to permit a negative, servile interpretation of her honorary status. Her vocal refusal to participate in a Board of Agriculture enquiry was an exercise of her professional independence.31 Although the rift was mended, Ormerod resigned from the RASE in July of the following year under the pretext of poor health. In August 1892, she confided to Robert Wallace: Who will they get to take my place [at the Royal]? It seems to me a great pity that there is not a properly paid and competent officer for the Board of Agriculture and R.A.S.E. I am safe in saying this, for I never intend to take office again, not for any amount of money that could be offered, neither do I mean to do the work of Government or Society under the polite name of ‘kindly co-operating’. Like H. C. Watson, Distributor for the Botanical Society of London in the 1840s, Eleanor Ormerod resigned her unofficial position when the rest of the society failed to accord her due respect. Ormerod was torn between conflicting values. As a member of the landed gentry, she realized that receipt of money would taint her work. As a woman bent on a scientific career, she also realized that a fee conferred recognition of her scientific expertise. She was content to remain honorary as long as she received appropriate respect as an acknowledged scientist.32 Claiming a Place for Insects By the strictest attribute-oriented definition, Ormerod was not a professional. She was not a member of a self-conscious, internally regulated group; nor did she derive an income from the sale of elite knowledge

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or skills. Self-taught in entomology, and completely financed from landed wealth, Eleanor Ormerod might, alternatively, fall within the rubric of Roy Porter’s careerist ‘gentleman’ amateur. But Ormerod eschewed the amateur ethos: she clearly identified with the professional ethos that pervaded the scientific community in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. She actively participated in the lobby for scientific and technical education and promoted the place of the expert or specialist in government.33 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the growth of higher agricultural education was part of the development of professional technical training. With a son attending the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester (established 1845), Charles Dickens announced in 1868: That part of the holding of a farmer or landowner which pays best for the cultivation is the small estate within the ring fence of his skull. . . . The farmer’s occupation is the oldest, the most necessary, and, when rightly pursued, one of the worthiest a man can follow. Of late years it has risen to the dignity of a liberal profession, and the young Englishman may go through part of his special training for it in a well appointed college. Eleanor Ormerod played a pioneering role in the institutionalization of agricultural entomology. She actively promoted the now acknowledged standard apparatus of a scientific discipline: lectures, publications, and centres of specialist education. She delivered six lectures on economic entomology at the Royal Agricultural College between October 1881 and June 1884. She contributed to the dissemination of economic entomology among schoolteachers by delivering ten lectures at South Kensington’s Institute of Agriculture in 1883. The latter effort resulted in the publication of her Guide to Methods of Insect Life (1884), which metamorphosed into A Text-Book of Agricultural Entomology (1892) in the wake of a series of government measures, which provided strong administrative and financial support for agricultural education. In addition, Ormerod contributed ‘suggestions and revisions’ to the relevant parts of William Fream’s Elements of Agriculture (1892), which, in its modern form, remains a standard agricultural textbook to this day. In 1889–90, she established agricultural entomology as a voluntary subject for the Senior Examination of the Royal Agricultural Society, and as a compulsory examination subject at the Royal Agricultural College. And she acted as

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an examiner in agricultural entomology for the University of Edinburgh from 1896 to 1899. Furthermore, she offered the University of Oxford £100 in 1897 as part of an unsuccessful lobby to have agricultural science established as a degree subject. In total, she promulgated the ‘normal science’ of economic entomology in Great Britain.34 An analysis of Eleanor Ormerod’s role in the professionalization of agricultural science confronts an immediate paradox. In the absence of equal efforts to promote education for women, Ormerod’s push for professionalization created opportunities for scientific employment unavailable to her. She was, moreover, aware of her plight. When that leader in agricultural education, the University of Edinburgh, decided to establish a chair in economic entomology in 1889, Ormerod observed: ‘Who ever is to take the position of lecturer? I am complimented by the expression of a wish from the authorities who have the election in hand that I should take it; but then Lady Professors are not admitted in Scotland. . . . I think I could do all that is wanted, but then, oh! Shades of John Knox!’ In this instance, Ormerod had to content herself as the éminence grise. William Fream, of the Downton College of Agriculture, was hired as Steven Lecturer in Economic Entomology at her suggestion. Ormerod’s status as a gentlewoman debarred her from public – that is, paid – work. Although the RASE retained a salaried consulting chemist and consulting botanist, Ormerod’s position was honorary. Her unpaid status was not due to the perceived value of economic entomology. The RASE appointed Cecil Warburton as her successor in 1893, at a salary of £200 per annum.35 Aware of the limitations that womanhood set to her scientific career, Eleanor Ormerod attempted to distance herself publicly from accepted notions of woman. First and foremost, she wanted to be recognized as a professional technological scientist. She achieved her ends by ignoring notions of feminine purity in her pursuit of economic entomology. She thereby allied herself with the male science. She was intensely aware that she might be addressing things unbecoming of a lady writer. Throughout her career, however, she remained rather ambivalent about the limitations imposed by her gender. She publicly rebuffed attempts to make her a model for the feminist cause, and she always acknowledged the support she received from male colleagues, such as J. O. Westwood. She spread her entomological word with an evangelical fervour. Three of her campaigns, in particular, reached a broad audience and attracted controversy. She

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offered published instruction and guidance on the ox-warble fly, Paris green, and the extermination of the house sparrow.36 ‘Unbecoming of a Lady Writer’ Eleanor Ormerod’s first in-depth investigation in 1884 established a common pattern for others that followed. Her chosen subject – the ox-warble fly (Hypoderma bovis) – combined economic urgency for the farming community with material that seemed defiantly to contradict accepted norms of femininity (figure 8.3). The expansion of livestock husbandry and the intensification of production methods helped establish veterinary science as a profession in England. The Royal Veterinary College (established in 1792) and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (established in 1844) were both part of a concerted, self-conscious effort to monitor professional standards. Moreover, the spread of livestock diseases, cattle plague being the most recent (1865–6), brought veterinary matters to the forefront of agricultural concerns. The Board of Agriculture was a direct descendant of the government Veterinary Department.37 As Ormerod realized, a dipteran parasite, by the standards of Victorian ideologues, was hardly appropriate subject matter for feminine consideration. When J. C. Medd approached her to contribute material to the Agricultural Education Committee in 1900, she suggested something devoted to fly attacks on farm stock. She stipulated that the committee should indicate on the published pamphlet that they had requested her to prepare it. This, she maintained, would ‘shield’ her from the imminent accusation that she had tenaciously touched upon ‘what might be called “Veterinary”-things that might involve discussion unbecoming of a lady writer’. Eleanor Ormerod used public sanction and approval to taste the forbidden fruits of professionalism and impurity. The two, of course, were not mutually exclusive.38 In 1890 she reported to the RASE: It is impossible in a wood engraving to convey the loathsome appearance of a maggot-infested hide when the pests are full grown, and showing through or breaking through the coating of their cells filled with putridity. The affected portion of the surface of the carcass commonly called ‘licked beef ’ may be generally described as of a greenish-yellow colour and flabby appearance, with a frothy discharge oozing from the

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 8.3 ‘Unbecoming of a lady writer’: Eleanor Ormerod presented this warbled ox hide to the Hope Collections at the University of Oxford in 1888.

surface after being exposed for some hours to the air, and the jelly-like matter on the surface, which necessarily must be cleared away . . . is a cause of great loss to butchers during the warble season. These were not the reassuring words of feminine purity that would be expected from an unmarried woman.39 Spreading a Pall of Poison Similarly, Ormerod allied herself with North American male economic entomologists to promote the mass application of insecticides in Britain. She thereby defined herself by the standards of masculine science rather than the ideology of separate spheres. Whereas Victorian feminine norms dictated that a woman should nurture and protect life, Ormerod espoused large-scale applications of a potentially lethal poison. In the First Annual Report of the Agricultural Adviser in 1887, Charles Whitehead (and, of course, Eleanor Ormerod) noted that Charles V. Riley, chief entomologist to the US Department of Agriculture, had criticized his British counterparts for their failure to use arsenical mixtures against insect pests of fruit trees. As part of a discussion of Paris green in her annual report for 1889, Ormerod explained: ‘I might almost say that the leading official entomologists of

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Canada and the United States have thought me to blame in not bringing forward here what has been proved there to be of great service by trial of many years, and over an area of thousands of miles.’ She fired off a cablegram to James Fletcher (1852–1908), banker and parliamentary librarian turned Canadian Dominion entomologist, on 28 December of the same year: ‘Is not “Paris-green” the same as “Scheele’s green”, that is, arsenite of Copper, not arseniate? With us arseniate of copper is a bluish powder; please write.’ Within the year, Ormerod had embarked upon the next great crusade of her entomological career – the push for Paris green, a copper acetoarsenite. By her own account, she was driven by her perceived shortcomings as an expert scientist. This public proclamation hid her private concern for her perceived shortcomings as a woman.40 Ormerod’s rise as an economic entomologist coincided with significant changes in Britain’s agriculture that encouraged the application of Paris green. In the depression years of 1873 to 1904, horticulture was one of the few branches of farming to expand its acreage. Large-scale imports of cheap meat and wheat, and the gradual relaxation of taxes on food increased purchasing power across all classes. The resultant low cost of food staples meant that people could partake of a more diverse diet. One manifestation of this was the ‘phenomenal increase in the consumption of fruit’. Whereas the acreage under grains fell by 15 per cent between 1886 and 1914, the acreage under orchards increased from 141,000 acres in 1873 to 237,000 in 1914. Like dairy farming and poultry rearing, market gardening and fruit farming were essential elements in the economic recovery of the agricultural sector.41 A need for an effective insecticide and career ambition inspired Ormerod to endorse Paris green. Entomology and horticulture, out of necessity, enjoy an intimate relationship. The appearance of fruit which are eaten directly, without first being cooked, is very important. Furthermore, an orchard represents a capital-intensive investment, and cannot be ploughed up and replanted in the event of an insect invasion. Consequently, insecticides were embraced in the face of the expansion and intensification of horticulture; and Ormerod’s role as referee between foreign entomologists and British farmers formed the foundation of her expertise.42 Ormerod saw herself as a bridge between scientific knowledge and practical applications. Leading fruit-growers in the Vale of Evesham, where horticulture dominated the local agricultural economy, formed a committee of experiment in February 1890. At their request, Eleanor

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Ormerod became their entomological adviser. In the past, the Toddington fruit-growers had grease-banded their trees or applied paraffin and soft soap solutions to stave off destructive caterpillars and moths. Dissatisfied with their results, they turned to Ormerod for sage advice. She, in turn, referred them to James Fletcher, Dominion entomologist of Canada, who suggested Paris green applications.43 Ormerod was familiar with the success of Paris green long before 1890. Her referral to Fletcher was another calculated move. As a recognized male expert, he was her entrance ticket to her Paris green crusade. As she explained to Fletcher in the autumn of 1890: I always feel, and I try to acknowledge, that the real usefulness of my work is derived from the kind co-operation I am allowed the benefit of. Just look at the Paris-green matter. I quite sheltered myself behind your name as an active referee. The good folks were hard of belief anyhow, but I really doubt if I could have driven the nail home without having you to fall back on. By February 1892, she was proudly composing her own epitaph: Surely it should be recorded of me, ‘SHE INTRODUCED PARIS-GREEN INTO ENGLAND.’ Ormerod, allied with Canadian and American expert advice, implored farmers to undertake large-scale applications of poisonous insecticide.44 Once again, Ormerod eschewed gender stereotypes by identifying herself as a scientific expert. The association of women with arsenic generated considerable anxiety in the Victorian imagination. The extent of the sensational press coverage of the forty women who poisoned their husbands between 1830 and 1900 far exceeded their insignificant numbers. A total of about a thousand domestic poisonings occurred over the same period but the stories of respectable ladies who had fallen from grace held a special fascination: on the one hand, they confirmed negative Victorian stereotypes of women as scheming and secretive; on the other, they vicariously empowered women through tales of triumph over male abuse. Ormerod, a ‘lady’, promoted the use of arsenical insecticides on food crops and thereby conjured up images of a female poisoner. Her science, however, empowered her to challenge any suspicions engendered by her womanhood. She noted that just one man had died from handling Paris green, and that a considerable number of investigations had been

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undertaken in the USA to determine the safest method of application of the insecticide before she began her campaign. These investigations proved that the most common victims of poisoning were bees and cattle rather than humans. Ormerod learned from early reports and duly suggested that Paris green be applied after fruit blossoms had fallen; and that animal stock not be permitted to graze near sprayed trees.45 Her campaign for the use of the insecticide was successful enough for the Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning (1904) to include an investigation of insecticides. The commission found no evidence of human illness from arsenical insecticides. Both in North America and in Great Britain, the medical profession was aware of the toxicity of arsenical compounds. The debate that raged in late nineteenth-century medical circles revolved around the chronic toxicity of arsenic. More specifically, practitioners disagreed about the quantity and frequency of exposure necessary to induce illness and death. Much of the ambivalence stemmed from professional selfinterest. Fowler’s solution, an arsenic-containing patent medicine, was prescribed as a veritable panacea throughout the nineteenth century.46 Ultimately, irresolute medical opinion led to a focus upon acute toxicity and a neglect of chronic toxicity. For the average person, 1.5 to 5 grains of arsenic constitutes a lethal dose. American entomologists discovered spray residues of 0.9 mg of arsenic per apple. Cheered by the knowledge that this amount was well below a lethal dosage, they ignored the fact that it was easily enough to produce chronic illness. Moreover, acceptance of Paris green as an insecticide may have been eased by its ubiquitous presence elsewhere. In the early 1880s, the Medical Society of London compiled a partial list of arsenic-tinted items: wallpaper, candles, book covers, children’s toys, playing cards, lampshades and sweetmeat wrappers were all covered with toxic tints.47 For Ormerod, Paris green imparted the same technical mystique as J. B. Lawes’s extremely successful fertilizer, superphosphate of lime. Furthermore, Paris green required mechanical devices for its application. On 21 March 1891, a contest of sprayers was held at the Crystal Palace, the temple of mid-Victorian science. Reflecting on this event, Ormerod remarked: I am fairly broadcasting the P. G. [Paris green] pamphlets. Many years ago when a railway bridge on a new method of construction was made over the Wye near my old home, the natives were ‘afraid for their

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lives’ to go over it, but the ingenious plan was struck of running any one gratuitously over and back all day long – the trains of trucks were crammed, the people shouted for joy, and the victory was won; and now I am carrying out the same principle. Gentle and simple, wise and very unwise, are wanting Paris-green pamphlets, and I hope that by the sheets of advise &c., that have to be sent accompanying, that the very silliest souls will not do harm; and meanwhile we are getting the subject popularized. Paris green – like the new fertilizers – was the tool of a technological scientist: increased horticultural productivity could be achieved through the rational application of a chemical. After the mid-nineteenth century, the shift away from a sustainable form of mixed farming gained increased momentum under the steam of emergent agricultural science. In her role as expert, Ormerod informed farmers when and how to apply poison safely and effectively. In addition, she provided the name of a supplier – Messrs Blundell & Spence of Hull. Perhaps fittingly, William Spence’s paint and colour-making firm had found an entomological niche: they had become ‘well-known manufacturers and great exporters of Paris-green to the United States of America and Canada’. Ormerod was part of a scientific community that encouraged farmers to redefine themselves as businessmen, who required scientific input, rather than as self-sufficient providers.48 Death to the House Sparrow In the summer of 1897, Eleanor Ormerod entered upon the pièce de résistance of her scientific career. In the name of science, she called for the extermination of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), whose very name elicited images of domesticity. The ‘sparrow question’ involved multifarious scientific and social issues, and was laden with a host of ideological contradictions. Ormerod and a male colleague, W. B. Tegetmeier, sought to attain professional status upon the heads of lifeless sparrows. When Tegetmeier elected to include a pamphlet of hers as an appendix to his book The House Sparrow (The Avian Rat), Ormerod responded: I most truly think it a great distinction that my name should be associated [on the title-page] with that of an Ornithologist of such world-wide reputation as yourself, and as it is your wish I very heartily agree. The

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only alteration I would suggest is that the word ‘Miss’ should be removed. I do not like the word if it is not quite needed; and would it not be well to add a reference to my being an authorised agricultural worker? It may protect me from some ‘mendacities’ . . . On the wings of the sparrow, Eleanor Ormerod sought the status of a professional technological scientist. She perceived her womanhood as an obstruction in her path. Virginia Woolf later quipped: ‘ “Miss” transmits sex: and sex may carry with it an aroma.’49 Ormerod’s campaign to exterminate the house sparrow drew on a long tradition of discontent with the scavenger ways of birds. In 1533, an Act was passed in England ordering parishes to wage war on jackdaws, crows and rooks. A further Act was introduced in 1566 granting bounties, to be paid by churchwardens, on an array of noxious birds and mammals. Throughout the eighteenth century, most parishes had sparrow clubs, which dispensed money for dead birds and eggs. The rate was twopence per dozen in Warwickshire in 1768. By 1870, however, ‘sparrow money’ had almost disappeared from parish accounts. The invective dumped on the house sparrow in the 1890s, however, was decidedly different from most of these antecedent efforts. The single-minded focus on the evil ways of the house sparrow was unique to the 1890s: finches, wood-pigeons, skylarks, rooks and other granivorous birds managed to escape attack.50 The resuscitation of sparrow clubs in the early 1890s undoubtedly had some foundation in the increased presence of birds on farmland. The combined effects of the diminution of woodlands to feed the hungry iron industry, the General Inclosure Act of 1845, developments in gun technology and the growth of urbanization had adverse consequences for Britain’s indigenous bird-life. Many forest species settled into a new habitat created by a network of hedgerows after the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To this day, 80 per cent of Britain’s farmland birds are forest species.51 Changes in the countryside of late nineteenth-century England fostered an increased farmland bird presence. Birds thrive on a mixed arable/livestock farm, where opportunities for sustenance are greatest. Moreover, an inefficient, neglected farm increases feeding opportunities. The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the apogee of high farming in England. And at the heart of high farming lay a mixed system of growing cereals and keeping livestock. Furthermore, the combination

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of bad harvests and a massive collapse in grain prices in the late 1870s resulted in the neglect of many farms. Some were converted to pasture and some just fell hopelessly into rough grazing. While England’s arable farmers probed the depths of agricultural depression, England’s bird-life soared over an almost perfect environment.52 Passerine peregrinations became increasingly troublesome as urbanization impinged upon the agricultural landscape. Completely dependent upon a symbiotic relationship with human beings, the sparrow prefers an urban environment to a rural one. Generally, the house sparrow will not migrate beyond two miles of its breeding grounds. Rural, agricultural areas that border on urban centres, therefore, face the greatest sparrow threat. This was borne out by the evidence brought against the bird in the late nineteenth century. In The House Sparrow (The Avian Rat), W. B. Tegetmeier reported: ‘The vast amount of injury inflicted by the sparrow is recognised by every agriculturist, and more particularly by the allotment holders whose plots are near villages and homesteads. The evil has led to the formation of Sparrow Clubs . . .’ The house sparrow received special criticism because of its ubiquitous presence in rural and urban settlements.53

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 8.4 Exterminate the Sparrow: The house sparrow thrived in the rapidly urbanizing environment of the nineteenth century. Eleanor Ormerod, however, declared it an enemy of agriculture and demanded its extermination.

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For Ormerod and her fellow scientists, familiarity also bred contempt. The ubiquity of the house sparrow ultimately led to a clash between amateur entomologists and expert agriculturists. The Epping and District Sparrow Club, created in 1891, became a model for these re-emergent sparrow clubs. Interestingly, in the same year, townspeople began the popular pastime of bird-feeding. Ornithology, in fact, experienced a renaissance in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Originally, ornithology grew out of the field sports. Late nineteenth-century interest in the subject, however, set the gun down in favour of field glasses. The campaign against the house sparrow was a direct response to the growth of interest in ornithology and protectionism. Emergent expert scientists entreated the general public not to feed breadcrumbs to the bothersome sparrow, because they had empirical evidence that this granivorous bird was a pest. In short, the experts knew best. Eleanor Ormerod beseeched people to reload their dusty guns at a time when they expressed fervour for bird-watching,54 Ormerod’s interest in the house sparrow – and, indeed, her most damning evidence against it – had its origins in American agricultural literature. The United States Department of Agriculture created a Division of Ornithology in 1885. One of the first extensive reports to emanate from the new division was The English Sparrow (Passer domesticus) in North America, Especially in its Relation to Agriculture (1889). Not indigenous to North America, the house sparrow was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century in the hope that it would combat harmful insects. Opinion began to turn against the sparrow in the 1880s. Seven of the states that had eagerly introduced sparrows had enacted laws against them by 1889 (figure 8.5). The case against the sparrow rested on its feeding habits. Careful dissections of their crops by entomologists and ornithologists proved that house sparrows fed primarily upon grain seeds: insects were a negligible part of their diet. Armed with this empirical evidence, American ornithologists demanded the repeal of legislation protecting the sparrow, and they triumphed immediately in several states. Eleanor Ormerod found a success story for technological science which she desired to emulate.55 Ormerod’s demand for the death of the house sparrow conflicted with the dominant ideology of a woman’s role in Victorian society. This was not lost to her opponents. After the publication of her sparrow pamphlet, the Rev. J. E. Walker informed her:

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Figure 8.5 Feathered Foreigner: Ormerod drew much of her evidence against the sparrow from American agricultural literature. The house sparrow was introduced to North America in the mid-nineteenth century. As this illustration from E. T. Seton’s Lives of the Hunted (1901) demonstrates, opinion quickly turned against the non-indigenous ‘English sparrow’ in the USA.

I have read it, and I must confess, the last paragraphs with an increase of pain, for I had hoped that the crusade against God’s sparrows, proclaimed to all and sundry, however cruel and brutal, in the newspaper article might have been only inspired by and not suggested in the pamphlet bearing a lady’s name . . . How far nobler is the crusade against sin and fashion, which are the real and awful causes of misery, suffering and poverty . . . It is the crime of liquor traffic, of legalised betting, etc., etc., that these things induce poverty, wretchedness, disease. I would to God that you, madam, would turn your great talents in the truest interests of the poor against these causes of national loss and misery . . . Walker entreated Ormerod not to steel her compassionate, womanly heart with her scientific studies. Instead, he suggested, she should devote herself to philanthropic works and fulfil her duty as a woman.56 Ormerod’s most vocal opposition came from Edith Carrington. Born into a family of naturalists in 1853, Carrington received her instruction in natural history at the feet of Charles Kingsley. Imbued with a ‘wish for no higher mission than to live and die in the cause of God’s beautiful and sinless mute creatures’, she embarked upon a literary career at the age of thirty-five. The cause of animal welfare was part of a sustained effort

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to extend woman’s role as moral guardian into the public realm in late Victorian Britain. In general, women comprised the majority of the membership of the anti-vivisectionist societies which arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Edith Carrington was a regular contributor to the Animals’ Friend (established 1894) and to the publications of Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League (established 1891): she was an active participant in the protectionist and anti-vivisectionist causes.57 Through the pages of the Animals’ Friend and through her Humanitarian League publications (Spare the Sparrow (1897) and The Farmer and the Birds (1898)), Edith Carrington opposed Eleanor Ormerod with surprisingly refined preservationist arguments. Carrington employed the balance of nature to combat the intervention of man and materialist science. The proliferation of the house sparrow, she maintained, resulted from the destruction of its natural enemies, such as the sparrowhawk. She blamed the game preservation laws for the diminution of the latter’s numbers. Furthermore, she realized that evidence drawn from lands where the sparrow was introduced as a non-indigenous bird was inappropriate invective to bring against it in a native environment. Carrington comprehended the interconnections of nature. She complained that scientists did not ‘sufficiently generalize’: they did not understand that, as the modern ecological dictum states, ‘it is impossible to do one thing only’.58 When Eleanor Ormerod first considered farmland birds in the early 1880s, she opposed interventionist, protectionist impulses by appealing to the balance of nature. With a burgeoning American anti-sparrow literature before her, she modified her position by 1884. She called for direct interventionist action against the sparrow, in the name of ‘a counterbalance – a legal and economic, rather than a natural, balance’. By the late 1890s, Ormerod and her ally W. B. Tegetmeier ignored the preservationist argument. Tegetmeier dismissed Carrington and other opponents as scientifically inaccurate. Dissections of sparrow crops proved conclusively that this bird fed upon the grain of man, and that it did not destroy injurious insects. Tegetmeier argued: The only well-known authors who have written in defence of the sparrow are two writers of popular works on natural history, but whose compilations are not recognised by any naturalists as those of competent observers. I mean the Rev. J. G. Wood and the Rev. F. O. Morris. The works of both these writers are amusing and adapted

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to please popular taste; but it would be difficult to find any books on natural history containing more inaccuracies, or which are more destitute of any evidence of practical observation. Ormerod and Tegetmeier represented the new empirical science bent upon the dissection of nature’s anatomy. As such, they rejected the natural theology of the Rev. J. G. Wood, the Rev. F. O. Morris and other naturalists of the early nineteenth century.59 Ormerod and Tegetmeier ignored field observation evidence – normally, the lifeblood of Ormerod’s annual reports – on the grounds that it was the inaccurate work of amateurs. In the survey Ormerod made in 1891, she received comment upon the house sparrow from seven farmers who had witnessed the habits of the bird: four thought that the sparrow was beneficial, and three thought that it was baneful to agricultural crops. Similarly, the US commission on ‘The English Sparrow in North America’ received 307 reports in favour of the bird, and 265 reports opposed to it. Primarily, Tegetmeier and Ormerod used the ‘sparrow question’ to bolster their reputations as recognised experts.60 Ormerod’s clash with Edith Carrington carries resonance within the historiography of science and suggests an inauspicious ecological legacy. Feminist historians have sought evidence of a female epistemology of science – a woman’s way of making scientific knowledge. Some have argued that the mechanization of the world-view, as ushered in by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, was symptomatic of broader changes in gender assumptions and the ideology of sexuality. According to this account, ancient organic, feminine conceptions of a vital and sensitive nature were replaced by a masculine view of nature as inert and passive and, therefore, subject to manipulation and exploitation. This change was part of the shift to a capitalist mode of production that also included the restriction of woman’s productive and reproductive roles to the domestic sphere. Within this schema, Ormerod seemed to perpetuate a masculine, reductionist view of nature: one bent on the progressive scientific management of agriculture for economic gain. In contrast, Carrington implored her readers to appreciate a holistic view of the natural world, and for humanity to intervene in natural processes as stewards rather than dominators. She instructed farmers to respond to pests in moderation and with ‘natural rather than artificial remedies’. In this respect, she was affirming nineteenth-century farming practices:

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‘Victorian and Edwardian arable agriculture remained “ecologically benign”.’61 Ormerod and Carrington represented different ecological visions, but neither can be exclusively linked to a female epistemology. Carrington appealed to an older natural theological tradition, but still deferred to male authorities. Canon Tristram, for instance, provided the preface to her Farmer and the Birds. This natural theological tradition did not have its roots in a female epistemology, but, as the comments of the Rev. Walker illustrated, its strong moral and religious grounding was increasingly associated with sentimental women. H. G. Wells, therefore, chastised Carrington for ‘hiding nature’s cruelty to children’.62 Ormerod was part of a trend which yoked science to the intensification of agricultural production. Her call for a legal and economic, rather than a natural, balance of nature carried resonances of the early nineteenthcentury shift from a Christian to a secular political economy. Whereas Carrington drew on an earlier natural theological tradition to implore respect for all God’s creatures, Ormerod wielded her scientific expertise to insist upon their extermination. The progressive scientific management of agriculture for the purpose of increased yields had its roots in the seventeenth century but did not begin in earnest until the midnineteenth century. Moreover, this shift from good husbandry to sciencebased agribusiness did not have a significant impact on British arable farming until after the introduction of the Haber-Bosch process for modern nitrogen fertilizer production in the opening decades of the twentieth century. But Ormerod contributed to this trend. Despite the praise that she received from contemporary agricultural scientists, she did not save a nation from agricultural dearth: she introduced Britain to the principles of scientific pest control, and to an ideology of agricultural science that espoused maximum economic efficiency.63 A Beneficent Demeter? On 14 April 1900, Eleanor Ormerod became the first female recipient of an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Edinburgh. At the presentation ceremony, university officials eulogized her ‘as the protectress of agriculture and the fruits of the earth – a beneficent Demeter of the nineteenth century’. In receiving the official recognition that she so desperately craved, the ‘spinster’ Ormerod listened attentively as she was

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equated with a goddess of fertility and guardian of marriage. This description belied the ideological conflicts which beset her scientific career. Reference to Demeter conjured up the arcadian conception of nature, in an attempt to locate Ormerod’s science in the legitimate feminine sphere. In the throes of massive economic, social and ecological upheavals, Victorian ideologues constructed an increasingly rigid model of womanhood, based upon the virtues of domesticity and dependence. Ormerod allied herself with expert entomologists, ornithologists and veterinary scientists as part of her effort to gain the status and recognition of a specialized scientist. She often pursued this work to the exclusion of accepted feminine philanthropic roles. In direct contradiction to the image of the pure spinster, she commended farmers to squeeze parasitic flies from warbled flesh, and to spread the pall of Paris green over Eden’s orchards. The house sparrow, whose very name conjured up images of domesticity, received the death sentence from her pen. Through the agency of the warble fly, Paris green and the house sparrow, she achieved her goal.64 Seventeen years before she loaded her pockets with stones and waded into the River Ouse, Virginia Woolf turned her pen towards the production of a short, semi-fictional biography of ‘Miss Ormerod’. Woolf ’s inspiration was the autobiography of Eleanor Ormerod, which had been published twenty years earlier. Dipping in and out of it, she loaded her pages with sometimes poignant and always insightful episodes: from the oppressive atmosphere of a severely patriarchal home to the socially alienating effects of a vocation in agricultural science. Ormerod’s final words – ‘Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!’ – acknowledged the inevitable persistence of insects, the subjects of her life’s work. In contrast, Woolf ’s final words on Ormerod pointed to a more circumscribed legacy for the woman herself: ‘Old Miss Ormerod is dead,’ said Mr Drummond, opening The Times on Saturday, July 20th, 1901. ‘Old Miss Ormerod?’ asked Mrs Drummond.65 Issues of gender lurk just below the surface of Woolf ’s biographical story: they define ‘Miss Ormerod’ in both life and death. But like the complexities of nature, the complexities of history provide a more fulsome appreciation of Ormerod.

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Eleanor Ormerod was a bridge between the mid-century publicist science of John Curtis and late nineteenth-century institutionalized agricultural science. Through her network research, her lectures and her publications, she established a model for economic entomology in governmental and commercial initiatives in Great Britain. Moreover, the versatility of her correspondence networks allowed her to engage in colonial entomological research without ever leaving the country. For instance, she became involved with South African economic entomology when S. D. Bairstow contacted her to identify the Australian Bug (the Cottony Cushion Scale, Icerya purchasi). Bairstow, who was president of the Eastern Province Naturalists’ Society, South Africa, had been a correspondent and contributor to Ormerod’s Annual Reports when he was a resident in England. Contact with him resulted in the publication of her Notes on the Australian Bug (Icerya Purchasi) in South Africa (1887) and her Notes and Descriptions of a Few Injurious Farm & Fruit Insects of South Africa (1889). Similarly, a direct appeal from the New Zealand government resulted in her publication of a small pamphlet on the Hessian fly. Her association with the RASE introduced her to West Indian economic entomology. And she produced a booklet on the sugar-cane shot-borer beetle (Xyleborus perforans) after the Barbados Agricultural Society explicitly requested her services in 1892. Ormerod’s economic entomology, which was an unashamed metropolitan science, set a precedent for late nineteenth-century imperial initiatives. In particular, her promotion of large-scale applications of inorganic insecticides provided economic entomologists with a technical tool of expertise. When emergent professional economic entomologists responded to Joseph Chamberlain’s call for ‘constructive imperialism’, they drew upon the intellectual foundation forged by Eleanor Ormerod.66

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n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British metropolitan entomological community increasingly embraced the specialist science that Eleanor Ormerod had done so much to foster. The development of a discipline of economic entomology was not, however, a response to the grassroots appeals of farmers. Rather, it was a facet of late nineteenth-century ‘public science’ that yoked itself to the promotion of national efficiency and the ‘welfare of the Empire’. The growth of the administrative machinery of government and the push for professional technical education produced a new class of scientist: the expert. Unlike Huxley and his circle – who considered the emergence of ‘experts’ as ‘seven devils worse’ than ‘aristocratic flunkeyism’ – this group did not present itself as a generalist clerisy, armed with an authoritative answer to fundamental philosophical questions. They founded their professionalism upon rational knowledge and bureaucratic authority, which they applied to specific technical and social problems.1 The growth of scientific farming and the push for the maximization of crop yields and profits focused attention on insect pests. Agricultural historians have noted that early nineteenth-century farmers passively accepted crop losses to the inevitable attack of insect pests. To the farmer, they argue, pests ‘were rather like the poor: he had them with him always’. Like ‘the “natural”, unproblematic poverty of one age that became the urgent social problem of another’, the ubiquitous presence of insect pests became unacceptable crop loss, which could be remedied by

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agricultural science. By the turn of the twentieth century, entomological experts and expertise were subsumed within the Victorian revolution in government.2 Economic entomology achieved professional respectability between 1880 and 1914 through the creation of specialist educational programmes and acknowledged posts in the field. The identification of insects as vectors of disease – the emergence of medical entomology within the rubric of tropical medicine – provided a further strong rationale for the study of applied entomology. Experience of insect control and eradication in empire shaped the careers, knowledge and practices of British entomologists. As an institution or discipline, applied entomology in Britain was forged from agricultural science and tropical medicine, under the umbrella term of economic entomology. Science, Whisky and the National Interest Agricultural experts, such as economic entomologists, highlighted threats to national interest to achieve greater governmental support for science. In the wake of Britain’s poor showing at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, science lobbyists used the perceived US and German lead in science-based industry and empirical technology to promote further provisions for technical education. Failure in the face of foreign competition was a recurrent theme of science lobbyists throughout the nineteenth century. When cheap grains from the USA, Canada and India plunged English arable agriculture into depression in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, agriculturists found favourable soil for the promotion of their subject. With the English economy reeling from a rural depression induced by foreign competition, agricultural science made direct institutional gains from the resultant technical education movement.3 Like most nineteenth-century British scientists, agriculturists relied upon a broad spectrum of patronage for education and research. Prior to 1888–9, the government offered limited support for agricultural education: partial endowment of the chair in agriculture at the University of Edinburgh (established 1790); and payment of fees to elementary school teachers who taught the principles of agriculture. Privately endowed institutions – such as the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, and Rothamsted Experiment Station – dominated the field.

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In the late 1880s, however, a series of planned and accidental governmental measures generated considerable administrative and financial support. In 1888, the Local Government Act created county councils, which provided an alternative administrative body to oversee measures for technical education. Prior to this date, the school boards had shown little interest in the technical education movement. One year later, in 1889, Sir W. Hart Dyke successfully introduced a bill which empowered local authorities to raise a one-penny rate for technical education. Thanks to teetotallers, funding soon increased substantially when the government attempted to reduce the number of public houses in Britain through legislation in 1890. To provide compensation for the publicans, who would lose their licences, the government raised a duty on alcoholic beverages. The ‘teetotal’ opposition to compensation was so strong that the government redirected this ‘whisky money’ to support technical education. The resultant sum, which rose from £709,000 in the first year to over £1 million by the turn of the century, funded the creation of agricultural colleges, university chairs and county extension schemes.4 The technical education movement of the late nineteenth century shaped the rise of the professional economic entomologist. The successes of the lower, provincial branches of the medical and legal professions provided agriculturists with the model for educational qualifications. ‘The subject of agriculture,’ argued Robert Warington, ‘like that of medicine or law, is one involving a multiplicity of detail, to become familiar with the whole of which requires much more time than is available in a University course; much of this detail can also only be learnt under special circumstances, which is hardly the function of a University to supply.’ Agriculturists sought to resolve a longstanding tension between science and practice. Educational institutions provided a theoretical grounding in sciences related to agriculture: ideally, the student then entered an apprenticeship, or period of applied practice. In this respect Agriculture is strictly analogous to such subjects as Medicine and Engineering. I suppose it is a most unusual thing for a physician – as soon as he has attained his qualifying diploma – to go directly into independent practice. He could not dispense with his academic training, but he does not rely on that alone. And similarly in the case of an Engineer. A man who has been through a course of training in Mechanism and Applied Mechanics . . . cannot altogether dispense with

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the experience of the shops, but most employers now recognise that he will learn more in an apprenticeship of two years than another youth will learn in four. Similarly in the case of the young agriculturist. Building on the nineteenth-century prestige of science, the higher education of an agriculturist focused on sciences relevant to the practice of farming. The Royal Agricultural College provided a curriculum that consisted of chemistry, engineering, natural philosophy, natural history, geology, botany, veterinary art, mathematics and surveying.5 Initially included under the umbrella of natural history, economic entomology achieved independent course status in the 1880s, and thereby created salaried positions for scientists. William Fream, who studied zoology under T. H. Huxley at the Royal School of Mines, established a physiological laboratory and the first course in economic entomology in Britain at the Downton College of Agriculture (established 1880). Because of this, the University of Edinburgh appointed Fream as Steven Lecturer in the subject in 1890; and when the same university reorganized its School of Agricultural Science in 1892, economic entomology became one of eleven required examination subjects for the B.Sc. degree (first established in 1886). Similarly, when the county councils of Kent and Surrey opted to use their portion of the ‘whisky money’ to establish the South-Eastern Agricultural College, Wye (opened 1894), they appointed F. V. Theobald as lecturer in zoology and economic entomology. And Cecil Warburton – Eleanor Ormerod’s successor at the RASE – became ‘examiner in entomology’ when the county councils in the Eastern Counties banded together to create the Diploma in Agriculture at the University of Cambridge (1894). Affiliated with nascent university departments of agriculture or independent agricultural colleges, a small circle of career economic entomologists existed by 1900.6 Governmental support for economic entomology arose from its close relationship with horticulture. Fruit farming, which was labour intensive, was perceived as a viable means of bringing people back to the land when the country was economically depressed. Under these circumstances, the government made efforts to support and encourage the horticulture industry through the creation of a Horticultural Department of the Board of Agriculture in 1912. This followed in the wake of an unsuccessful bill ‘to provide for the eradication of Disease and of Injurious Insects amongst Fruit Trees in Nursery Gardens’ (1903).7

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An insect pest emergency played a significant role in this government initiative, and confirmed the importance of economic entomology. The blackcurrant mite was a recurring subject of the Departmental Committee upon the Fruit Industry of Great Britain (1903–5). It acted as a timely example of the intimate relationship between entomology and horticulture, and of the inadequacy of private patronage of research. Spencer Pickering, with the informal assistance of Eleanor Ormerod and Robert Newstead, undertook investigations on the blackcurrent mite at the Duke of Bedford’s experimental fruit farm (established 1894), but failed to vanquish the pest. Although unsuccessful, this private research cast serious doubts on the Board of Agriculture’s suggested response to the emergency. The committee, therefore, recommended the creation of a horticultural department of the Board of Agriculture, which ‘should contain experts, with a practical acquaintance of fruit-growing and with a scientific knowledge of the origin and course of diseases and insect injuries’. Accordingly, the government appointed J. C. F. Fryer to be the chief entomologist of the new department in November 1912, at a salary of £500–£700 a year. Walter Runciman, speaking in the House of Commons, explicitly acknowledged ‘the close connection between insect life and horticulture, which all scientific horticulture must mainly depend upon’.8 More generally, governmental support for agricultural science manifested itself as investment in expertise, which was considered a counter-depressive measure. The Liberal government enacted unprecedented state support for education and research in agriculture, horticulture and forestry under Asquith’s administration. As an adjunct to Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, the Development and Road Improvement Funds Bill was an integral part of the social reform vision of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. In combination with the Labour Exchanges Act and the National Insurance Act, the Development Act was part of a three-pronged unemployment policy. The government infused money into rural development to entice the urban unemployed back to the ‘healthy’ countryside in response to fears of physical degeneration of British people which had been heightened by the experiences of the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Approximately 35 per cent of potential recruits had been rejected for military service. The Development Commission’s mandate was to counter economic depression through the deployment of a

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five-year budget of £2,900,000 on public works and the promotion of agricultural productivity.9 Although it was a complete failure as a preventative measure against unemployment, the work of the Development Commission was a huge boon to institutional support for agricultural research. The commission, under the tacit direction of A. D. Hall (former principal of the SouthEastern Agricultural College and Director of Rothamsted) devoted itself to the creation of secure professional careers for agricultural scientists. The commission elected to divide agricultural science into eleven research areas in recognition of the fact that specialization was ‘one great cause and one distinguishing characteristic of the progress of modern science’: £30,000 was dispersed between selected institutions, which specialized in each of the targeted subjects. The grant for ‘agricultural zoology’ was divided between the universities of Manchester (entomology) and Birmingham (helminthology).10 Manchester may appear an unlikely location for agricultural entomology, but as a leading centre of industry the city had cultivated institutions for scientific and technical instruction throughout the nineteenth century. From its inception, Manchester University had been conceived as a northern science-based institution. Manchester, therefore, fulfilled the Development Commission’s self-imposed guidelines. It was a recognized university with an established tradition in a specialty. Professor S. J. Hickson, Chair of Zoology (1894–1926), had led the university in the direction of entomological research after a larch saw-fly epidemic in the Lake District in 1906. This incident established cooperation between scientists at the university and the Board of Agriculture. Manchester became an acknowledged specialist in research relating to insect pests. Charles Gordon Hewitt, for instance, acted as lecturer in economic zoology at the University of Manchester for five years before taking up his position as Dominion Entomologist in Canada in 1909. Following these precedents, the University of Manchester used Development Commission funding to appoint A. D. Imms reader in agricultural entomology in 1913. After the First World War, however, the Board of Agriculture transferred its support for entomology to a phytopathological institute at Rothamsted Experiment Station, where Imms became chief entomologist in 1918. This move was part of general shift towards centralization of Development Commission research in London.11

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Insects in Empire There was a striking similarity between the work of the Development Commission and the programme of ‘constructive imperialism’. In the last several decades of the nineteenth century, the development of natural resources became an explicit mandate of British imperial policy. Prior to this date, individuals and private companies dominated the field of colonial exploration and exploitation. The government restricted its support to an informal network of botanic gardens, surveys and medical civil servants. Joseph Chamberlain’s accession to the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies in June 1895 marked a new era in government patronage for science. Still falling within the wake of Gladstonian fiscal restraint, Chamberlain’s initiatives at the Colonial Office were positive interventionist departures for Salisbury’s Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. They were also inexpensive. By according scientific expertise a central role in British imperial policy, Chamberlain’s ‘constructive imperialism’ promised future prosperity at a minimum expense. Mercantile fears of bankruptcy and economic decline in the colonies motivated Chamberlain to deploy science for economic gain and development. Successive Edwardian governments continued this colonial policy because it was easily subsumed within the ideologies of national efficiency and ‘optimistic liberalism’. This manifested itself in a variety of metropolitan and colonial institutions, such as the Imperial Institute (1887), the London and Liverpool Schools of Tropical Medicine (1899), Imperial College of Science and Technology (1907), the Entomological Research Committee (1909), and numerous imperial departments of agriculture. Economic entomology made direct institutional gains from the programme of ‘constructive imperialism’ through its associations with agricultural science and tropical medicine.12 In 1911 the Colonial Office organized a conference ‘to discuss a scheme for imperial co-ordination in the prevention of the spread of insect pests in agriculture and horticulture’ as part of its commitment to the ‘development of entomological research in the British colonies and protectorates’. This conference was a successful bid to expand the work of the Entomological Research Committee which had been created in 1909 to undertake insect research in the British colonies and protectorates in Africa. Initially, two travelling entomologists – S. A. Neave and J. J. Simpson – had been despatched to East and West Africa to form collections of harmful ticks and

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insects, and to encourage residents to do the same. Now, three years later, the Entomological Research Committee became the Imperial Bureau of Entomology and extended its scope to include the self-governing Dominions and colonies and India. It remained faithful to the government’s commitment to inexpensive scientific initiatives for the colonies: Lord Cromer (E. Baring) explained, ‘the role of the Committee will be confined to transmitting information and nothing more’. To aid in this endeavour, the committee issued two journals: the Bulletin of Entomological Research (established 1910), which published original articles quarterly; and the Review of Applied Entomology (established 1913), which published monthly abstracts of current literature.13 Although altered to emphasize research on insect pests of agriculture and horticulture, the initial impetus for the creation of the Entomological Research Committee came from the revelation that insects were intermediate hosts for organisms that caused disease. In an account of the creation and early work of the committee, a correspondent to The Times proudly proclaimed: We now know that fleas are agents in the spread of bubonic plague; that the bed-bug and the house fly act as carriers of typhoid; that typhus is conveyed by the body-louse; and pellagra, in all possibility, by the ‘black-fly’ (Simulium). Every one is now aware that mosquitoes are the inoculating organisms of malaria and of yellow fever, whilst the tsetse-fly not only infects man with the deadly sleeping sickness, but is the cause of nagana and many other diseases in domestic cattle. This was truly an inspirational testament to the entomology of empire, but such triumphal rhetoric belied the actual role of the entomologist. The committee’s shift in emphasis in 1912 represented an important acknowledgement of the economic entomologists’ traditional field of expertise: agriculture. In many ways, medical entomology emerged from two significant strands of specialists: biomedical practitioners who engaged in a ‘golden age’ of discovery, in which they delineated the aetiology of insect-borne diseases, between about 1870 and 1920; and entomologists who provided specialist knowledge of insect vector control, which had been honed through agricultural applications. For entomologists, medical entomology became subsumed under the umbrella of economic entomology, which sought to identify and control insects that

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were baneful and beneficial to agriculture and human health. This can best be understood through an examination of the role of entomologists in the development of medical entomology.14 Bitten by the Bug The rapid development of medical entomology in the first decade of the twentieth century was intimately connected to the growth of tropical medicine as an acknowledged specialism. Tropical medicine was a mixture of protozoology, helminthology, parasitology and medical entomology that forged an identity separate from the orthodox medical establishment. Promoters of tropical medicine focused on arthropodal vectors as specific agents of disease, worthy of comparison with the germs that lay behind the emergence of bacteriology in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. As a leading edge of biomedical science, tropical medicine gained its principal identity and advancement from reform-minded medical practitioners with colonial work experience. Its institutional success rested upon the initiatives of ‘constructive imperialism’. Endemic disease was a major impediment to the development and exploitation of tropical colonies.15 As a significant facet of tropical medicine, medical entomology developed somewhat independently of economic entomology. Writing in 1913, American economic entomologist W. D. Hunter acknowledged ‘without reservation that it is primarily the medical profession that has benefited the world by work on insect-borne diseases’. In the rapidly emerging field of medical entomology, practitioners of biomedicine, who were often untrained in entomology, studied the aetiology of insect-borne diseases. Wary of treading upon the well patrolled borders of the medical profession, entomologists struggled to define a role for themselves. As early as 1837, the Rev. F. W. Hope broached the subject of medical entomology with caution: ‘The entomologist can name the insects which attack our persons, and detail their general habits and economy. To the medical profession we leave the discovery of antidotes adapted to relieve human suffering . . .’ Hunter suggested that they establish possible insect vectors once the medical practitioners elucidated the disease aetiology. In general, entomologists provided knowledge of insect classification, and of the eradication techniques of economic entomology.16 Entomologists infrequently applied their specialized knowledge to medical subjects. When drawing up his tabular charts of insects and

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larvae that infect the human body, the Rev. F. W. Hope canvassed William Spence and William Kirby for information. Both men admitted that they had devoted little attention to the subject. Kirby stated that it ‘has never occupied my thought since the publication of the Introduction to Entomology’. The fourth ‘letter’ of the Introduction to Entomology was a series of horrific accounts of opthalomyiasis, urinary myiasis, and scabies. Like Hope’s later paper, Kirby’s ‘letter’ aimed ‘to render the science of Entomology practically useful’. Enmeshed in cultural values of pollution and taboo, a moralistic providentialism overlaid this utilitarianism of natural theologians. Kirby warned that God had created lice ‘to punish inattention to personal cleanliness’. In his Bridgewater Treatise, he asserted that biting and sucking insects, insects that cause cutaneous diseases, internal parasites, and all such ‘unclean and disgusting creatures’ were God’s punishment upon Fallen man.17 Within medical literature and travel narratives, insects were long associated with filth, decay and putrefaction, and with the amorphous concepts of contagion, miasma, and animalcular disease agents. In 1899, G. H. F. Nuttall amassed a vast array of literature to demonstrate this fact, and to search for antecedents or anticipations of ‘great discoveries’. But early speculations on the connections between insects and disease remained unproven until the late nineteenth century.18 Medical entomology arose from developments in parasitology, and from methodological and technical changes in biomedicine in the context of empire. Insect vectors of disease caused financial loss because they depleted the labour force on tropical plantations and impeded the development of fertile tropical land. Nearly every major development in the aetiology of medical entomology occurred in the colonial context, with a notable lack of input from entomologists or entomological science. Patrick Manson, while working as a medical doctor for the Imperial Customs Services at Amoy, in China, in 1877, made the connection between the common mosquito (Culex p. fatigans) and Wuchereria bancrofti, the filarial worm responsible for elephantiasis. Pointedly, his lack of entomological knowledge hindered him from observing the full life-cycle of the parasite. He never observed the transmission of the parasite from the mosquito back to human beings because he was committed to the common belief that mosquitoes only fed once in a lifetime. Instead, he speculated that people were infected with the filarial worm when they unwittingly drank the mosquito’s eggs in their water. Perhaps aware of his own limitations, Manson advised Ronald Ross

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to acquire some entomological knowledge before embarking on his quest to prove that the mosquito transmitted the malarial plasmodium to humans. Ross, an officer of the Indian Medical Service, ignored Manson’s suggestion and subsequently struggled with ‘brindled’, ‘grey’, ‘bar-backed’, ‘large brown’, and ‘dapple winged’ mosquitoes. He was completely untrained in entomology or zoology so he proceeded initially on the assumption that all mosquitoes were essentially the same.19 Nationalist ambitions produced a competitive race to elucidate the aetiology of insect-borne diseases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While working in India in 1898, Ross transmitted malaria from diseased sparrows to healthy birds by the bites of infected mosquitoes. Giovanni Battista Grassi and his Italian team subsequently rushed to announce the successful transmission of the malaria plasmodium to humans through the bite of Anopheles mosquitoes (figure 9.1). The British government, which was convinced that malaria was ‘the most important barrier to colonial development’, acted quickly to encourage further research. In 1898, the Colonial Office requested the Royal Society to establish the Malaria Committee, to study the nature, importance and distribution of the disease in Africa over a five-year period.20 Research initiatives in tropical medicine had a direct institutional impact on entomology. Changes in the status of entomology at the British Museum (Natural History) were one manifestation of this trend. Although proposals for the creation of a separate department of entomology had been made in 1897 and 1906, the ‘Insect Room’ remained a part of the Department of Zoology until 1913. The elevated status of applied entomology within the empire provided a major impetus for the change of heart. In 1898, E. Ray Lankester, Director of the museum and member of the Malaria Committee, sought the assistance of the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and the India Office in the procurement of an extensive collection of mosquitoes. Joseph Chamberlain duly issued a letter to the heads of all colonial governments requesting that collections be ‘made of the winged insects in the Colony which bite men or animals’. In 1899, Lankester retained the services of F. V. Theobald, entomologist at the South-Eastern Agricultural College, to identify the resultant influx of mosquitoes. Between 1901 and 1907, Theobald received 21,200 specimens, and purported to name 275 new species. The establishment of the Entomological Research Committee further enhanced the museum’s role in the identification of the noxious insects of

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Figure 9.1 Mosquito Danger: Experimental proof that mosquitoes were vectors of diseases such as malaria provided significant incentive to study insects. The threat from mosquitoes became important for the ‘efficiency’ of colonial development and troops serving in tropical climates.

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empire. The committee’s office was located in the museum. At the suggestion of Ernest E. Austen, the museum began publication of its one-penny Economic [Entomology] Leaflets in 1913. These booklets supplemented Lankester’s earlier endeavours to educate the public on the role of insects as agents of disease. In 1900, he began the exhibition of large-scale (enlarged twenty-eight times) models of disease-spreading insects and ticks in the Central Hall. Bruce Frederick Cummings (figure 9.2), who had attained the position of Second Class Assistant in the Insect Room at the British Museum (Natural History) in 1912, lamented the museum’s shift towards applied entomology: ‘I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of Economic

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 9.2 A Disappointed Economic Entomologist: Under the pseudonym of W. N. P. Barbellion, Bruce F. Cummings published his Journal of a Disappointed Man in 1919. Cummings, who worked as a second class assistant in the ‘Insect Room’ at the British Museum (Natural History), wryly observed the life of an economic entomologist working within one of the bastions of systematic entomology.

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Entomology! Curse . . . Why can’t I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist?’21 As the government increasingly subsumed economic entomology within colonial policy, the British Museum (Natural History) began to supplement its traditional commitment to pure science with work in applied science. Theobald embodied this new direction in entomology. His early taxonomic study of British Diptera justified his involvement in traditional museum entomology. His established reputation as an economic entomologist was also a contributing factor to his employment. This dual role captured the ambivalent position of the metropolitan-based economic entomologist. At the same time that Theobald provided taxonomic work on the mosquitoes of empire, he assisted the Director of the museum with reports on economic zoology for the Board of Agriculture.22 Entomologists staked their claim to medical entomology on their specialized knowledge of the collection, classification and eradication of insects. Ernest E. Austen, an entomological Assistant at the museum, complained: ‘From the nature of the present movement very many collectors – perhaps the majority – are medical men who, unfortunately, seem endowed with a sort of natural instinct prompting them to preserve everything by placing it in a bottle of spirit or glycerine. Mosquitoes when treated in this manner reach England in a sorry plight.’ Austen proceeded to explain the correct procedure for collecting and setting an insect.23 Alternatively, colonial economic entomologists declared that the naming of insects was best left to metropolitan museum staff who were accustomed to working with dead specimens. They complained that ‘the lack of knowledge of entomology of the medical men who have to apply themselves to entomological problems is very painful’. The expertise of the economic entomologist lay in the use of insecticides, such as hydrocyanic-acid gas and crude oil emulsions. The sheer toxicity of insecticides provided a justification for the professional entomologist’s involvement in eradication campaigns: ‘a dangerous poison fumigation with . . . [hydrocyanic-acid] gas can only be carried out by some competent and experienced person.’24 Furthermore, the eradication of insects need not be indiscriminate, because ‘every Herb has its peculiar insect’. ‘It is the aim and function of applied entomology’, proclaimed A. D. Imms, ‘to investigate the habits and life-histories of all noxious insects’; and ‘to provide the requisite knowledge upon which to base those remedial measures which are likely

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to be effective in each specific case’. The entomologists’ expertise lay in the purported specificity of their measures. Using an analogy that belied their professional aspirations, Theobald and Spencer Pickering asserted that to ‘spray a tree without a definite object is like giving a man physic without knowing what is the matter with him, or whether anything is the matter at all’. The economic entomologist diagnosed the problem, prescribed the cure and determined the timing of its application.25 In England, agricultural entomologists provided the necessary experience and expertise in insecticide applications. In April 1911, Robert Newstead – elected in 1905 as Lecturer in Economic Entomology and Parasitology – became the first Dutton Memorial Professor of Entomology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Prior to assuming his position at Liverpool, Newstead had devoted his entomological investigations exclusively to agricultural applications. He compiled the general index to Eleanor Ormerod’s Annual Reports of Observations of Injurious Insects, 1877–1898 (1899) after declaring a desire to emulate her entomological career. Newstead became a specialist in the study of scale insects. This subject attracted considerable attention when San José scale threatened to destroy the Californian citrus fruit industry in the 1880s. Proclaimed as one of ‘the great achievements in the entomological history of California’, D. W. Coquillet successfully vanquished the pest with a new fumigant: hydrocyanic-acid gas. Newstead made numerous experiments with the American insecticidal technology on scale insects in Britain. When he shifted his emphasis to medical entomology, he applied this same insecticidal technology. In 1915, he employed hydrocyanic-acid gas against bedbugs.26 Established in 1899, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine reflected the priorities of its commercial and mercantile financial backers, and of its first director, Ronald Ross. Committed to a holistic, public health and sanitarian approach to tropical medicine, Ross preached ‘a general crusade’ of insect vector control as the solution to tropical disease. The appointment of Newstead, an agricultural entomologist who possessed knowledge of insect eradication techniques, was consistent with Ross’s programme. In contrast, the London School of Tropical Medicine appointed Lt-Col. Alfred William Alcock as lecturer on medical entomology and general medical zoology in 1907. A former member of the Indian Medical Service and Superintendent of the India Museum, he was a general zoologist, with a special interest in marine

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fauna. Guided by Patrick Manson’s reductionist, research-oriented vision of tropical medicine, the London School did not appoint an economic entomologist to teach medical entomology (figure 9.3). The institutional and personal priorities, which resulted in the appointments of Newstead and Alcock, reflected the struggle of entomologists to define their role in medical entomology. The high profile of malaria, tsetse fly and house fly campaigns focused attention on the importance of knowledge of insects. Emergent expert entomologists wished to consolidate their professional aspirations around this publicity by locating medical entomology under the disciplinary umbrella of economic entomology.27 Imperial Entomologist Economic entomology had largely gained status as a recognized discipline within an established programme of agricultural science by 1914. The emergence of economic entomology was not, however, strictly a metropolitan phenomenon. Experience abroad provided career opportunities for professional scientists that helped to shape the discipline. In general, the

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 9.3 Your Money or Your Son’s Life: This cartoon from 1913 was part of an appeal for funding for the London School of Tropical Medicine.

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rise of the professional civil servant scientist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was first rehearsed in the British Crown colonies and protectorates. This was often borne out by individual career patterns. Lt-Col. David Prain, for example, was superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens before assuming the directorship of Kew Gardens in 1905. Similarly, both Fryer and Imms had experience in colonial science before taking up their government-funded entomological positions in Britain. Fryer was a member of the Percy Sladen Trust expedition to Seychelles and Aldabra Islands (1908–9), and later visited Ceylon to work on butterfly genetics. Imms, after graduating from Cambridge in 1907, served a short term as assistant demonstrator in zoology at Birmingham University before assuming the professorship of biology at the University of Allahabad. In 1911, he succeeded E. P. Stebbing as Government of India Forest Entomologist at Dehra Dun. There were more than thirty posts for economic entomologists scattered throughout the empire by 1911.28 The career of Harold Maxwell Lefroy is perhaps the most instructive example of the relationship between entomological science and empire. After graduating from Cambridge in 1898, he became assistant master of Seaford College, Sussex. Less than a year later, he embarked on a lifelong career in economic entomology. An examination of the trajectory of his career – education in England, employment in the West Indies and India, and his return to London to train future ‘imperial entomologists’ – provides historical insight into the varied social roles of an economic entomologist. Lefroy, who was aware of his pioneering position in the conceptual, institutional and professional development of his discipline, brought an evangelical fervour to his subject. He became increasingly sensitive to his dual audience – metropolitan and colonial – and to the concomitant struggle between pure and applied science.29 Although trained in academic entomology at Cambridge, Lefroy spent his entire career in the service of economic entomology which had been principally the preserve of agricultural colleges. Cambridge-educated zoologists dominated the government-supported positions in economic entomology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lynchpin of Cambridge’s success in placing entomologists was Arthur Everett Shipley, who combined research interests in arthropods with experience in the colonies and political influence. Shipley had advanced from demonstrator of comparative anatomy (1885) to lecturer on advanced morphology

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of the invertebrata (1894), and, finally, to reader in zoology (1908). He began his studies with the embryology and morphology of marine invertebrates, but he later became a specialist on parasitic worms, and made minor contributions on insects and arachnids. Moreover, he made important connections with colonial science early in his career. He taught entomology at the Royal Engineering College, Coopers Hill in the 1880s, and the Colonial Office sent him to investigate a plant disease in the Bermudas in 1887. Two years later, he published a note on an insect pest of rice-crops in Burma. He became Master of Christ’s College in 1910, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1917 to 1919. Significantly, he was also a leading exponent and active member of Cambridge’s Appointments Board (established 1899); he ‘did more than anyone at Cambridge to bring the University into closer touch with the outside world’. In combination with his connections at the Colonial Office, this put him in an excellent position to place students in colonial posts.30 Cambridge’s lack of a chair in entomology (which it did not acquire until 1931) may have produced an educational training that was well suited to colonial work. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a loose collection of specialisms constituted the biomedical sciences in Britain. Consequently, tropical medicine emerged from a spirit of interdisciplinary research. Cambridge University experienced a propitious combination of personnel and administrative reforms beginning in the 1860s that allowed students to pursue an entomological education within an interdisciplinary context. This equipped them well to undertake work in economic entomology, which linked knowledge of insects to agricultural and medical applications.31 In the late nineteenth century, changes in the natural sciences tripos, and the acquisition of several prominent scientists permitted students to pursue a specialty of entomology at Cambridge. Entomology became an attractive option for part II of the tripos when one of Britain’s foremost entomologists – David Sharp – became curator of the MacAndrew Collection at the University Museum in 1890. Fortunately, Shipley realized the limitations of Huxley’s laboratory-based elementary biology and promoted the pedagogical merits of the museum. ‘The arrival of so eminent an entomologist in Cambridge’, explained Shipley, ‘gave a great impetus to the study of Insects . . .’ A special room in the museum was set aside as the Entomological Department, where Sharp held classes. The addition of G. H. F. Nuttall as lecturer in bacteriology and preventive

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medicine in 1900 provided a further complement to Cambridge’s provision of entomological science. Lefroy, Imms, Fryer and F. M. Howlett (who became second entomologist of the Imperial Department of Agriculture for India in 1907) all studied zoology at Cambridge, and took classes with David Sharp. Shipley was tutor to Imms and Cecil Warburton at Christ’s College; and Imms did special work on the anatomy of the larva of Anopheles under the direction of Nuttall. By 1900, the University of Cambridge was a formidable centre for the education of entomologists.32 Lefroy was one of a number of Cambridge scientists who subsequently found employment in the service of the Colonial Secretary’s constructive imperialism. The ‘Cambridge School was drawn upon for mycologists and entomologists’ when Chamberlain sought to create the Imperial Department of Agriculture in the West Indies. As his first successful endeavour to stimulate and exploit colonial economies, the reconstruction of the West Indies became Chamberlain’s model for his colonial development policy. Although crops such as lime, cocoa and nutmeg were significant, sugar remained the mainstay of the West Indian economy in the 1880s and 1890s. Its economic vitality had been greatly eroded by the abolition of slavery, the abandonment of preferential duties, and competition from both slave-grown sugar in Cuba and the European sugar beet industry.33 Lefroy’s work in the West Indies confirmed the role of economic entomology in the organization and development of colonial agriculture. Lefroy assumed the position of entomologist to the Imperial Department of Agriculture one year after its creation in 1898. Chamberlain, who had been the victim of a failed West Indian plantation venture seven years earlier, established the department on the recommendation of a Royal Commission. With its headquarters at Barbados, the department consisted of five specialists and their assistants. They were charged with the duty of plant crop introductions, exchanges and improvements; pest and disease management; and agricultural education schemes. Lefroy’s first investigations reflected the principal concerns of the department: he immediately produced detailed accounts of the insect pests of sugar cane, and of thrips that attacked cacao trees. Three years later, he left Barbados to become Entomologist to the Government of India.34 Lefroy’s subsequent work in India confirmed economic entomology as an element of colonial development policy – but this was development underpinned by mercantilist economics. As one historian has observed, India was governed as ‘a revenue plantation’. Cash crops such as cotton, tea

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and indigo were the focus of scientific research and state subsidies at a time when the Indian population suffered the effects of serious drought-induced famines. Under Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty (1898–1905), the Indian government took steps to replicate the West Indian Imperial Department of Agriculture. This culminated in the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa (Bihar) in 1905, but only after a wealthy American philanthropist, Henry Phipps, provided Curzon with $100,000. Prior to this, British India had used infrastructures created by surgeons of the Indian Medical Service and botanic gardens to convert a significant portion of the Indian economy to plantation production through a series of plant transfers. The completion of a network of railways in the 1880s produced more intensive, commercialized forms of agricultural production and actually compounded the severity of famine in 1881–91 and 1896–1902 in the south and the North Western Provinces of India. Famine, however, inspired a number of provinces to create departments of agriculture in the final decades of the nineteenth century.35 An early call of support for economic entomology arose in the wake of famine. Retired surgeon-general of Madras, Edward G. Balfour, argued that agricultural losses due to the attacks of insect pests were unacceptable amidst difficulties of feeding an increasing population. Drawing upon ‘metropolitan’ entomological science, he asserted: The like of Miss Ormerod’s form of reporting has never been done for India, although every year to some extent, and from time to time largely, losses occur there from the pests which attack agricultural produce. . . . But the subject is of far too great importance to agricultural India to be left to be treated in so casual a manner, and the special knowledge now available might be utilized to describe the insects which injure the agricultural, horticultural, and forest produce of India, suggesting means of preventing, and remedies for same. In direct imitation of Ormerod’s entomological network research, Balfour suggested the preparation of biannual reports on injurious insects. He solicited a letter of support from Ormerod, and forwarded it to the Secretary of State for India on 28 September 1885. Two years later, Balfour published his correspondence with the government as a preface to his Agricultural Pests of India. Like his earlier Cyclopaedia of India (1857), this book followed an A to Z format.36

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Balfour was not, however, representative of late nineteenth-century British commitment to agricultural science in India. He was part of an earlier generation of successful reformist government servants who mobilized the government of India in support of scientific development of essential resources. In the 1840s, he had joined forces with the Madras government to lobby the government of India to establish a conservationist forest department. As a Scottish-trained surgeon, he ‘combined a reasonably sensitive and unusual interest in the culture and welfare of the indigenous population with an equivalent concern to develop public works specifically related to the basic resource needs of the population’. Convinced that deforestation precipitated dramatic climatic changes, Balfour linked protection of forests to prevention of drought, disease and famine. Economic considerations undoubtedly motivated the government to support sound management of Indian forests. By 1886, Indian forestry revenues exceeded those of France.37 Economic entomology received initial governmental support as a colonial science – a science dependent on utility-oriented results. Unlike their metropolitan counterparts, Indian museums received little support for research in pure science and were encouraged to cultivate applied science. E. C. Cotes, therefore, began work on applied entomology under the aegis of the government-funded India Museum (Calcutta). He issued the first Notes on Economic Entomology in 1888. These reports continued under the title of Indian Museum Notes between 1889 and 1903. Compiled by the entomological staff of the museum, they were a combination of the latest European and American information on economic entomology, and local reports and experiments.38 British economic entomologists used the intensive agricultural development of the colonies to test insecticide technology. Cotes devoted his entire second report of 1888 to the ‘experimental introduction of insecticides into India’. He declared: The insect pests of India are believed to be almost without exception allied to American ones, in some cases being actually identical with them, and there is every reason to presume that insecticides which have been valuable in America will be also applicable in India, though much may have to be done in experimenting on each particular Indian pest and in devising the cheapest and most effective method of utilizing the American insecticides upon it.

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He suggested that the India Museum become a centre for distributing and testing insecticides, force-pumps and cyclone nozzles.39 Insecticide applications were not sinister campaigns to exploit and poison Indians for the promotion of British science and technology. With the exception of a small circle of Christian humanitarians, who objected to the taking of insect life, few people contested the application of insecticides in the nineteenth century. Even fewer opposed insecticides on the grounds of health hazards. As Balfour’s involvement demonstrated, economic entomology could be included within conservationist ideology. Enmeshed in the concept of balance of nature, economic entomology used mineral poisons and assorted organic substances to restore an artificially induced ecological imbalance to its ‘natural’ equilibrium. Lefroy, in fact, supported his argument with desiccationist theory. He, therefore, claimed that human destruction of forests produced hydrological drought that contributed to an artificial increase of insect pests. Deforestation necessitated the restorative intervention of the economic entomologist, and American experiments had established the efficacy of insecticide applications. British economic entomologists used Indian agricultural conditions to deploy American technology that they could not – rather than would not – employ in Britain.40 Unlike the development of desiccationist theory, the intellectual foundations of economic entomology did not rely upon colonial experiences or indigenous knowledge. Indians, in fact, demonstrated little interest in the study of insect life. But India provided a context within which to apply the full potential of the knowledge and technical expertise of metropolitan economic entomology. It possessed plantations worthy of comparison with American forms of intensive mass monocultural production. Moreover, its paternalistic, authoritarian government permitted the collection of pertinent information. Lefroy – who had succeeded Lionel de Niceville as Entomologist to the Government of India and then became Imperial Entomologist of India on the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa – reported: ‘In a country where nothing is outside the scope of official enquiries, much may be learnt from enquiries pursued by the Mamlatdar or Tahsildar and especially in regard to the attitude of the cultivator towards his pests.’ The availability of cheap labour meant that hand-picking of insects and simultaneous large-scale applications of insecticides were viable methods of insect eradication. For economic entomology, India operated as a ‘gigantic laboratory’.41

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Metropolitan Entomology Harold Maxwell Lefroy’s appointment as Lecturer in Entomology at Imperial College in 1911 and his elevation to professor one year later were integral parts of the Colonial Office’s desire to support and encourage research and training in economic entomology from the metropolis. Article II of Imperial College’s Charter of 1907 stated that the institution intended to offer ‘the highest specialized instruction, and to provide the fullest equipment for the most advanced training and research in various branches of science especially in its application to industry’. This work was to be carried out for ‘the ornament and safeguard of the empire’. Adam Sedgwick, who became Chair of Zoology in 1909, decided that these goals could best be achieved through the provision of appropriate training for agricultural posts. He, therefore, resolved to make applied entomology the main focus of the zoology department: he recruited Lefroy and introduced an associateship course in the subject. The Colonial Office subsequently supplied designated funds for its men to attend courses on insect control.42 Lefroy’s inaugural lecture was a programmatic statement for economic entomology as a ‘tool of empire’. He argued that the immense economic importance of the study of insects had only become truly apparent in England in the wake of agricultural development and competition in tropical countries. He proclaimed that if we are ever to colonise the tropics, if we are to people them with healthy races, to develop them agriculturally, and to render available the immense amount of raw material they are capable of producing for England’s manufactures and trade, it will be only when we have organised the entomology and successfully tackled the insect transmitters of disease. He promoted a vision of an imperial science: entomology could only be developed and organized properly in the British Empire if a training programme was established in England. The USA, he continued, were leaders in this specialist field, and success depended on replicating their provision of training. Lefroy was the first British economic entomologist to be a true ‘research-entrepreneur’. The creation of American agricultural experiment stations between 1870 and 1914 produced scientific personnel who

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were ‘research-entrepreneurs’: they had to balance lay expectations and assumptions with their professional agenda. Lefroy advised that ‘nothing brings an entomologist more closely into touch with the public than a minor industry [sericulture, shellac, beekeeping], as it is a tangible money-making thing, whereas his usual work is intangible, preventive and educative work, not visibly directly money-making’. In addition, Lefroy quickly understood the different social and economic expectations in both metropolis and empire after he assumed his academic position at Imperial College. He explained: ‘The life of an economic entomologist is that of any business man, if his work is any good to the public’, ‘the quiet necessary to research and enquiry is not to be found in it . . . Of course there are many who regard the public as an enemy and that, at all costs, research is to be carried on; those persons should be in the places provided for research – universities – and not in government service.’ Aware of his roles as both scientist and publicist, Lefroy freely used newspapers, popular magazines, wireless broadcasts, and even cinematograph films to promote his subject.43 In London, he concentrated his research on another minor industry: insecticides. His colonial experiences had converted him to the centrality of insecticides as tools of empire, and of the professional economic entomologist. ‘The function of the entomologist’, he contended, ‘is simply to explain the details the first time this work is undertaken, and to recommend washes, spraying machines, etc.’ He asserted that local conditions required the economic entomologist to invent suitable equipment and insecticides. Once he returned to London, however, Lefroy deployed his colonial inventions as universally effective insecticides. In 1913, the London press published extensive, illustrated accounts of a conspicuous, large-scale spraying operation in Richmond Park. Under the direction of Lefroy, ‘a squad of men . . . has been busily employed in utilizing a powerful, petrol-driven sprayer to dislodge and exterminate the great plague of caterpillars that again attacked the trees, especially the young oaks’. Six sprayers, great lengths of hoses, and fire-brigade carriageladders made the operation an impressive public spectacle. Lead chromate solution was the chosen insecticide. Lefroy had developed this spray while in India as an alternative to lead arsenate, the most popular American insecticidal ‘stomach poison’.44 His promotion of a ‘contact’ insecticide (crude oil emulsion), which he had first produced in the West Indies, illustrated the tensions embodied

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in a research-entrepreneur and landed Lefroy in the midst of a minor controversy in 1915. He had developed an aqueous compound of crude oil, naphthalene, and whale oil soap as a variant of the American kerosene emulsion in 1902–3. The American insecticide, he argued, was inappropriate for tropical agriculture because the lighter oils rapidly evaporated in the intense heat. On 2 February 1915, The Times published a letter from Lefroy in which he offered a remedy for lice for troops stationed in Britain or abroad. He instructed all persons who desired information to contact him at Imperial College. A correspondent to the British Medical Journal complained that Lefroy’s response was a slip of paper with the names of two insecticide manufacturers printed on it. The promotion of secret, quack remedies, the letter decried, was unprofessional conduct. Lefroy denied that the remedy was secret, and directed readers to his description of crude oil emulsion in the West Indian Bulletin, and in his Indian Insect Pests. He claimed that an overwhelming response to his letter had necessitated his unusual course of action. The editor of the British Medical Journal was rightfully sceptical of this explanation. Why, he asked, had Lefroy not just printed the recipe for crude oil emulsion? Lefroy steered a precarious course between professional respectability and commercial enterprise.45 Professionals at Last Typically regarded as the bastion of amateur science, entomology became the archetypical success story of aspiring professional applied biologists in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1914, F. W. Gamble complained: ‘Hitherto entomology only has been considered of value in regard to agriculture and though other classes of animals have long been known to exert an important influence upon the yield of crops and stock, yet no advance has hitherto been made in their study which can compare with that accomplished in the case of insects.’ Social, economic and political circumstances conspired to elevate the status of economic entomology in both the metropolis and the colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.46 By 1914, economic entomology had achieved status as an acknowledged discipline through the acquisition of specialist journals, training and organizations. Its dominance of the nascent Association of Economic Biologists highlighted the subject’s success. Established in 1904 at the instigation of

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W. E. Collinge and F. V. Theobald, the association effectively drew together all ‘such Biologists employed by the Government or by any County or City Council, University, or Agricultural or Horticultural College or Association . . .’. The institutionalization of economic entomology rested upon emergent agriculturists, Cambridge-educated imperial zoologists and high-profile initiatives in tropical medicine. Significantly, the officers elected at the inaugural meeting of the Association of Economic Biologists, in November 1904, represented all of these interests. F. V. Theobald, who was educated at Cambridge, employed at the South-Eastern Agricultural College, and specially engaged to identify malarial mosquitoes, became president. Sir Patrick Manson, A. E. Shipley and William Somerville, an agricultural scientist, shared the vice-presidency. Moreover, economic entomology held a dominant position in the association. Between 1904 and 1918, all of the presidents were entomologists; and papers on ‘entomology and insect pests’ constituted the greatest number from any single category (250 of 960) in the first twenty-five volumes of the association’s Annals of Applied Biology (1914–38).47 Initially institutionalized as an agricultural science, economic entomology sunk its conceptual roots in the notion of the balance of nature. Posing as agents of the restoration of a natural equilibrium, economic entomologists used the technological fix of insecticides to establish their expertise. In a bid to wrest the lead in medical entomology from medical practitioners, economic entomologists attempted to consolidate the institutional gains that they had made in agricultural applications. H. Maxwell Lefroy announced: Medical men are organised and that so successfully that in a present problem, largely entomological, the medical interest has tended to prevent all recognition of the value and need of the entomologist’s services. . . . If then the applied biologist is to make himself felt, it will be through an organisation comparable to those by which the chemists, the engineers and the doctors assert themselves; we hope to make the Association [of Applied Biologists (renamed in 1914)] such an organised body . . . Five years later, in 1919, Lefroy pushed for professional closure. He submitted a proposal to convert the association from a scientific society to a professional licensing body for applied biologists. By the early twentieth

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century, agricultural science and tropical medicine, as anti-depression measures and as ‘tools of empire’, had created an increasing demand for economic entomologists.48 For years ‘regarded as a harmless and somewhat ridiculous hobby’, the study of insects gained respectability in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The application of entomology to colonial settlement and development improved the profile of the subject. Alfred Keogh, Rector of Imperial College, announced in 1919 that the supply of economic entomologists could not keep pace with the demand. In the past, The Times explained, graduates of the biological sciences were largely restricted to teaching careers; now ‘tropical plantations’ were providing alternative employment. J. Stanley Gardiner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, reported that, for the year 1919, he had received requests for candidates to fill seventeen posts in entomology and eight in economic zoology. He responded to Keogh to stake Cambridge’s claim to the subject, but he also continued the push for professional recognition. Economic entomology, he argued, did not receive ‘scientific and pecuniary’ rewards equivalent to ‘the recognized professions’. Lefroy’s career seemed to confirm Gardiner’s observations. By 1920, Lefroy’s students were working in India, Trinidad, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, the Gold Coast, the Malay States, Uganda and Tanganyika, but he struggled financially. He informed the Royal Entomological Society that he could not pay the increased member fees because his salary increase had not kept pace with the cost of living.49 Unfortunately, for Harold Maxwell Lefroy, he did not live long enough to realize the full potential of his entomological ambition. In the end, he succumbed to the thing that he considered his greatest tool in the struggle for professional recognition – insecticides. Eulogized as a ‘martyr to the cause of Entomological research’, Lefroy, in life and death, epitomized the relationship between insecticides and the ‘researchentrepreneur’. He publicly acknowledged the economic entomologist as a good businessman, and he made the development of insecticides one of his chief concerns. In 1916, he announced that his experiments at Imperial College had produced two non-poisonous sprays that effectively cleared a room, hospital ward, kitchen or any other confined space of flies. Both of the liquid insecticides were supplied by the Army Medical Corps. Lefroy made a clear proprietary claim by naming one of them ‘Lefroy’s Solution’; and he declared that he would not be publishing the formulae ‘until the requirements of the army are satisfied’.50

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Several years earlier, Frank Baines, an architect from the Office of Works, requested Lefroy’s assistance with an infestation of Death Watch beetle in the roof of Westminster Hall. Lefroy was one of a number of entomologists to be consulted: C. J. Gahan (British Museum (Natural History)), A. E. Shipley (University of Cambridge), C. Warburton (Royal Agricultural Society of England) and Guy Marshall (Imperial Bureau of Entomology) were also among the group. Collectively, they represented the various strands of the development of economic entomology in Britain. After experimentation, their proposed solution was an insecticidal liquid. Fortunately, they rejected an initial suggestion of hydrocyanic gas fumigation in favour of a mixture of sulphur dioxide and camphor. Most of the developmental work on the appropriate insecticide was undertaken by two consulting chemists, but the experience inspired the entrepreneurial spirit in Lefroy.51 His assistance was again requested when infestations were also discovered in the roof timbers of St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court. In words that had clear echoes of William Kirby, the Society of Antiquaries proclaimed that insects had become the ‘enemy of Church and State’. Whereas Kirby feared a Jacobin threat and wielded his Tory pen, Lefroy grasped a commercial opportunity and brandished his insecticides. Kirby was, on occasion, literally paralysed with fear of the future. In contrast, a friend of Lefroy recalled: He was an ardent and dangerous motorist. It was an experience to be driven by him in a car whose battered wings gave little confidence, as fast as the car could go, through London traffic, in company with a biscuit-box of noxious living insects, a few glass bottles of poisons, and a cylinder of some lethal gas . . . Lefroy embraced new technology and the thrill of risk.52 In 1924, he and his assistant, Elizabeth Eades, seized the commercial opportunity that had arisen and began to supply bottles of woodworm fluid from a factory in Hatton Garden. Their product – ‘Ento-Kill Fluids’ – proved so successful that they attempted to register a company under the same name the following year. Trade name objections meant that they had to alter it. Consequently, they settled for ‘Rentokil Limited’. But, alas, Lefroy’s ‘fly-room’ laboratory at Imperial College of Science and Technology was improperly ventilated, so he would never enjoy the fruits

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of their impending success. On 10 October 1925, he was overcome by poisonous fumes while experimenting with house fly fumigation techniques with a gas insecticide of his own invention. He thereby entered ‘the ranks of those men who have given their lives in the cause of science’. At an inquest held later, it was determined that he had rallied briefly before exposing himself to a final fatal dose. Aware that his insecticidal research on house flies had proved his undoing, he uttered the final words: ‘The little beggars got the best of me this time.’53 Lefroy’s battle with the house fly had a personal and professional dimension that connected his experiences in the British Empire with his research in London. In addition to honing his knowledge and skill in insecticide technology, he suffered a family tragedy in India. Two of his children, Gladys and Denis, died of enteric disorders. Forever after, he devoted considerable energy to the control and extirpation of house flies. On his return to London, he played a prominent role in the AngloAmerican anti-fly campaign. His story is part of a larger history of infant welfare and the reciprocal transfer of vector-control knowledge, practices and policies between the periphery and core of empire.54

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ut I wish to tell you’, explained Dr Dolittle, ‘that I am very sad at leaving your beautiful country. Because I have things to do in the land of the Europeans, I must go. After I have gone, remember never to let flies settle on your food before you eat; and do not sleep on the ground when the rains are coming.’ With these sage words of advice, Dr Dolittle departed from the Land of the Monkeys. Writing in 1920, Hugh Lofting, Dolittle’s creator, chose to warn the simian natives of Africa not about the sting of the mosquito, nor about the bite of the tsetse fly. Clearly as concerned for his young Anglo-American readers as Dolittle might be for the monkeys, Lofting warned about the dangers of the ubiquitous house fly and related species – insects that were as likely to grace the tables of Britain or the United States as they were the Land of the Monkeys.1 Economic entomologists were less intent than their counterparts in tropical medicine on establishing a knowledge base that was unique to the colonies and protectorates. As entomologists, they actively sought to translate their colonial experiences to the metropolitan context. Whereas Patrick Manson, doyen of British tropical medicine, excluded fly-borne enteric diseases from his definition of tropical medicine, entomologists played a key role in the ‘fly danger’ campaigns that occupied Britain and other temperate lands in the early twentieth century. They argued that flies, as mechanical vectors of infantile diarrhoea, were to Britain what mosquitoes were to the tropics: they posed a threat to Britain’s commercial and military strength.2

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Although they were significant, colonial experiences of crop pests and vectors of disease were just one facet of the complex interplay of humanity and insects that shaped the development of medical entomology. A convergence of environmental factors in Britain led to a marked increase in house flies and a concomitant rise in infant mortality in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Wartime experiences, increasing urbanization, urban and suburban growth and a ‘refuse revolution’ all helped to shape the interplay of economic entomologists and insects in Britain. In the early twentieth century, the public health dangers of the house fly swarmed and settled upon every feature of British and American culture. The West Hartlepool Health Department issued a typical booklet entitled The House Fly Danger: The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth, which repeatedly implored people to ‘KILL THE FLY’. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the house fly came to embody fears for the mental, moral and physical well-being of nations that were intent upon populating robust empires. More particularly, the circumstantial evidence of science established the house fly as a mechanical vector of diseases that depleted the ranks of future generations through diphtheria and infant diarrhoea; and decimated the fighting ranks of patriotic soldiers through typhoid and other enteric disorders. The anti-house fly campaigns of the early twentieth century provided economic entomologists with an opportunity to address a pressing domestic issue outside the rubric of tropical medicine. Economic entomologists sought to gain expert possession of a ubiquitous companion of humanity.3 Reinventing the Fly Whereas entomologists wielded imperial triumphalism for their work in the colonies, they often portrayed themselves as slayers of superstition and sentiment for their anti-fly campaigns in Britain and the USA. In 1871, newly elected Liberal MP Sir John Lubbock rose in the House of Commons and proceeded to read the following extract from an elementary school book: ‘the fly keeps the warm air pure and wholesome by its swift and zigzag flight.’ The perpetuation of such nonsense, he declared, demonstrated the inadequacy of elementary school teaching in the area of science: natural theological explanations of the natural world were inaccurate and misleading, and should be replaced by secular scientific naturalism. The

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Lancet applauded Lubbock’s statement and implored ‘far from looking upon . . . [flies] as dipterous angels dancing attendance on Hygeia, regard them rather in the light of winged sponges speeding hither and thither to carry out the foul behests of Contagion’. G. E. Nicholas, Medical Officer of Health for Wandsworth, immediately seized on the ‘fly theory of the propagation of contagion’, and speculated that flies were a causal factor in the spread of cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea. These suspicions were repeated and magnified over the next three decades.4 Nascent expert economic entomologists and public health officials sought to claim control of the house fly at the turn of the twentieth century by attacking religious explanations for the usefulness of this insect. In his Book of the Fly (1915), Major G. Hurlstone Hardy proclaimed: The old fanciful dogma that everything existing was actually created ‘in the beginning’, and ‘for a purpose’, was once ardently championed as controverting aggressive atheism, but it must be now recognised as an unwarranted assumption, deduced from an orthodox doctrine of ‘design’, which in itself seems acceptably agreeable with the idea of unity, consistency, and perfection in Creation and The Creator. In fact, the said ‘fanciful’ dogma never really was an integral part of Christian Catholic doctrine. The house fly, as we know it, is absolutely the developed product of human insanitation; scientifically and practically it is a new ‘species’ of an old ‘genus’ established by a long course of breeding in man-made environments. Far from being evidence of God’s wondrous handiwork, the house fly was a natural product of human filth. Similarly, L. O. Howard recalled a meeting of the American Civic Association in Washington at which the dangers of the house fly were thoroughly aired: ‘a dear old lady arose in the audience and said, with breathless indignation: “In the name of the women of the United States and of that of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I protest against the wholesale murder of these defenceless creatures.” ’ Such sentiments, concluded Howard, possibly explained how such a clearly insidious creature like the house fly had managed to survive for so long. In many ways, Hurlstone, Howard and their colleagues were creating a false antithesis, flogging a dead horse. Natural theological explanations of the house fly were not widespread by the turn of the twentieth century; they survived mainly through the

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auspices of preservationists and anti-vivisectionists, who sought alternatives to scientific naturalism. These were people belittled by Howard as ‘dear old lady’. Expert entomologists wished to memorialize their campaign against the house fly as another battle in the war of science against religion, but these arguments played little role in their technocratic management of this insect.5 Early twentieth-century experts who spearheaded the anti-fly campaigns did not entirely reinvent the house fly. Flies were not universally accepted as innocuous insects – or God’s beloved creatures – before twentieth-century experts declared them the most dangerous animals on earth. As creatures that swarmed on wounds, faeces and rubbish, and alighted on eyes, mouths and food, and visited corpses and carcasses, house flies could hardly evoke warm and fuzzy sentiments. From Exodus 8 through the incidental observations and speculations of St Augustine, Mercurialis, Thomas Sydenham and Thomas Muffet, people speculated that the ubiquitous plague of flies brought disease in its wake. Moreover, the ubiquity of these insects meant that people were aware of their habits. In the land of the Brobdingnagians, Gulliver observed: The kingdom is much pestered with Flies in the summer; and these odious Insects, each of them as big as a Dunstable Lark, hardly gave me any Rest while I sat at Dinner, with their continual Humming and Buzzing about mine Ears. They would sometimes alight upon my Victuals, and leave their loathsome Excrement or Spawn behind, which to me was very visible, although not to the Natives of that Country, whose large Opticks were not so acute as mine in viewing smaller Objects. The fly was long recognized as a filthy and potentially lethal pest.6 Henry Mayhew, in his London Labour and the London Poor, brought together flies, filth and the poor, and thereby evoked many of the themes explored in the anti-fly literature of the early twentieth century. ‘The active fly, so frequently an unbidden guest at your table . . . was but the other day a disgusting grub, without wings, without legs, without eyes, wallowing well pleased in the midst of a mass of excrement.’ After a thorough entomological overview of the house fly and related species, Mayhew suggested that the only means of reducing their number was by lessening the flies’ access to stable dung. But his principal interest lay in

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the ‘catch ’em alive’ sellers and the flypaper maker; and it is difficult not to notice the blurring of the worlds of the poor and the flies, as he moved effortlessly from his natural history of one to the other. The poor, after all, lived in houses as dirty as the sides of a dustbin, and ate bread the colour of London snow. In the same manner in which he reinvented the London poor from ethnographic studies of primitive people, Mayhew helped to reinvent the fly from his natural history of the poor.7 Entomological experts campaigned to change the filthy house fly’s name, which, they suggested, was too comfortingly domestic and innocuous: the public needed to be alerted to the insidious insects’ danger. Henceforth, they asserted, the house fly should be called the ‘typhoid fly’ (figure 10.1). Prizes were offered for the most flies captured and killed in specially designed traps, and major public spectacles were created to reinforce the link between flies and infant deaths. In 1915, for instance, Samuel J. Crumbine, Secretary of the Kansas Board of Health, organized a sanitation parade, replete with a huge fly float dragging thirteen black empty baby buggies. Public health officials were adamant that this campaign was not just about better sanitation. Rather, they sought to educate and to improve personal hygiene through active intervention. Middle-class health visitors sought to create more ‘enlightened mothers’ through educational campaigns and home visits to the working class.8 Flies, Babies and War Two principal concerns precipitated unprecedented awareness of the public health dangers of the house fly: high infant mortality from summer diarrhoea; and the loss of soldiers’ lives from typhoid and other enteric disorders. The experiences of the Spanish-American and Boer wars did much to galvanize the campaign against the house fly. In a commission headed by army surgeon Walter Reed, an investigation into the outbreak of typhoid fever among American troops was undertaken in late 1898. Reed and his team concluded that flies played a significant role in the spread of typhoid by carrying bacteria, contained in faeces, on their wings and feet to army food. The British Army Medical Department Report for 1900 drew the same conclusion when it assessed the outbreak of enteric fever among the 2nd King’s Royal Rifles at Diyatalawa Camp, Ceylon. Similarly, circumstantial evidence against the fly was mustered to explain enteric fever at Bloemfontein.9

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 10.1 Typhoid Fly: American entomologist L. O. Howard suggested in 1908 that the house fly should be renamed the ‘typhoid fly’ to alert the public to its deadly threat as a disease carrier.

The Boer wars focused attention on flies as possible vectors of typhoid, and this led to the link between flies and infant diarrhoea. A general fear about the health of the next generation gripped the medical community in the light of the poor state of recruits for the Boer wars. In particular, experts struggled to understand the rise in infant mortality due to diarrhoeal diseases. Noting the coincidence in the seasonal peaks of the disease and house fly populations (figure 10.2), medical officers of health – such as J. C. T. Nash, Arthur Newsholme, James Niven and

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E. W. Hope – began to suggest that house flies spread the disease from infected excrement to babies’ milk or mouths. In 1914, it was announced in the House of Commons that 123 medical officers of health had warned of the dangers of house flies in connection with the summer prevalence of infant diarrhoea. By the same date, the Local Government Board had issued five annual reports on the subject, thoroughly investigating the life habits, flight distances and patterns, and bacterial cultures associated with the house fly.10 By the outbreak of the First World War, an anti-fly campaign was in full swing, and the house fly had become a spreader of filth – germs with legs. Public fear was sufficient for insurance companies to announce policies of assurance covering the risk of fly-borne infections being carried

Figure 10.2 Baby Killers: Medical Officers of Health charted the coincidence in seasonal peaks of fly populations and infant mortality to prove that flies were decimating the future population of the empire. This particular graph was for the city of Manchester.

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back from the battlefields in 1915. In April of the same year, W. K. Haselden, cartoonist for the Daily Mirror, boldly predicted an ignominious end for the fly (figure 10.3). In 1917, the National Baby Week Council received 180,000 essays from schoolchildren for their competition. The

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 10.3 The End is Nigh for the Fly: Responding to the vigorous campaign to swat the fly, W. K. Heselden, cartoonist for the Daily Mirror, predicted the inevitable end for the house fly in 1915.

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rules of the contest perpetuated the well-established gender assumptions about insect ‘hunting’. Boys were instructed to explain ‘Why I should kill that fly’, while girls had to recount ‘How I mind our baby’. A war against the house fly assumed a central place in the infant welfare movement (figure 10.4).11 In general, entomologists continued to define themselves as experts in the identification of particular species of insects, their habits and life histories, and eradication programmes. In 1907, Robert Newstead, at the behest of E. W. Hope and the Liverpool Health Authority, produced a special report on the house fly, replete with graphic photographs of the eggs, larvae, pupae and perfect fly in refuse and assorted dung. The British Museum (Natural History) published Ernest Austen’s The House Fly as a Danger to Health as the first in its series of booklets on applied (economic) entomology in 1913. In addition, a large-scale model of a house fly, a tray of fly-infested food and a heap of kitchen refuse was added to the central hall display. And under the direction of Lefroy and Howlett, the museum issued its own ‘fly danger’ poster (figure 10.5). The ever zealous Lefroy organized an anti-fly exhibition at the Zoological Society’s gardens in 1915, and issued several booklets on the subject. All were agreed that the best way of destroying the fly was by attacking or destroying its breeding places. In this manner, claimed Shipley, they could repeat the success of anti-malarial, anti-mosquito campaigns: ‘if we have the faith which moves mountains – mountains of manure’. Both wartime camps and increasingly congested urban centres were awash with excrement.12 Front-line war conditions had long been associated with the unpleasant company of flies. Writing in 1879, Alfred, Lord Tennyson spelled out the realities of military engagement: Ever the day with its traitorous death from the loop-holes around Ever the night with its coffinless corpse to be laid in the ground Heat like the mouth of a hell, or deluge of cataract skies Stench of old offal decaying, and infinite torment of flies. Trench warfare – with its attendant conditions of cold and wet, poor diet, and vermin – resulted in considerable discomfort and sickness. By the second year of the First World War, one author reported that ‘many officers . . . fear lice more than they fear bullets’. This was the result of the irritation that the vermin caused, and the new awareness that they also

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Figure 10.4 Reinventing the Fly: This illustration, which was produced by the Committee on Health Problems, National Council of Education and American Medical Association, stressed the urgency of destroying the dangerous house fly.

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Figure 10.5 Fly Danger: This poster (1915), which was produced by the British Museum (Natural History), highlighted the threat from the filthy, germ-carrying fly, and suggested various remedies.

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carried typhus. But lice were not the only insects to cause nuisance and disease: flies were considered among the most significant ‘minor horrors of war’. The popular press issued a ‘call-to-arms’ against ‘an enemy more numerous and even more menacing to life and health than the Germans’: ‘the common house fly – the “winged Huns” ’. A distraught soldier wrote to his mother from near Ypres: ‘Soon life will be quite unbearable, and there will be any amount of disease spread by the flies.’ The noise from their buzzing on occasion drowned out the sound of an approaching shell. One soldier counted thirty-two dead flies in his shaving water and seventy-two from his shoulder to his wrist. With this kind of insect company, there were also reports that snipers would use fly swarms above trenches to locate potential targets. Flies were an undesirable but ubiquitous presence during war.13 Aware of the health threat posed by flies, the government and military acted quickly to combat the insect at the outbreak of war. The War Office appointed a three-man Entomological Commission (headed by Robert Newstead) in April 1915 to control and eradicate flies and other insects at the front. Before this, circulars were issued to every unit by the Director General of Medical Services outlining the best preventive methods to combat flies. Entomologists, like Newstead, Lefroy and Austen, took their expertise to sanitary commissions on the front lines. Similarly, members of the Royal Army Medical Corps were very sensitive to the possibility of the spread of infectious disease with the advent of war. Initially, they believed that fifteen years of sanitary education had left them well prepared: ‘no army was better equipped in knowledge of sanitary science affecting the field.’ They soon feared that this initial advantage was disappearing with losses of trained men and their replacement with less informed new recruits. ‘Therefore,’ it was stated, ‘unity in both statement and action of the medical profession is a factor of all importance . . .’ Drawing on his experience at Rouen in 1915, Captain P. J. Marett noted that complete lack of segregation made preventive measures difficult. Latrines, for instance, were often located next to kitchens. To address properly the chief ‘carrier’ diseases – enteric and the paratyphoids – a sustained attack had to be mounted against flies. Breeding grounds had to be assaulted; flies had to be killed; and food, latrines and patients had to be protected from the unwanted visitations of the winged foes.14 One of the greatest difficulties was the sheer quantity of excrement. The daily production of horse dung was estimated at one hundred tons in

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Rouen. Under wartime conditions, it was impracticable – if not impossible – to sell the dung as fertilizer. Similarly, it was difficult to burn all of it in specially constructed incinerators. In the first instance, heaps were made that were covered with quicklime, earth and hay. Some of it was dumped using a narrow gauge train line that led to a depression, where it was covered with quicklime and earth, and planted over with flower seeds donated by Messrs Carter & Sons. Fly populations were reduced by treating camps, in general, and latrines, in particular, with paraffin. Traps of 5 per cent formalin in lumps of sugar were suggested; and covers and netting were employed where required. Following the instructions of Lieutenant R. Newstead of the Entomological Commission, a boiled solution of five parts castor oil and eight parts resin was spread on paper or in tins as a substitute for flypaper. Fly brigades, of one non-commissioned officer and four men, sprayed cookhouses each week with formalin solutions of two ounces to the gallon. In addition, one man vigilantly laid tin traps around manure heaps and removed clusters of eggs. Marett estimated that this one man destroyed approximately 236,000 flies, in all their stages of development, each day.15 Where Do Flies Go in the WinterTime? Whether controlling mosquitoes to aid labour efficiency and development in the colonies or controlling house flies to ensure a commercially and militarily robust population at home, expert entomologists concerned themselves with vector ecology. To be effective, they had to be conversant with every facet of an insect’s life history, habits and habitat. In the course of their investigations for the Local Government Board, E. E. Austen and S. Monkton Copeman set out to determine if house flies hibernated. Common belief, they observed, dictated that fertilized female flies lay in a dormant state in nooks and crannies throughout the winter, and then laid their broods with the return of warm weather. In short, flies hibernated in their perfect state. But this common-sense belief had been challenged by Henry Skinner, an entomologist from Philadelphia, who declared, in the Entomological News for 1913, that ‘House flies pass the winter in the pupal state and in no other way.’ Copeman and Austen made a preliminary collection of hibernating flies, found in attics and other locations, but careful examination proved that none of the species collected was the true house fly. Austen observed: ‘In this matter the importance of accurate

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determination of species is obvious . . .’ The classifier had an important role to play in answering this pressing question. If the hibernating condition of flies was known, a means of attack could be devised for their non-active, and most vulnerable stage of development. Austen made an appeal to readers of The Entomologist to search out hibernating flies in every attic and nook and cranny, and to post them to himself or Copeman. This produced a torrent of flies at the British Museum (Natural History), but it was only a prelude to the vast deluge that would follow.16 Once identified as an intellectually urgent question, the wintertime repose of the house fly became contested territory for the competing specialisms that constituted medical entomology. A. E. Shipley reiterated the unexplained conundrum of the hibernating fly at a Royal Society of Arts lecture on the relation of insects to disease in early December 1915. In a letter to The Times, E. Halford Ross, of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and author of The Reduction of Domestic Flies (1913), responded to Shipley. Results of an experiment performed by himself and Dr Brinkner, of the Public Health Service of London, proved that bluebottle fly larvae passed the winter hibernating in manure. C. J. Gahan, of the British Museum (Natural History), was quick to note the mistaken classification of the medical practitioner. Shipley had asked about house flies, not bluebottles. Gahan declared that the work of French naturalist J. H. Fabre explained fully the hibernation of bluebottles.17 An exchange of six letters followed, in which the two men drew lines based on specialist knowledge of medical practitioner versus entomologist. Ross contended that Gahan was missing the point: flies were a threat to public health, whether house or bluebottle. If bluebottles hibernated as larvae, he argued, house flies must do the same. Gahan countered that the house fly was the principal enemy, and that it had a different, and as yet unexplained, life history from other flies. The habits of the house fly constituted the danger to public health. A comprehensive knowledge of the life history of house flies was required in order to cope with this danger most effectively; and life histories and habits were species specific. ‘In investigations of this kind,’ proclaimed Gahan, ‘the work of the systematist, or classifier, which is so apt to be misunderstood, proves to be of the utmost importance.’ He then invited readers of The Times to send specimens of flies to the British Museum (Natural History). Bruce Frederick Cummings, an assistant at the museum, wryly documented the ensuing response in his semi-fictional Journal of a Disappointed Man:

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Every morning sees more letters and more flies sent by all sorts of persons – we seem to have set the whole world searching for Houseflies – Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the Setting Room, and an Assistant’s whole time is devoted to identifying, arranging, listing, and reporting upon new arrivals . . . . The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along the corridor crying that Mr——had just found a Housefly in his room. We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a veritable Musca domestica. A consultation being held to sit on the body, a lady finally laid information that two ‘forced Houseflies’ hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested Mr——’s specimen was one of them. ‘How would it get from your room to Mr——’s?’ she was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of her window, up the garden and in Mr——’s window, or it may have gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to know why it should have entered Mr——’s room as he is not a dipterist but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly dispersed. Like E. Halford Ross, the fly showed little respect for the specialist distinctions of the insect classifier.18 Expert entomologists originally posed the question of house fly hibernation, but in the best sense of early twentieth-century ‘public science’, the debate spilled into the public press and expert scientists enlisted public assistance for their cause. The hibernating fly continued to haunt the halls of the British Museum (Natural History) and the imagination of the public for years to follow. F. M. Howlett announced in The Times that the whole matter was being subjected ‘to the test of practical experiment at Imperial College of Science’, and he invited the public to visit their ‘fly-room’. George Birdwood, in contrast, raised concern for the murderous motives driving the search for the fly’s winter repose. He offered readers a story of a fly which fed from the hand of a lady every night on fourteen occasions in November 1912. He considered this evidence that flies were human creatures, high up on the scale of ‘the

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84 millions millions of transmigrations’ through which the soul of Nature gradually ascends. This was not Lubbock’s taming of a wasp, but it accorded with Birdwood’s half-Hinduized philosophy. After this fanciful flight, the matter temporarily landed and settled in 1917 when Captain R. P. McDonnell and Staff-Serjeant T. Eastwood submitted the results of their investigations to the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Like Ross, they supported the theory of larval hibernation.19 Gahan returned to the fray in November 1919 with news that D. Keilin and M. E. Séguy had discovered that flies pass the winter in the shells of snails. Naturally, he requested readers to collect and send snails to the museum. Ross hailed the discovery, and asked Gahan to determine if other species passed the winter in snail shells. Unfortunately, he also made the fatal mistake of attributing a morphological trait of bluebottles to house flies: Gahan duly noted the slip. In the wake of the return of fly correspondence, The Times cautioned people against snail-hunting, and suggested that it was common sense that the house fly continued through the winter in all forms of development, and wherever life could be sustained. Austen objected that this remained unproven, and used the occasion to promote a new edition of his House Fly booklet. Ever confident, Lefroy proclaimed that he had long ago resolved the question through experimentation: house flies survive in all their stages, but if the temperature dips too low, the perfect fly dies. Gahan chastised Lefroy for his ‘cocksureness’, and argued that laboratory results were not an adequate explanation for the fly’s natural behaviour. A. D. Imms, writing from Rothamsted Experimental Station, suggested that ‘competent entomologists will, I think, agree with me that we need [more] investigations’. As entomologists continued to tie their expertise to the resolution of this mystery, and as letters continued to flood the popular press, a comic song arose, aptly entitled, ‘Where do Flies Go in the Wintertime?’20 ‘Where do flies go in the wintertime?’ was part of a broader public health and hygiene propaganda campaign. Wartime skirmishes with flies and fly-borne diseases intensified home-front campaigns against flies as agents in the spread of infantile diarrhoea. The deadly Diptera were frequently shown larger than life on posters, in films, and in popular magazines. The highly visible and tangible fly conveniently embodied old notions of dirt and filth and new fears of unseen germs. Public health organizations disseminated posters and songs that denounced flies and filth, and promoted cleanliness. One such song declared:

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There was a man in our town And he was wondrous wise; He covered up his garbage pail, To keep away the flies. Similarly, the ‘Song of the Fly’ explained: ‘The fly takes a season ticket from the rubbish heap to the milk jug and other things and this is his song’: Straight from the rubbish heap I come I never wash my feet. And every single chance I get I walk on what you eat. The Local Government Board undertook a series of investigations on ‘Flies as Carriers of Disease’ in the opening decades of the twentieth century. A ‘plague of flies’ at the village of Postwick, five miles east of Norwich, provided an opportunity for various experiments. Experts decided that the only explanation for the increased prevalence of flies was the recent creation of a dump at Whitlingham Marshes, half a mile from Postwick’s village church. They traced the flight of these filthy creatures by marking them with coloured chalk at the dump, and trapping them in the village. Through the agency of the fly, rubbish – the fundament of modernity – was revisited upon humanity. The fly traversed boundaries: it transported urban refuse, which had been deposited on rural ‘wasteland’, back to village homes.21 Risk, Fear and the Environment In his monograph The Housefly (1951), American Luther S. West pondered why almost forty years had elapsed since the last major study in English of the house fly. Multiple books, solely devoted to the house fly as disease carrier, were published in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Countless articles on the same subject appeared in the popular and specialist press. This flurry of interest in the house fly, however, had declined by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century. As a historical phenomenon, the campaign to highlight the house fly peril was part of the infant and child welfare movement, and the rise of a progressive, technocratic push for national efficiency as applied

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to public health and to the war effort (figure 10.6). For West, this historical context was not the most important factor in the scale and extent of fly campaigns at the turn of the twentieth century: ‘[O]nce popular interest had been aroused, imagination tended to outstrip the facts. The housefly seems to have become regarded by journalists as the criminal of the ages, and its elimination or suppression was heralded as the panacea for most human ills.’ Fear, of course, was not unique to the twentieth century, but the house fly campaign is perhaps best explained within the context of fear born of the rise of the ‘risk society’.22 At a time when the prospect of major mortality crises, from famine or epidemic disease, seemed to be a thing of the past in Britain and the USA, the house fly became the focus for emergent technocrats who collectively sought to manage lingering threats (figure 10.7). Experts and commentators consistently depicted the fly as a product of humanity. Although it was a creature of nature, the fly had been assured growth and survival by the rise of urban industrial society and its attendant problems of overcrowding and waste. The indeterminate threat of germs, therefore, carried the same freight of fear as later mega-hazards, such as genetics and nuclear radiation. Flies were the embodiment of unseen germs: they were ‘germs with legs’. The literature of fear that surrounded the fly literally magnified the insect as part of the assessment of the threat. Illustrations often featured Godzilla-like flies hovering over cities or over babies. Furthermore, the metaphor of war slipped into the rhetoric and reality of anti-fly campaigns as the technology of entomologists and military engineers merged in the form of insecticides and gases. Identical poisonous gases were used against both insect and human ‘enemies’.23 But fear and bellicose technocrats provide incomplete historical explanations for early twentieth-century campaigns against the house fly. Economic entomologists did not acquire knowledge of insect pests and vectors of disease, and then manufacture the menace of house flies. Campaigns against the house fly were not simply emergent malariology transferred to Britain’s temperate shores. Environmental conditions produced a resurgence of house flies in late nineteenth-century Britain. Flies, as a significant danger to human health, were a lingering reminder of a past demographic regime in Britain in which insect-borne diseases played a significant role. Infant mortality in Britain, in fact, increased after 1870 at a time when adult mortality began to decline. The greatest single cause of infant mortality in towns was diarrhoeal diseases.24

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 10.6 An Enormous Threat to Babies: This illustration was part of the self-described ‘public health propaganda’ of the Central Council for Education in the early twentieth century.

Front-line conditions of war concentrated and magnified sanitary problems with which the British home-front had struggled for a number of years. A recent historical case study of a large town, Preston in Lancashire, contends that an increase in the fly population was a significant contributing factor in the anomalous rise in infant mortality in the late nineteenth century. Increasing growth of large towns and cities created a new urban geography that fuelled an increase in horses. Although the middle-class shift to suburban living may have been aided by a change in transportation technology, it generated an expansion of

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Figure 10.7 Fly Monster: The threat of the house fly loomed large over urban North America.

small manufactures and businesses within the city that relied on horse transportation to service suburban markets. Between 1851 and 1911, the number of horse-drawn carts, vans and wagons in Britain grew from 200,000 to 800,000. Within the commercial sector alone, the number of horses doubled between 1850 and 1870 and then doubled again between 1870 and 1900: by 1890, Britain’s off-farm horse population exceeded its on-farm population. Each urban horse produced between 15 and 30 pounds of dung and gallons of urine every day, which provided ideal feeding and breeding grounds for flies, the vectors of infant diarrhoea. In Preston in 1880, horses would have produced about 600 tons of manure per square mile. By 1900 this figure would have risen to 1,600 tons. Under these circumstances, infant mortality in Britain did not begin to decline until the automobile began to replace the horse, and until public health and sanitation reforms became pervasive after the second decade of the twentieth century.25 Modern Fly On the eve of the Enlightenment, Sir William Temple, diplomat, essayist and mentor of Jonathan Swift, had contended that flies – wallowing in filth for their fleeting existence – were the exemplars of modernity.

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Post-Enlightenment scientists would, in contrast, associate modernity with the power of human reason to control and manipulate the natural world. Agricultural science, tropical medicine, public health and sanitation helped to shape an increasingly self-conscious body of modern professional, expert economic entomologists. Timothy Mitchell, however, reminds us that despite humanity’s best efforts to subject the non-human natural world to expertise and planning, there were always unforeseen or unintended consequences. National politics and scientific expertise, he argues, arose as a bid to manage the gap between rational human planning and the natural world. By the turn of the twentieth century, expert economic entomologists had seemingly closed the gap between humanity and nature in their discussions of the house fly problem: they consistently depicted the fly as a product of humanity. In this respect, house flies offer an alternative narrative of the development of medical entomology in Britain. Medical entomology, as the study of insects that act as intermediate hosts for pathogenic organisms, resulted from developments in parasitology and bacteriology, and from methodological and technical changes in biomedicine. British involvement in this process largely occurred in a colonial context, but environmental conditions in Britain converged to produce an increased incidence of fly-borne disease and thereby helped to shape the role of economic entomologists within the rubric of medical entomology.26

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y their own repeated admission, entomologists struggled to achieve recognition and respect throughout the nineteenth century. The diminutive size of insects rendered entomology a perceived ‘futile and childish’ pastime. Failure to outgrow the childish delight in insects was construed as deviant behaviour. Thus Moses Harris recounted the perhaps apocryphal tale of Eleanor Glanville, whose will was contested on the basis of her passion for butterfly collecting: a clear mark of lunacy. Joseph Conrad’s misanthropic Stein sought solace in his collection of beetles – ‘horrible miniature monsters, looking malevolent in death and immobility’. And Arthur Conan Doyle, on more than one occasion, found a homicidal villain lurking in the person of an entomologist, for he was a ‘creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart’. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes’s obsession for the rational capture and collection of criminals proves the only match for Stapleton: ‘We have him, Watson, we have him, and I dare swear that before tomorrow night he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies. A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!’1 ‘Entomologists, like the objects of their research, may be classified,’ claimed J. O. Westwood in 1838. He proposed a hierarchy of entomologists, at the base of which he placed the amateur. Single-minded devotion to the acquisition of a collection of beautiful insects was, he claimed, the mark of this lowest class of entomologists. A decade earlier, Kirby and

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Spence had employed the same definition: a ‘mere amateur’ would be content to fill his cabinet with nameless, beautiful insects. Kirby and Spence contrasted amateur butterfly hunters with systematic entomologists, who named their insects and published new descriptions of species and genera. Similarly, Westwood placed systematic entomologists above amateurs, but he acknowledged ‘philosophical observers of nature’ as yet a higher class of entomologist because they concerned themselves with the structure and economy of insects. The ‘good naturalist’ sat at the pinnacle of Westwood’s hierarchy. He studied relevant scholarship and he appreciated anatomy, adaptation of structure to habits, and relationships between species and with the environment. In the early nineteenth century, Kirby, Spence and Westwood contrasted amateur with scientific entomologists. By their own definitions, none of them were amateurs, in spite of the fact that only Westwood earned his living from science and all of them were field-based naturalists.2 Historically, the amateur is often identified with descriptive, fieldbased natural history; and as the antithesis of the laboratory-based professional biologist. According to this formula, natural history is a recreational pursuit and biology is a vocation. An examination of nineteenth-century entomology reveals the limitations of these static distinctions between amateur and professional scientists. According to their contemporary definitions, none of the principal subjects of this book was an amateur. All wished to establish themselves as elite practitioners of science in a bid to achieve or retain cultural authority. This book affirms the necessity of retrieving local contexts for scientific expertise in nineteenth-century Britain. Thus a Tory High Churchman used circular classification of insects and comparative psychology of bees to buttress the traditional land-based governance of British society. And the detached experimental analysis of ants, bees and wasps permitted a Whig-liberal scientist to impugn any natural basis to socialist forms of governance. Management and control of agricultural pests and insecticides permitted a socially marginalized spinster to become a de facto government scientist. Darwinian explanations of protective mimicry in butterflies allowed a new generation of entomologists to control their specialist science at an ancient university and at a learned metropolitan institution. And classification and control of mosquitoes and house flies made entomologists expert guardians of the labour and economy of empire. Bugs and the Victorians challenges the historical conceptions of

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entomology as either a morass of taxonomic systems, or as an amateur pursuit which was excluded from experimental science and industrial or government initiatives. Elite entomologists organized for intellectual and cultural rather than professional reasons.3 Shifting boundaries between nature and society necessitate attention to the varied social roles of scientists. Relatively recently ‘the politics of evolution’ has been located in the early nineteenth-century. The relocation of the evolutionary debate from the ‘age of equipoise’ in the 1860s to the ‘age of conflict’ in the 1820s and 1830s opens exciting possibilities for historical study of the ways in which individuals deployed a specialist knowledge of the natural world to achieve prestige and power. Kirby, Spence and Westwood envisioned serious scientific entomology as a buttress to religion in its fight against creeping atheism. The complete lack of political consensus in the early nineteenth century, however, produced a broad spectrum of politico-religious approaches to the natural world. Historical examination of natural theology requires the delineation of individual idiosyncrasies and nuances. As contributions to early nineteenth-century reviews illustrated, sectarianism was rife within British intellectual culture. An over-reliance on the explanatory value of a ‘common context’ and a unified, organic culture glosses over these divisions and distinctions. Tory science, for example, could resist ‘innovation’ but still embrace Burkean reform to produce a systematic study of the natural world that was a departure from traditional natural history. Similarly, agricultural entomology arose out of a Tory protectionist commitment to improvement, only to experience a renaissance at mid-century under the LiberalConservative banner of high farming and free trade.4 Within the history of science, professionalization and the formation of scientific disciplines are often presented as simply synonymous. The ‘professional ideal’, however, spread beyond the laboratories and institutions of higher education. The rise to dominance of scientific naturalism reflected transitions in capitalist society. The specialized expertise and ‘human capital’ of experimentalism displaced the collection and classification of natural history. Moreover, T. H. Huxley explicitly promoted his ‘biology’ as a generalist science of life. As the descendants of the Whig tradition in science, the practitioners of scientific naturalism purported to rise above early nineteenth-century partisan sectarianism. Whereas William Kirby’s entomology was a Tory appeal for the preservation of the status quo, John Lubbock claimed the mantle of scientific disinterestedness.

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Professionalism in science did not mean the immediate fragmentation of a natural theological ‘common context’. Scientific naturalists sought an alternative generalist cultural through liberalism and a specialized, secular knowledge of the natural world. They did not cultivate strong disciplinary boundaries. John Lubbock, therefore, pursued a laboratory-based professional ideal but did little to promote the specialist field of entomology. Huxley, Lubbock and their fellow members of the X Club were the intellectual aristocracy of the cult of science, and not the proponents of the balkanization of science into separate disciplines. The professional ideal of scientific naturalism was a keystone of a Whig-liberal cultural consensus rather than simply a tool for occupational status.5 Edward Poulton’s career demonstrates that laboratory-based experimentalist science was not the only alternative to natural history, founded on collection and classification. Poulton made concerted efforts to institutionalize field-based natural history at the University of Oxford and at the Entomological Society of London. Poulton and his circle deployed terminology from both the early and late nineteenth century in their bid to monopolize expertise and authority. They presented Batesian and Müllerian mimicry as reputable ‘philosophical’ and ‘biological’ entomology which challenged the taxonomic hegemony at the Society. Attending a meeting of the Society in 1914, Bruce F. Cummings testified to Poulton’s success: It was really a one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our country’s butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got up and barked ‘Mendelian characters’, or ‘Germ plasm’, what time the obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. Poulton drew upon neo-Darwinian naturalistic explanations of mimicry to give his entomology intellectual respectability.6 The history of nineteenth-century entomology is instructive precisely because it seemed to eschew the trend towards laboratory-based professional science. The apparent paucity of institutional trappings often leads to the assumption that entomology blithely avoided serious science, which grappled with some of the nineteenth century’s most pressing

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existential questions. In this respect, it is worth remembering that the best known example of Darwinian evolution in action involves a rather drab insect’s evolutionary adaptation to the smoke and soot belched from the smokestacks of the workshop of the world. The peppered moth of England now occupies a prominent position as a standard textbook example of evolution by natural selection. According to the classic account, coal-black melanic forms of this moth began to replace the light grey ‘typical’ forms in the mid-nineteenth century. In the face of industrial pollution, light-coloured lichens ceased to grow on tree trunks and, therefore, rendered the light grey moths more conspicuous to predatory birds. In contrast, the exposed dark-coloured tree trunks now afforded the melanic forms of the moth camouflage. As expounded by Bernard Kettlewell in the mid-twentieth century, industrial melanism provided the ‘missing link’ to Darwin’s theory of evolution. It demonstrated selective adaptation in action as new melanic forms of peppered moths replaced light typicals in Britain’s increasingly industrialized environment. But the ‘missing link’ was actually a continuation of nineteenthcentury entomological contributions to evolution by natural selection.7 Recently, the peppered moth has assumed a central place in the battle between Darwinian science and creationism. An insect, therefore, is the focus of competing world-views of secular evolutionism and religious design. The author of one account of the controversy surrounding the peppered moth seems to flirt with counterfactual history: ‘What if ’, she asks, ‘Darwin had fancied Lepidoptera instead of pigeons? What if he’d been in the habit of reading entomology journals and had come across reports of the strange black moths in the industrial regions?’ Darwin, she misleadingly informs us, was unfortunately too preoccupied with barnacles at the time to notice reports of melanic moths. As we have seen, Darwin never truly ‘missed’ the significance of cryptic coloration for his theory of evolution; and nineteenth-century entomologists were not strictly amateur parson naturalists, or bug hunters, intent on amassing an inventory of God’s design. Darwin openly celebrated Batesian mimicry as the triumph of natural selection over ‘creationism’. Moreover, he acknowledged that Bates’s explication of mimetic resemblance held equally well for ‘the innumerable instances of insects imitating the bark of trees, lichens, sticks, and green leaves’. The evolutionary account of mimicry in insects provided strong supporting evidence for natural selection and conceptual foundations for serious entomologists.8

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In spite of apparent impediments, nineteenth-century entomologists made significant contributions to theoretical discussions in zoology. Turning the numbers argument on its head, H. W. Bates asserted that the great variety and fecundity of the insect world meant that entomology was the most likely key to unlock the secrets of the formation of new and distinct species (that is, speciation). The social insects (ants, bees, wasps and termites), however, provided entomology with its greatest tool for overcoming estrangement from zoology. Throughout the nineteenth century, the social insects played an important role in debates surrounding the transformationists’ search for the origins of life. Although the scientific naturalists openly rejected many of the anthropocentric trappings of natural theology, they required biological evidence for the evolutionary relationship between human and animal. Explications of intelligent insects affirmed the existence of a mental continuum between ‘man and beast’. Moreover, descriptions of insect societies allowed naturalists to naturalize their preferred political ideologies.9 Although they honed their entomological skills through their contributions to the theory of mimicry, entomologists such as J. C. F. Fryer and Guy Marshall established careers in economic entomology. In this respect, they owed their livelihoods to the emergence of a new type of scientist – the ‘expert’. Because they had ‘sold their souls for a good price’, Huxley denigrated them as mere traders. Unlike Huxley and his circle of scientific naturalists, economic entomologists did not purport to be an intellectual aristocracy, holding the keys to fundamental philosophical questions. They were experts, willing to yoke their knowledge to commercial and governmental initiatives. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic entomology became an integral part of a scientific endeavour to increase agricultural yields. The rebirth of agricultural science at mid-century provided impetus to the study of economic entomology. It was part of an emergent statecraft bent on measurement, management and control of the natural world and its subjects. This managerial revolution yoked science to agriculture – and insecticides to entomological expertise – in nineteenth-century Britain. Because economic entomology most closely adhered to the emergent model of a professional occupational scientist, the subsequent fortunes of entomology became intimately linked with insecticides. Moreover, expert agricultural and medical entomologists honed and transformed their study of insects as a colonial science. As pests of

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agricultural crops and as vectors of debilitating diseases, insects constituted formidable barriers to colonial settlement and development. Although recent histories of science have been sensitive to the shifting relationships between cores and peripheries of empire, less attention has been given to the overlap of personnel and institutions that resulted from the development of agricultural science as an anti-depression measure in Great Britain, and as a ‘tool of empire’ in the colonies. This has often occurred because the roots of medical entomology have been sought in

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Figure 11.1 Insects Are My Life: This engraving from c. 1830 captures the human form that often shaped our interpretation of the insect world.

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tropical medicine without proper consideration for the role of British economic entomology. The ideology of constructive imperialism undoubtedly played a central role in the institutionalization of medical entomology in Britain, but tropical medicine’s commitment to vector control drew upon established knowledge and institutions within agricultural science. Progressive celebratory histories of medical entomology recount early speculations about the connections between insects and disease in order to locate the discipline within the specialism of tropical medicine. More appropriately, the early history of medical entomology should be seen in the context of an emergent specialism of economic entomology, which sought to identify and control insects that were baneful and beneficial to agriculture and human health. G. Spratt’s print of the Entomologist from 1830 nicely captures the essence of bugs and the Victorians (figure 11.1). Whereas numerous insect parts constitute the entomologist, a multitude of human cultural assumptions and experiences constitute the insect. As a pluralistic science, still well within the domain of general culture, nineteenth-century entomology offers a fascinating perspective on the varied social roles of persons engaged in the production and dissemination of science. Although closely related to one another, secularization, professionalization, discipline formation, and the emergence of the expert were not identical processes. The history of entomology in the nineteenth century is the story of political and cultural authority derived from expert knowledge of the insects. It is the story of how God was found in the hinges of the wings of an earwig; of how a savage wasp was tamed; and of how a fly became the most dangerous animal on earth.

NOTES

Where references also appear in the Select Bibliography, only short titles are given here. References not in the Select Bibliography are in full the first time they appear in the notes.

1 Introduction 1. Henry Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot Climates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 71 (1781), 139–91 (151). 2. Donald Worster, ‘History as Natural History’, in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 30–44 (p. 30). May R. Berenbaum, Bugs in the System: Insects and their Impact on Human Affairs (Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1995), p. 258. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 304. 3. Francis J. Griffin, ‘Henry Smeathman [?–1786]’, Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society, series A, 17 (1942), 1–9. Extracts from Mr Henry Smeathman’s Journal, 17 Dec. 1771, Uppsala University MS D 26. 4. Henry Smeathman to Joseph Banks, 12 Apr. 1773; Henry Smeathman to Dru Drury, 10 May 1773; Henry Smeathman, ‘A Kind of Journal’, 23 Feb. 1775, Uppsala University MS D 26. In addition, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, esp. pp. 38–68. 5. Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 1–24. Farber, Finding Order in Nature, esp. pp. 1–45; and Jacques Roger, ‘The Living World’, in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of EighteenthCentury Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 255–83. 6. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, pp. 49–51. C. E. Raven, John Ray: Naturalist, 2nd edn (1950; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 101–2; S. Peter Dance, The Art of Natural History (1981; repr. London: Bracken Books, 1989), p. 190, for a reproduction of the engraving. See Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology, pp. 158–70, for the close relationship between early microscopy and insects. 7. Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites’, 139–40. Christopher O’Toole, Alien Empire (London: BBC Books, 1995), p. 178. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 4;

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

N O T E S t o p p. 6 – 12 William B. Ashworth, Jr, ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’, in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 17–37. Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites’, 145. Roy Porter, Enlightenment, p. 27. Porter, Enlightenment, pp. 295–319. Outram, ‘Science and Political Ideology’. Edmund R. Leach, ‘Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse’, in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (eds), Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 4th edn (London: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 153–66 (esp. pp. 160–1). Paley, Natural Theology, p. 346; Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 175. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans, p. 60. John Brewer and Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–15; Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology’, esp. 814–16; and William Noblett, ‘Dru Drury, his Illustrations of Natural History (1770–82) and the European Market for Printed Books’, Quaerendo, 15 (1985), 83–102. Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, p. 13. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, pp. 96–9, 139. Kathryn Hughes, ‘Introduction to Facsimile Edition’ of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (London: Cassell, 2000), p. ii. Barber, The Heyday of Natural History. Kirby and Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), pp. 7–8. Roy Porter, ‘The New Taste for Nature in the Eighteenth Century’, The Linnean, 4 (1988), 14–30. Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites’, 139. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion, pp. 196–225; and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 125–65 (p. 133). Paley, Natural Theology, pp. 577, 578, 579. Porter, Enlightenment, p. 298. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), p. 10. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, p. 101. Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science; Jack Morrell, ‘Individualism and the Structure of British Science in 1830’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 183–204; and G. Foote, ‘The Place of Science in the British Reform Movement, 1830–50’, Isis, 42 (1951), 192–208. [Edward Newman], ‘Stephens v. Rennie and Orr’ and ‘Stephens v. Rennie’, Entomological Magazine, 1 (1832–3), 88–90. Edward Newman, ‘Establishment of the Entomological Society of London’, Entomological Magazine, 1 (1832–3), 390–4 (390); Griffin, ‘The First Entomological Societies’, 49–68; Neave and Griffin, The History of the Entomological Society of London, pp. 1–12; Brian O. C. Gardiner, ‘A Short Account of the Royal Entomological Society and of the Progress of Entomology in Britain (1833–1999)’, in Pedersen, A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomological Society, pp. 1–30; and Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, pp. 29–43. Sydney Ross, ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word’, Annals of Science, 18 (1962), 65–85. Kirby and Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn (1856), p. 582. H. T. Stainton, ‘Preface’ to The Entomologist’s Annual (1855), p. iii. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, pp. 85–6. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions, pp. 1–31. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, pp. 66–78. D. E. Allen, ‘The Early Professional in British Natural History’, in A. Wheeler and J. H. Price (eds), From Linnaeus to Darwin (London: Society for the History of Natural History, 1985), pp. 1–12. Henry Smeathman to James Lee, 9 Apr. 1773, Uppsala University MS D 26. James Riley, ‘Insects and the European Mortality Decline’, 852. Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction’. In addition, see Smeathman, ‘Some Account of the Termites’, 146–7, for a similar natural theological explanation of the termite. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, pp. 1–8. Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 1–2. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 129–33. Peter Coates, ‘Clio’s New Greenhouse’, History Today, 46 (1996), 15–22 (22). H. Maxwell-Lefroy (assisted by F. M. Howlett), Indian Insect Life:

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A Manual of the Insects of the Plains (Tropical India) (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1909), p. 3. 22. John Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 79–111 (pp. 85, 105, 102, 109).

2 The Politics of Insects 1. William Kirby as quoted in Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, p. 80. For a personal recollection of the genesis of the Introduction to Entomology, see William Spence’s contribution in Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, ch. 15, pp. 265–327; reprinted in Kirby and Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn, appendix, pp. 569–607. All references herein are from the latter source. I have used Spence’s detailed summary of the authorship of portions of the Introduction (pp. 596–8) to attribute specific passages to each individual. The following is a summary of the publication history of the four volumes of the Introduction to Entomology (1815–56): vol. 1: 1815 (750 copies), 1816, 1817, 1822, 1828, 1843, 1856; vol. 2: 1817, 1818, 1823, 1828, 1843, 1856; vols 3 and 4: 1826, 1828. Lorenz Oken translated the four volumes into German between 1823 and 1833. 2. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, p. 102; James Wilson, A Treatise on Insects (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1835), p. 14, quoted in Prete and Wolfe, ‘Religious Supplicant, Seductive Cannibal, or Reflex Machine?’, p. 105, n. 48; ‘Kirby and Spence’s Entomology’, Gardener’s Chronicle, 2 (3 Dec. 1842), 808; Charles J. S. Bethune, ‘To Correspondents’, Canadian Entomologist, 1 (15 Sept. 1868), 15. 3. Hilton, ‘The Politics of Anatomy’, 183. For a useful and fascinating comparison, see Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. David M. Knight, Natural Science Books in English 1600–1900 (London: Portman Books, 1972), p. 94. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, esp. pp. 70–1. Macleay Papers: W. Kirby to A. Macleay, 38: 6 Mar. 1809; W. Spence to A. Macleay, 176: 12 Mar. 1817; W. Kirby to A. Macleay, 25: 4 July 1807; and 34: 10 Oct. 1807. 5. Parish Records, Bishop Burton (PE 140/4, p. 10), Archives and Records Service, County Hall, Beverley. For biographical background, see J. F. M. Clark, ‘William Spence (1782–1860)’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 51, pp. 813–14. 6. See the letters between Kirby and Spence, dated 7 Jan. 1808, 12 Oct. 1808 and 15 Nov. 1808, printed in Spence, in An Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn (1856), pp. 581–2. On the pamphlet war generated by Spence’s Britain Independent of Commerce, see Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, p. 56. Spence contacted Cadell & Davies to publish his completed manuscript of Britain Independent of Commerce on 21 July 1807. See Autograph Letters etc. 1611–1884, Add. MSS. 37951, ff. 15–16, British Library. 7. Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, pp. 80–109, 46. For his specific comments on Spence, see ibid., pp. 110–11. For an account of the long history of a similar cyclical ‘Oeconomy of Nature’, see Worster, Nature’s Economy, pp. 33–8. Ronald L. Meek, ‘Physiocracy and Classicism in Britain’, in his The Economics of Physiocracy, pp. 345–63 (p. 352). ‘Foreign trade’ was the unnecessary or ‘sterile’ form of ‘commerce’. Spence, Britain Independent of Commerce, pp. 28–9. 8. Checkland, ‘The Advent of Academic Economics in England’, pp. 43–70; Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, p. 200; and Hilton, The Age of Atonement, pp. 37–8. Rashid, ‘Richard Whately’; Waterman, ‘The Ideological Alliance’; and Hilton, The Age of Atonement. 9. Rev. Thomas Chalmers, An Enquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources (Edinburgh: Oliphant & Brown, 1808), appendix, pp. 343–65, on p. 343. Thomas

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11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

N O T E S t o p p. 1 8 – 21 Chalmers plays a central role in the recent studies of ‘Christian Political Economy’. See Hilton, The Age of Atonement, passim; and Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, pp. 217–52. T. R. Malthus (?) or H. Brougham (?), ‘Spence on Commerce’, Edinburgh Review, 11 (1808), 319–40; [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Spence on Agriculture and Commerce’, Edinburgh Review, 14 (1809), 50–60. The latter was a review of Spence’s Agriculture the Source of Wealth in Britain (1808), which was a reply to James Mill and to the Edinburgh Review. This second work quoted extensively from Malthus to support its case. J. R. McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy (London: Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1845), p. 56. Karl Marx, A History of Economic Theories from the Physiocrats to Adam Smith, ed. Karl Kautsky, trans. Terence McCarthy (New York: Langland Press, 1952), pp. 49–50. ‘Wilson’s Illustrations of Zoology’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 22 (June 1828), 856–73 (872). On the ultra-Toryism of Blackwood’s, see Salim Rashid, ‘David Robinson and the Tory macroeconomics of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’, History of Political Economy, 10 (1978), 258–70. Ronald L. Meek, ‘Physiocracy and the Early Theories of Under-Consumptionism’, in his The Economics of Physiocracy, pp. 313–44. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade, pp. 56–60, for a discussion of the ‘Spence–Mill debate of 1808’. Meek, ‘Physiocracy and Classicism in Britain’, pp. 355–6. [William Cobbett], ‘Summary of Politics’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 12 (7 Nov. 1808), 705–14; ibid., 12 (21 Nov. 1807), 801–23; ibid., 12 (28 Nov. 1807), 833–49; ibid., 12 (5 Dec. 1807), 865–81; ibid., 12 (12 Dec. 1807), 897–915. For an excellent treatment of Cobbett’s attraction to Spence’s Britain Independent of Commerce, see Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, pp. 49–51. According to E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 820–37 (p. 820), passim, ‘It was Cobbett who created the Radical intellectual culture . . .’ Martin J. Weiner, ‘The Changing Image of William Cobbett’, Journal of British Studies, 13 (1974), 135–54; and Ian Dyck, ‘From “Rabble” to “Chopstick”: The Radicalism of William Cobbett’, Albion, 21 (Spring 1989), 56–87. William Cobbett, ‘To Parson Malthus. On the Rights of the Poor; and on the cruelty recommended by him to be exercised towards the Poor’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 34 (8 May 1819), 1019–47 (1019, 1021). On Malthus, see Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, p. 97. In Spence’s Britain Independent of Commerce, I have managed to find only one reference to the ‘Creator’ (p. 28), and it is part of his summary of Malthus’s Essay. Burke, of course, did not restrict his deployment of the term ‘property’ to land. Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought’, 604. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), [dedication]; Spence, The Objections against the Corn Bill Refuted. In addition, see Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, pp. 116–45; and Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 3–30. David Philip Miller, ‘Between Hostile Camps: Sir Humphry Davy’s Presidency of the Royal Society of London, 1820–1827’, British Journal for the History of Science, 16 (1983), 1–47; David Philip Miller, ‘Sir Joseph Banks: An Historical Perspective’, History of Science, 19 (1981), 284–92; and John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Drayton, Nature’s Government. Mike Fitton and Sharon Shute, ‘Sir Joseph Banks’s Collection of Insects’, in Sir Joseph Banks: A Global Perspective (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1994), pp. 209–11. For the significance of type specimens, see Farber, ‘A Historical Perspective’. B. B. Woodward, ‘Spence, William (1783–1860)’, in Sidney Smith (ed.) Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1909), p. 748. A perusal of Warren R. Dawson (ed.), The Banks Letters: A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, Preserved in the British

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

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Museum, the British Museum (Natural History) and Other Collections in Great Britain (London: British Museum, 1958), reveals no extant correspondence with Kirby or Spence. The latter individual, however, carried a letter from Banks to Martin van Marum when he visited the Continent in 1815. Part of the letter involved an introduction for Spence (p. 587). Both Kirby and Spence contributed to the subscription fund for a marble statue of Sir Joseph Banks in 1821. See Wm Kirby to Joseph Sabine, 3 Aug. 1821, and Wm Spence to Joseph Sabine, 15 Aug. 1821, Papers Concerning the Statue of Sir Joseph Banks, Add. MSS. 32,166, ff. 88, 96, British Library. Chambers and Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, pp. 34–147; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’, pp. 126–31, 79; Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought’, p. 603. H. S. A. Fox, ‘Local Farmers’ Associations and the Circulation of Agricultural Information in Nineteenth-Century England’, in H. S. A. Fox and R. A. Butlin (eds), Change in the Countryside: Essays on Rural England, 1500–1900 (London: Institute of British Geographers, 1979), pp.43–63. Chambers and Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, pp. 112–13; Bethell, Extracts from the Minutes of the Holderness Agricultural Society, pp. 1–7. Bethell, Extracts from the Minutes pp. 68–88, 25, 31, 125, 194–5. In the Introduction, Spence used observations communicated to him by William Stickney as evidence for his ‘letter’ on instinct. See Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 2 (1817), p. 528. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, esp. pp. 1–74. Spence, Britain Independent of Commerce, pp. 66, 70, 47; Young, ‘On the Hessian Fly’, p. 389. Banks, ‘General Report of Sir Joseph Banks’, p. 445. For a comprehensive picture of the government’s response to the Hessian fly scare of 1788, see ‘Proceedings of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and Information Received, Respecting an Insect Supposed to Infest the Wheat of the Territories of the United States of America’, Annals of Agriculture, 11 (1789), 402–614. Pauly, ‘Fighting the Hessian Fly’, pp. 494, 497. Spence, Objections against the Corn Bill Refuted, pp. 24, 2. For Spence’s background in commerce, see Clark, ‘William Spence (1782–1860)’, pp. 813–14. Upon sending his subscription of £2.2.0 for the monument to Sir Joseph Banks, Kirby explained: ‘I wish I could give more but times press heavily upon all who depend upon agriculture.’ See Kirby to Joseph Sabine, 3 Aug. 1821, Papers Concerning the Statue of Sir Joseph Banks. For a nice illustration of Kirby’s combination of religious and scientific vocation, see William Kirby to W. S. Macleay, 243: 6 Dec. 1824, Macleay Papers: As an addendum to a discussion of the reproduction of insects, he notes: ‘I write this in a publick House at Clayden where I am receiving my tithes . . .’. Armstrong, The English ParsonNaturalist, p. 14. Letter from William Kirby, dated Aug. 1795, in Thomas Marsham, ‘Observations on the Insects that infested Corn in the year 1795. In a Letter to the Rev. Samuel Goodenough’, Transactions of the Linnean Society, 3 (1797), 246–9. See ibid., 251, for Marsham’s contact with Sir Joseph Banks. William Kirby, ‘History of Tipula Tritici, and Ichneumon Tipulae, with Some Observations upon Insects that Attend the Wheat, in a Letter to Thomas Marsham’, Transactions of the Linnean Society, 4 (1798), 230–9; William Kirby, ‘A Continuation of the History of Tipula Tritici, in a Letter to Thomas Marsham’, Transactions of the Linnean Society, 5 (1800), 96–11 William Kirby, ‘Observations upon Certain Fungi; which are Parasites of the Wheat’, ibid., 112–25; and William Kirby, ‘Some Observations upon Insects that prey upon Timber, with a Short History of the Cerambyx violaceus of Linnaeus’, ibid., 246–60. Kirby, ‘A Continuation’, pp. 105–6, n. (b); ‘History of Insects’, Edinburgh Review, 37 (June 1822), 122–36 (122). For a wider reading of ‘utility’, see Roy Porter, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of a Science of Geology’, in M. Teich and R. Young (eds), Changing Perspectives

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

N O T E S t o p p. 2 5 – 30 in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 320–43. William Kirby to W. S. Macleay, 237: 11 Jan. 1824; Kirby to Alexander Macleay, 149: 10 May 1819, MacLeay Papers. Garfinkle, ‘Science and Religion in England’; and Isaac Kramnick, ‘EighteenthCentury Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 1–30. Robert Nares(?) or William Beloe(?), British Critic, 18 (July-Dec. 1801), i, quoted in Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, p. 2. I recognize changing meanings over time, so I restrict mine to the ‘High Church Toryism’ of the 1790s (with full knowledge that no contemporary would have publicly accepted the label ‘Tory’ prior to the 1820s). I include under this rubric church-and-king supporters and anti-Jacobins. Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, p. 35; Inkster, ‘London Science and the Seditious Meetings Act’; and Weindling, ‘Science and Sedition’. R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783–1852 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 4–5; ‘J. Cantaur’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 68 (May 1798), 385–6; Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, pp. 30–1, 36; Austin Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792–3’, Historical Journal, 4 (1961), 56–77 (65). Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 35–6, 53–4, 168, 233–5. On the politicoreligious implications of pre- and post-millennialism, see Hilton, The Age of Atonement, pp. 16–17. Armstrong, The English Parson-Naturalist, pp. 1–9. Tuxen, ‘The Entomologist, J. C. Fabricius’, pp. 1–14; and Bengt-Olof Landin, ‘Fabricius, Johann Christian’, in Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (16 vols, 1970; repr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), vol. 3, pp. 512–13. Sloan, ‘John Locke, John Ray’, 1–53; and Winsor, ‘The Development of Linnaean Insect Classification’. Although littered with small errors when it strays into biographical details, Wilson and Doner, The Historical Development of Insect Classification, is a useful overview of the subject. Kirby, Monographia Apum Angliae, vol. 1, pp. 38–40. Dupuis, ‘Pierre-André Latreille (1762–1833)’. For Kirby’s suspicions of Latreille’s equivocation, see William Kirby to W. S. Macleay, 232: 29 Apr. 1823, Macleay Papers. Kirby, Monographia Apum Angliae, vol. 1, pp. 116–19. Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research’, in his The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), pp. 225–39; Correspondence of Robert Brown, Add. MSS 32 439, f. 323, British Library. Kirby, quoted in Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 178–9; Kirby, Monographia Apum Angliae, vol. 1, pp. 170–1, 6–8. See also ‘Kirby’s Monographia Apum Angliae’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 13 (Sept. 1802), 19–22 (20); and ‘Kirby’s Monographia Apum Angliae’, British Critic, 22 (Oct. 1803), 405–13 (406). By way of an interesting contrast, in a letter dated 30 June 1810, William Spence complimented Robert Brown on his ‘innovation in the use of nominatives in the Specific’ characters in a recent botanical work. See Correspondence of Robert Brown, Add. MSS 32 439, f. 323, British Library. Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 1195, s.v. ‘novitas’, 4c. ‘novitas rerum’ – ‘a changed situation in the state, revolution’; p. 1196 s.v. ‘novus’, 10a. – ‘constitutional changes, revolution’; 10b. – ‘(of plans, activities, etc.), subversive, seditious’. Burke to le Chevalier de Rivarol, 1 June 1791, in Edmund Burke, Correspondence, ed. T. W. Copeland (9 vols, 1958–70), vol. 6, p. 268, quoted in Frank O’Gorman, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 123. For a discussion of the Burkean conservative distinction between change and reform, see Ted Honderich, Conservatism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), pp. 1–16. The nineteenth-century compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary noted this Burkean

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36.

37.

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distinction: s.v. ‘Innovate, 3. 1796. Burke Lett. noble Ld. Wlks. VIII 20 “It cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept . . . to innovate is not to reform.” ’ Charles Daubeny, A Guide to the Church in Several Discourses (London: T Cadell, Jun. & W. Davies, 1798), pp. 421–2. See Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order, pp. 73–82, for a good discussion of the radical secularist potential of Paley’s theological utilitarianism. For Kirby’s recommendation of Daubeny, see Kirby in Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 124–5. John Playfair, ‘Méchain & Délambre, Mesure d’un Arc de Meridien’, Edinburgh Review, 9 (1807), 376. And see Morrell, ‘Professors Robison and Playfair’, esp. 50–9. Henry Brougham, ‘Dr. Black’s Lectures’, Edinburgh Review, 3 (1803), 22. On his call for specialization in science, see Brougham, Dissertations on Subjects of Science’, pp. 156–8. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), letters 1 and 2. See Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, pp. xviii–xix for science ‘as the grammar of industrial society’. Kirby, ‘Introductory Address’, 2, 5. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, pp. 86–7. Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 171. In addition, see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 20–8; and Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, pp. 5–6, n. 13. Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, p. 159; Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1, p. 4. See William Kirby to Alexander Macleay, 78: 24 Mar. 1815, Macleay Papers. Antommarchi, The Last Days of the Emperor Napoleon, vol. 1, pp. 315–16. Napoleon I substituted the honeybee for the fleur-de-lis as the Bourbon family emblem. See Charles L. Hogue, ‘Cultural Entomology’, Annual Review of Entomology, 32 (1987), 181–99 (186–7). Giles, Napoleon Bonaparte, pp. xiii, 28, 109. Antommarchi, The Last Days of the Emperor Napoleon, p. 37; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962).

3 Struggle for the Minds of Insects 1. Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology, p. 97. See also Farber, ‘Discussion Paper’. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, B207, pp. 222–3. 2. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life, pp. 1–27 (p. 5). See also Appel, The Cuvier–Geoffroy Debate, pp. 40–68. 3. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 4 (1826), pp. 363–4, 21. 4. Robert J. Richards, Darwin, pp. 20–70; and Robert J. Richards, ‘Influence of Sensationalist Tradition’. For the historical antecedents to this type of challenge to man’s superiority, see Boas, ‘Theriophily’. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution; and Desmond, ‘Lamarckism and Democracy’. In terms of scale, the insect and the elephant were most often used as the bookends of animal creation. See, for example, Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), p. 348; Paley, Natural Theology, p. 515; and Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (3 vols, London: John Murray, 1832), vol. 2, p. 174. 5. Paley, Natural Theology, pp. 324–45. Garfinkle, ‘Science and Religion in England’. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, pp. 137, 183; and Paley, Natural Theology, p. 324. 6. Arguably one of the best parts of Yule’s ‘The Impact of Science’ pp. 192–235, is a discussion of Brougham and Bell’s edition of Paley’s Natural Theology, and an analysis of its reception. Brougham, Dissertations on Subjects of Science’, pp. 84–106 (17, 30–8, 72–86), 218–36. 7. Smellie, The Philosophy of Natural History, pp. 144–59 (145). 8. Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Brougham, quoted in Chester W. New, The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. v. Brougham, Dissertations on Subjects of Science, pp. 12–16, 204, 120, 147–8.

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9. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), p. iv. Kirby, On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God , vol. 2, p. 222. Spence, in Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn, p. 598n. 10. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, p. 227. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), p. xiii. See also ibid., vol. 2 (1817), p. 505, where Spence expresses a concern for the ‘philosophical accuracy of language’. 11. Cantor, ‘Henry Brougham’. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 4 (1826), pp. 31–2. 12. Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 42–7. Spence, Britain Independent of Commerce. William Spence, ‘Letter from Mr. Spence’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 12 (12 Dec. 1807), 921–8 (928). Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order, pp. 67–72 (68–9). See also Brooke, Science and Religion, pp. 181–9; and Sheridan Gilley, ‘Christianity and Enlightenment: An Historical Survey’, History of European Ideas, 1 (1981), 103–21. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), pp. 349–50, n. c. George Horne, A Letter to Adam Smith LL.D. on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of His Friend David Hume Esq. By one of the People called Christians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1777). 13. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 2 (1817), p. 515. 14. Ibid., pp. 513, 470; vol. 4 (1826), pp. 29–30; Brougham, Dissertations on Subjects of Science, p. 106. 15. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, p. 468. See also Richards, Darwin, p. 139. 16. See the letter from John G. Children to W. Kirby, dated 16 Nov. 1830, reprinted in Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 435–6. For background on the choice of authors for the Bridgewater Treatises, see Brock, ‘The Selection of the Authors’; Robson, ‘The Fiat and Finger of God’, esp. 71–5; Jonathan R. Topham, ‘Beyond the Common Context: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises’, Isis, 89 (1998), 233–62; and Topham, ‘ “An Infinite Variety of Arguments” ’, esp. pp. 81, 213–32 for Kirby. ‘Kirby on Instinct’, Medico-Chirurgical Review, 23 (1835), 400–13 (401). ‘Kirby’s Bridgewater Treatise on the Creation, &c. of Animals’, Christian Remembrancer, 17 (Dec. 1835), 707–20 (708). ‘The Bridgewater Treatises. No. III. The Rev. Wm. Kirby and Doctor Roget’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 12 (Oct. 1835), 415–29 (417, 415). BETH, ‘On the Hutchinsonian Physico-Theology’, Christian Observer, 33 (Mar. 1833), 154–8 (154). 17. The literature on Hutchinsonian physico-theology is relatively abundant. See Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism’; Wilde, ‘Matter and Spirit’; Cantor, ‘Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos’; Kuhn, ‘Glory or Gravity’; David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 178–212; Michael Neve and Roy Porter, ‘Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology’, British Journal for the History of Science, 10 (1977), 37–60; and C. D. A. Leighton, ‘Hutchinsonianism: A CounterEnlightenment Reform Movement’, Journal of Religious History, 23 (1999), 168–84. 18. W. S. Lewis (ed), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (48 vols, London: Oxford University Press, 1973), vol. 35, p. 156. Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 34–5. 19. The Proclamation Society was formed in response to George III’s Proclamation against Vice (1787). In 1802, it metamorphosed into the Society for the Suppression of Vice. See Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order, pp. 85–6, 130. For parallels between the Clapham Sect and the Hackney Phalanx, see Murray, ‘The Influence of the French Revolution’, pp. 50–2. On the Hackney Phalanx, see ibid., pp. 49–79; Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 9–20; and A. B. Webster, Joshua Watson: The Story of a Layman, 1771–1855 (London: SPCK, 1954), pp. 18–32. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832, esp. pp. 199–276. Within late eighteenth-century political circles, Nobody’s Friends was a group of Hutchinsonian fellow travellers who were united through friendship with William Stevens (1732–1807). For background on

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21.

22. 23.

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26. 27.

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‘Nobody’s Friends’, see J. A. Park, Memoirs of the Late William Stevens, Esq. (London: Philanthropic Society, 1812), pp. 163–4; and Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 9–20. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism’, p. 2, states that Kirby was a member of the group of Nobody’s Friends. Park, Memoirs of the Late William Stevens, Esq., new edn (London: Rivingtons, 1859), ‘Appendix: List of “NOBODY’S FRIENDS” since the Foundation of the Club’, pp. 168–216, reveals that Kirby was not a member. There was, however, a strong representation from the Hackney Phalanx. ‘E.E.A.’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (1796), 23–4 (23). The persistence of Tory patriarchalism, and the relative absence of Lockean contractarianism, throughout the long eighteenth century constitutes a major part of the historiographic revisionism most notably espoused by Jonathan Clark. The Hutchinsonians play a prominent role in this literature. See Clark, English Society 1688–1832, pp. 64–93, 216–35; Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order, pp. 16, 37, 61, 86–8, passim; and Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, pp. 120–93. ‘A Member of the University’ (Benjamin Kennicott), A Word to the Hutchinsonians (London: R. Dodsley, 1756), p. 16. William Jones, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, in Memoirs of the Life Studies, and Writings of the Right Reverend George Horne, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Norwich, 2nd edn (London: J. Davis, 1799), p. xxv. The ‘Preface’ is probably the best polemical statement of late eighteenth-century Hutchinsonianism. Yule, ‘The Impact of Science’, pp. 130–8, assesses the plight of Hutchinsonianism in the early nineteenth century. State sermons received the sanction of the Book of Common Prayer until their removal in 1859. See Clark, English Society 1688–1832, p. 158. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1797), p. 429; John Bird Sumner, A Treatise on the Records of Creation, Vol. II (1816), p. 18, quoted in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 141. See Farber, Finding Order in Nature, esp. pp. 1–45; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 15–37; and Roger, ‘The Living World’. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life, pp. 1–5; Kirby, Monographia Apum Angliae, vol. 1, pp. 1–2. Desmond, ‘The Making of Institutional Zoology’. Appel, ‘Henri de Blainville and the Animal Series’, 304. Kirby, ‘Introductory Address’, 2, 5. William Kirby to William Sharp Macleay, 232: 29 Apr. 1823, Macleay Papers. For similar statements of English pride in home-grown science, and of denunciations of French pretensions of scientific ‘imperialism’, see 187: 16 Mar. 1820; 239: 7 June 1824. See Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life, pp. 81–7; Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory, pp. 101–13; Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, pp. 26–46; Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology, pp. 111–13; Wilson and Doner, The Historical Development of Insect Classification, pp. 64–70; and J. Holland, ‘Diminishing Circles: W. S. Macleay in Sydney, 1839–1865’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 11 (1996), 119–57. William Kirby to Alexander Macleay, 158: 27 Dec. 1821, Macleay Papers. See, for instance, William Kirby, ‘A Description of Some Insects which appear to exemplify Mr. W. S. MacLeay’s Doctrine of Affinity and Analogy’, Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 14 (1825), 93–110; Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), pp. 12–20, 173–4; and ibid., vol. 4 (1826), pp. 355–418, 465–73. William Kirby to William Sharp Macleay, 237: 11 Jan. 1824, Macleay Papers. In addition, see his earlier attempts to ensure that Macleay had rebuffed Lamarck: Kirby to W. S. Macleay, 207: 9 Apr. 1821 and 209: 28 May 1821. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), pp. 359–60; Appel, ‘Henri de Blainville and the Animal Series’, 306. Y.Y.Y. [David Robinson], ‘The Church of England and Dissenters’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 16 (1824), 397, quoted in Clark, English Society 1688–1832, p. 91.

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28. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 4 (1826), pp. 465–73; W. S. Macleay, Horae Entomologicae: Or Essays on the Annulose Animals, vol. 1 in 2 parts (London: S. Bagster, 1819–21), part 1 (1819), p. v, explicitly responded to the possible accusation that he was ‘aiming at innovations in science’. In addition, see Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology, p. 111. Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth Century’, A Journal of English Literary History, 20 (1953), 39–78 (63); and Victor Harris, ‘Allegory to Analogy in the Interpretation of Scriptures’, Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 1–23 (esp. 8–9, 16–17). In addition, see Blaisdell, ‘Natural Theology and Nature’s Disguises’, 166–73; and Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican Highchurchmanship, 1760–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kirby, Seven Sermons. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 3 (1826), p. 15, n. a. Edward Newman introduced a ‘Septenary System’ in 1832 and continued to develop it through the pages of the Entomological Magazine throughout the 1830s. See Wilson and Doner, The Historical Development of Insect Classification, pp. 69–70. Kirby, Monographia Apum Angliae, vol. 1, p. 4. 29. French, ‘An Inquiry respecting the True Nature of Instinct’; N. A. Vigors, ‘Introduction’, Zoological Journal, 1 (1824), vi. 30. Richards, Darwin, p. 133. In addition, see his earlier version: Robert J. Richards, ‘Instinct and Intelligence in British Natural Theology’, 207. 31. For the important socio-political implications attached to ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, see Heimann, ‘Voluntarism and Immanence’; and Jacyna, ‘Immanence or Transcendence’. Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. xix–xl, 240–2. In addition, see William Kirby to Alexander Macleay, 52: 27 Sept. 1811, Macleay Papers. To contextualize Kirby’s remarks, see Pietro Corsi, ‘The Importance of French Transformist Ideas for the Second Volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology’, British Journal for the History of Science, 11 (1978), 221–44. 32. For Kirby’s opposition to French, see Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. 230–4. On his acceptance of Virey and disagreement with Spence, see ibid., pp. 273–8. For Spence’s rejection of Virey, see Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 4 (1826), pp. 25–30. On the persistence of ethers in natural theology, see G. N. Cantor, ‘The Theological Significance of Ethers’, in G. N. Cantor and M. J. S. Hodge (eds), Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 135–55. 33. Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. 278–9. See Frederick Dreyer, ‘Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley’, American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 12–30. On Jones’s similar Christian epistemology, see Murray, ‘The Influence of the French Revolution’, p. 47. Baden Powell, ‘The Burnett Prizes: The Study of the Evidences of Natural Theology’, in Oxford Essays (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1857), pp. 178, 181; and Robson, ‘The Fiat and Finger of God’, p. 123, n. 55. 34. Freeman, Life of the Rev. William Kirby, pp. 482–3, 437. To contextualize properly these books, see Clark, English Society 1688–1832, pp. 138, 177, 247–8. Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, p. 518. In addition, see Jacyna, ‘Immanence or Transcendence’, 325–6, for his insightful comments on Kirby. For Kirby’s Hutchinsonian interpretation of the ‘vicegerents’ of instinct, see Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. xlvi–ciii. On the ‘vicegerents’ see Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. 242–5, 253–6. For the use of ‘vicegerents’ in state sermons, see Samuel Horsley, A Sermon, Preached Before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, on Wednesday, January 30, 1793: Being the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of King Charles the First (London: J. Robson, 1793), pp. 17–18; Samuel Croxall, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons at St. Margaret’s Westminster on Friday January xxx. 1729 (London, J. Roberts, 1730), p.10; and Gunn, Beyond Liberty, pp. 154–5. 35. W. F. Cannon, ‘Scientists and Broad Churchmen: An Early Victorian Intellectual Network’, Journal of British Studies, 4 (1964): 65–88. An extended version of this

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article was reprinted in Cannon, Science in Culture, pp. 29–71. In addition, see Hilton, ‘The Politics of Anatomy’, esp. 183–9, for his observations on the varieties of conservative science.

4 Bees and Ants 1. See Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800–1914 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Baron, 1978), pp. 57–8. 2. Scott, Seeing like a State, pp. 2–3. 3. Christopher Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), pp. 32–75. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1985). Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, 4th edn (London: Wisbech, 1837), pp. 1, 259. 4. For the relationship between modern statecraft and legibility, see Scott, Seeing like a State. Timothy Raylor, ‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees’, in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds), Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 91–129; and Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (London: Duckwoth, 1999), pp. 251–7. Una A. Robertson, ‘The Falkland Bee Man’, Scots Magazine, 132 (1990), 631–3; and Una A. Robertson, ‘Some Early Scottish Bee Masters and their Books’, Review of Scottish Culture, 5 (1989), 33–4. 5. D. J. Bryden, ‘John Gedde’s Bee-house and the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48 (1994), 192–213. See Peter Burke, ‘Fables of the Bees: A Case-Study in Views of Nature and Society’, in M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustaffson (eds), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 112–23; and W. B. Ashworth, Jr, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’, in D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 303–32. 6. Jeffrey Merrick, ‘Royal Bees: The Gender Politics of the Beehive in Early Modern Europe’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18 (1988), 7–37. Drouin, ‘L’image des sociétés d’insectes’, Prete, ‘Can Females Rule the Hive?’. Dror Wahrman, ‘On Queen Bees and Being Queens: A Late-Eighteenth-Century “Cultural Revolution”?’, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 251–80. 7. Renato G. Mazzolini, ‘Adam Gottlob Schirach’s Experiments on Bees’, in J. D. North and J. J. Roche (eds), The Light of Nature: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science Presented to A. C. Crombie, (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), pp. 67–82. Francis Huber, New Observations upon Bees, trans. C. P. Dadant (1814; repr. Hamilton, Ill. American Bee Journal, 1926), p. 8. 8. William Dunbar, ‘Some Observations on the instinct and Operations of Bees, With a Description and Figure of a Glazed Bee-Hive’, Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 3 (1820), 143–8. 9. Huber, New Observations upon Bees, p. 89; Crane, The World History of Beekeeping, pp. 381–3; and Karl Showler, The Observation Hive, 2nd edn (Burrowbridge, Somerset: Bee Books, 1985), pp. 29–32. 10. Huber, New Observations upon Bees, pp. 9, 89. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 46. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (1815), pp. 408–10. William Jones, ‘Considerations on the Nature and Oeconomy of Beasts and Cattle’, in The Theological, Philosophical and Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. William Jones, ed. W. Stevens (12 vols, London: F. & C. Rivington, 1801), vol. 6, p. 48. 11. ‘Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles’, Edinburgh Review, 11 (1808), 336; and Huber, New Observations upon Bees, p. 101.

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12. Robert Huish, A Treatise on the Nature, Economy and Practical Management of Bees (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Jay, 1815), pp. vii, xi. 13. William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (London: C. Clement, 1822), pp. 169–74. 14. Nutt Humanity to Honey Bees, p. 15. 15. Steve Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes’, Social Studies of Science, 7 (1977), 31–74. Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor, trans. A. R. Tulloch (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 28; and George Birkbeck, quoted in Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, p. xxiii. M. W. Flinn, ‘Introduction’ to Edwin Chadwick, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), pp. 1–73. 16. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, pp. 54–97. E. L. Jones and M. E. Falkus, ‘Urban Improvement and the English Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Research in Economic History, 4 (1979), 193–233. 17. See James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, for a related exploration of the overlaps. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Population and Colonisation’, Bentham Papers, CLI. 108, quoted in J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 123. Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor, p. 27. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, p. xiii. 18. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, pp. 65, 56–7, 123. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, p. 109. 19. O. MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52–67. H. Parris, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 17–37. H. Perkin, ‘Individualism versus Collectivism: A False Antithesis’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1977), 105–18. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, pp. ix, iv–v. 20. William M. Taylor, The Vital Landscape: Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Melanie L. Simo, Loudon and the Landscape:From Country Seat to Metropolis 1783–1843 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), esp., pp. 93–124. Henry Cole quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851–67 (1955; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 49. 21. Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees, p. 40. Stewart, On Longing, p. 68. 22. I. Bernard Cohen, Interactions: Some Contacts between the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 1–99. Paul Weindling, ‘Theories of the Cell State in Germany’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 99–155. 23. Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, pp. 32–75. Proverbs. 6: 6–8. See also ibid., 30: 25. Gould, An Account of English Ants, pp. 92–3; Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn, pp. 313–14; and Browne, ‘A Science of Empire’, esp. pp. 455–6. 24. Sykes, ‘Descriptions of New Species’, of Ants p. 103; Hope, ‘On Some Doubts’; McCook, The Natural History of the Agricultural Ant of Texas; Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London for the Year 1871, pp. xlvii–xlviii; Moggridge, Harvesting Ants and Trap-Door Spiders, pp. 2–69; and ‘Ants’, Westminster Review, new series, 61 (1882), 346–83 (347–48). 25. Huber, The Natural History of Ants, pp. xxii, 248–345. Huber actually observed that the Amazon ants captured pupae and larvae (p. 250). J. R. Johnson in Huber, p. 252 n. For Kirby and Spence’s ‘priority’ in the use of ‘negro ant’, see Sir James A. H. Murray (ed.), A New English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), s.v. ‘Negro, 7. In special uses, as negro ant, a blackish ant’. 26. Frederick Smith, ‘Essay on the Genera’, pp. 98–9. In a letter to William Farren White, dated 7 March 1878, Smith stated that he observed the slave-making instinct in the summer of 1843. See W. F. White, ‘ “A Little People,” but “Exceeding Wise” ’, Leisure Hour (1880), 698. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 7 (1991), CD to J. D. Hooker, 6 May (1858), pp. 89–90. In addition, see Frederick

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29.

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Smith to CD, 26 Feb. 1858, pp. 36–7; CD to Frederick Smith (before 9 Mar. 1858), p. 44; and CD to Emma Darwin (25 Apr. 1858), p. 80. Darwin considered himself a slave to his work and his wife, and referred to himself as Emma’s ‘nigger’. As a term of endearment, Emma addressed him as ‘My dearest N [nigger]’. See Ralph Colp, Jr, ‘ “Confessing a Murder”: Darwin’s First Revelations about Transmutation’, Isis, 77 (1986), 9–32 (25, n. 59). Charles Darwin to H. W. Bates, 25 Sept. 1861, in Darwin, More Letters, vol. 2, pp. 196–7. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, pp. 243–7 (247). Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 5 June (1861), the Library, Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, quoted in Colp, ‘Charles Darwin: Slavery and the American Civil War’, p. 473. Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, p. 244, broached the subject: ‘Although fully trusting to the statements of Huber and Mr. Smith, I tried to approach the subject in a sceptical frame of mind, as any one may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves.’ See Beer, ‘Darwin’s Reading’, pp. 562–3. William Baker, ‘William Wilberforce on the Idea of Negro Inferiority’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), 433–40; Derek Jarrett, The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 75–8; Frank M. Turner, ‘Victorian Scientific Naturalism’; and J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 74–5. ‘Ants’, Westminster Review, 358–9. In addition, see Suckling, The Ant, p. 14. ‘The Origin of Species’ [review], Catholic Mirror, 18 Feb. 1860, p. 4 (I thank Bill Astore for this reference). Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 7 (1991), CD to J. D. Hooker, 13 [July 1858], pp. 129–31; and Frederick Smith to CD, 30 Apr. 1859, pp. 87–8. Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, p. 245; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, p. 554; and Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 63. W. F. Kirby, Marvels of Ant Life (London: S. W. Partidge, 1898), p. 102. Büchner, Mind in Animals, pp. 136–63 (136). To place Büchner in his German context, see Alex Büchner, ‘Introduction. The Life of Ludwig Büchner’, in Ludwig Büchner, Last Words on Materialism, trans. Joseph McCab (London: Watts, 1901), pp. ix–xxiv; and Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, pp. 100–21. Büchner, Mind in Animals, p. 137. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, pp. 82, 26–7; Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, pp. 35, 19–20; and Lubbock, ‘On the Habits of Ants’, 292, 290. Robert James Mann, ‘Sir John Lubbock on Ants and Bees’, 381–2. On Mann, see British Biographical Archive (London: K. G. Saur), 736: 427. .Pierre-André Latreille, Essai sur l’histoire des fourmis de la France (1798; repr. Paris: Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie/Champion-Slatkine, 1989), p. 8, quoted in Drouin, ‘L’image des sociétés d’insectes’, 334. Stewart, On Longing, pp. 40–1, 146; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 1–37; and Gooday, ‘ “Nature” in the laboratory’, 320–5. Ritvo, The Animal Estate. Sharp, Insects, part 1 (1895), p. 85. Alice Bodington, Studies in Evolution and Biology (London: Elliot Stock, 1890), p. 20. In a sense, H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901), fulfilled Bodington’s wish.

5 Social Insects and Secular Science 1. Cassis, ‘Bankers in English Society’, 215, 219, 225. See Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, p. 73, for his criticisms of Cassis’s central thesis. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 150–6, 212–18, 253. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, pp. 243–87 (p. 244); for the Lubbock family, see p. 282. 2. See [A. M. Clerke], ‘Lubbock, Sir John William’, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12 (London, 1909), pp. 227–8; and Susan Faye Cannon, ‘The Cambridge

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Network’, in her Science in Culture, pp. 29–71 (esp. pp. 41–2). On the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) and Broughamite education, see Topham, ‘Science and Popular Education’, 405–20; and Hays, ‘Science and Brougham’s Society’. John Lubbock truly ‘was born . . . with an F.R.S. in his mouth’. See Burrow, Evolution and Society, p. 228. Identified as one of the tools of the mid-century professional middle-class radicals, scientific naturalism and its political associations become slightly problematic in the later nineteenth century. See Barton, ‘The X Club’, pp. 69–85. Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 1–149, provides the best analysis of Lubbock’s politics in the context of his intellectual circles. In their classic microstudy of the Home Rule crisis, A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–86 (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1974), pp. 84–118, place Lubbock in his ‘high political’ context. See also Jennifer Hart, Proportional Representation: Critics of the British Electoral System 1820–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 101–44. 3. Tuesday, 25 Oct. 1853, Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, Diary, 1853–63, Supplementary Avebury Papers (hereafter SAP), British Library, Add. MSS 62679, f. 24. (The Lubbock diaries, and other items, were relatively recently deposited at the British Library. At the time of writing, the manuscript and folio numbers were provisional. All references, therefore, to the Supplementary Avebury Papers should be checked against the dates). J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859; rept. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 114. Parry, Democracy and Religion, p. 5, makes the same general point in terms of the educational priorities of whig-liberals. John Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times, pp. 488–89. See Roy M. MacLeod, ‘Resources of Science in Victorian England: The Endowment of Science Movement, 1868–1900’, pp. 126–60; and D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, pp. 111–26. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within, pp. 107–08, provides an analysis of Lubbock’s educational activities. Sir John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life. Part II, pp. 250–51. 4. Hutchinson, Life, i, pp. 7, 15; and Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ii (1986), CD to Catherine Darwin (24 July 1842), pp. 323–25; CD to W. D. Fox (20 November 1843), p. 409; iii (1987), CD to Susan Darwin [27 November 1844?], p. 86. Sir J. W. Lubbock leased 1 1/2 acres of land – which included the famous sandwalk – to Darwin in 1846. See CD to John William Lubbock (16 January 1846), pp. 276–77. Darwin, Correspondence, v (1989), CD to John William Lubbock, 6 September (1853), p. 154. J. W. Lubbock was chairman of a railway company, which ran an extension from Lewisham to Beckenham. See CD to W. E. Darwin (25 April 1855), pp. 321–22. Darwin, Correspondence, vii (1991), John Innes to CD, 9 January (1858–59), pp. 4–5; iv (1989), CD to Harriet Lubbock (December 1848–1849), pp. 183–84; CD to John William Lubbock (December 1848–1849), p. 184; vi (1990), CD to John Lubbock (29 July 1856), pp. 192–93. Hutchinson, Life, i, pp. 23–24; and The Hon. Mrs. Adrian Grant Duff, ‘Later Years’, in The Life-Work of Lord Avebury, p. 15. 5. Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 4 (1988), CD to G. R. Waterhouse (Jan.–June 1850), pp. 295–6. Lubbock was elected a member on 1 July 1850; vol. 5 (1989), CD to George Newport, 24 July (1851), pp. 54–5. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, George Newport forsook his career in surgery to devote himself to insect physiology. In 1837, he published his renowned work on the circulatory system of the privet hawkmoth (Sphinx lingustri). See V. B. Wigglesworth, ‘The History of Insect Physiology’, in Smith, Mittler and Smith, History of Entomology, pp. 203–8 (esp. 218–20). John Lubbock, ‘Description of a New Genus of Calanidae’, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 11 (Jan. 1853), 25–9; Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, vol. 1, p. 33; and Duff, ‘Later Years’, p. 16. Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 5 (1989), CD to J. D. Dana, 27 Sept. (1853), p. 157; CD to J. D. Dana, 6 Dec. (1853), p. 167. John Lubbock, ‘An Account of the Two Methods of Reproduction in Daphnia, and of the Structure of the “Ephippium” ’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 8 (1856–7),

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352–4; John Lubbock, ‘An Account . . .’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 147 (1857), 79–100; Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 6 (1990), CD to John Lubbock (22 Nov. 1857), pp. 489–90; Richard Owen to John Lubbock, 27 Jan. 1858, and 3 Feb. 1858, Avebury Papers (hereafter AP), British Library, Add. MSS 49638, ff. 98–9, 102: Owen organized the signatures for Lubbock’s Royal Society certificate. Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 6 (1990), CD to John Lubbock (6 Mar. 1857), pp. 349–55. Thursday, 15 June 1854, and Friday 27 Oct. 1854, Lubbock, Diary, 1853–63, SAP, Add. MSS 62679, ff. 43, 50; and Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 6 (1990), CD to John Lubbock, 24 Apr. (1856), p. 87; and 11 and 12 Aug. (1857), p. 442. Jensen, ‘Return to the Wilberforce–Huxley Debate’, 169–70; Lucas, ‘Wilberforce and Huxley’; and James R. Moore, ‘Charles Darwin Lies in Westminster Abbey’. Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 24. See Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 97–103, for his discussion of Huxley’s Evangelical roots. In addition, see Durant, ‘The Meaning of Evolution’, for the close intellectual, stylistic and emotional relationships between natural theology and scientific naturalism. Grappling with his own reluctance to extend evolution to the hallowed domain of man, Charles Lyell informed J. D. Hooker, in March 1863: ‘I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you, than one who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to abandon of old and cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days . . .’ See Lyell, Life Letters and Journals, vol. 2, pp. 361–2. For an account of Lyell’s slow and painful conversion to Darwinian evolution, see Michael Bartholomew, ‘Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of the Evolutionary Ancestry of Man’, British Journal for History of Science, 6 (1973), 261–303. 11 Apr. 1884 (written 5 Oct. 1886), Alice, Lady Avebury, Diary, 1884–8, SAP, Add. MSS 62691, ff. 61–2. Wednesday, 7 May 1884, Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, f. 27. Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation, pp. 255–6. See Heelas, ‘Intellectualism and the Anthropology of Religion’, pp. 1–165, for a historical analysis of ‘intellectualist’ anthropology. Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times, pp. 491–2. Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, pp. 161–2. First used by R .H. Clough, the term ‘broad church’ appeared in a sermon by A. P. Stanley in 1847. But a broad church ‘party’, with acknowledged leaders, was not identified until the publication of W. J. Conybeare’s Edinburgh Review article in 1853. See Ellis, Seven against Christ, pp. 2–3; and Peter Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 69–71. See Herbert Stephen, ‘Grant Duff, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone’, Dictionary of National Biography, 2nd suppl., vol. 2 (London, 1912), pp. 150–1. On Grant Duff ’s connections with the Balliol broad church intelligentsia, see Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 69–70. On Lubbock’s connections with Jowett, see Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, vol. 1, p. 174; and Saturday, 8 May 1875, Saturday, 8 Mar. 1879, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, ff. 123, 240; Saturday, 4 Oct. 1879, Lubbock, Diary, 1879–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62682, f. 11; Saturday, 9 May 1885, Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, f. 42. Upon the publication of Lubbock’s On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals (1888), Jowett wrote to Lubbock: ‘I am inclined to think that more light will be [shed] on the human mind from a study of the instincts of animals than from metaphysical speculations.’ See Jowett to Lubbock, 22 Oct. 1888, AP, Add. MSS 49681B, f. 84. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pp. 90–7. Charles Lyell to J. Lubbock, 14 Feb. 1863; (Edward?) Westlake to J. Lubbock, 15 Feb. 1863; T. H. Huxley to J. Lubbock, 16 Feb. 1863; and J. D. Hooker to J. Lubbock, 17 Feb. 1863, AP, Add. MSS 49640, ff. 11–12, 13–14, 15–18, 20–1. See also J. Lubbock to J. D. Hooker, 16 Feb. 1863 and 3 Mar. 1863, J. D. Hooker Correspondence (Letters to), vol. 4, ff. 178, 179. Brock and MacLeod,

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N O T E S t o p p. 8 4 – 88 ‘The Scientists’ Declaration’; see p. 51 for the relationship between the Declaration and the origins of the X Club. See also Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pp. 7–8. Barton, ‘The X Club’, p. 2; Ruth Barton, ‘ “Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others”: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–1864’, Isis, 89 (1998), 410–44; Barton, ‘ “An Influential Set of Chaps” ’; Adrian Desmond, ‘Redefining the X Axis: “Professionals”, “Amateurs” and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology – A Progress Report’, Journal for the History of Biology, 34 (2001), 3–50; and Jensen, ‘The X Club’. Interestingly, Lubbock does not note the creation of the X Club in his diary, although he does mention his involvement in the purchase of the Reader, a weekly review, with many of the same people. His first reference to the X Club appears in his entry for Saturday, 9 June 1866. See Lubbock, Diary, 1864–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62680, ff. 1, 2. Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 24. MacLeod, ‘Evolutionism, Internationalism and Commercial Enterprise’, p. 68; Haar, ‘E. L. Youmans’; and James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, pp. 19–30. Besides Ants, Bees and Wasps, Lubbock contributed three other volumes to the series: On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects (vol. 65, 1888 (6 editions)); A Contribution to our Knowledge of Seedlings (vol. 79, 1896 (1 edition)); and Buds and Stipules (vol. 86, 1899 (1 edition)). Peter Rivière, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, pp. xxvi–xxvii, xxii. ‘Lord Avebury, F.R.S.’, Nature, 91 (5 June 1913), 350–1 (350). After a query from Lubbock in 1906, Macmillan’s provided the following total sales: Pleasures of Life, part 1: 229,192; part 2: 183,000; Use of Life: 134,000; Beauties of Nature: 271,290, Macmillan Archive, British Library, Add. MSS 55213, ff. 139–40. Barton, ‘The X Club’, p. 205 (table viii), uses the research of Richard Altick to provide a comparative analysis of sales for Lubbock’s books in relation to other late nineteenth-century English ‘best-sellers’. For the income generated in 1891, see Monday, 28 Dec. 1891, Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, f. 115. For 1869–1903, see John Lubbock, Accounts (1854–1903) LUA.12, Royal Society of London Library. ‘Lord Avebury, F.R.S.’, Nature, 350. ‘Sir John Lubbock’, Leisure Hour (1881), 483–7 (485). Arthur E. Shipley, ‘Obituary’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, series B, 87 (1913–14), i–iii(i). ‘Lord Avebury F.R.S.’, Nature, 350. Jaynes, ‘The Historical Origins’; John R. Durant, ‘Innate Character in Animals and Man’; Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr, ‘On the Emergence of Ethology’; Leary, ‘The Fate and Influence’; and Collini, Public Moralists, p. 138. Romanes, Animal Intelligence. In addition, see Romanes, ‘Intelligence of Ants’. Darwin gave Romanes his unpublished notes on instinct. George J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals. With a Posthumous Essay on Instinct by Charles Darwin (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), pp. 355–84. C. Lloyd Morgan, Animal Behaviour (London: Edward Arnold, 1900), pp. 198, 218–19. For the contributions of Romanes and Morgan, see Richards, Darwin, pp. 331–408; Hearnshaw, A Short History, pp. 92–100; Turner, Between Science and Religion, pp. 134–63; and Alan Costall, ‘How Lloyd Morgan’s Canon Backfired’. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, pp. 8–128. Reed, ‘Darwin’s Earthworms’, demonstrates Darwin’s use of an evolutionary and ecological framework to explain the behaviour of worms. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, pp. 182–235, 45; Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, pp. 42–62; and Lubbock, ‘On the Habits of Ants’, 299. Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr, ‘Darwin on Animal Behaviour and Evolution’; and Richards, Darwin, pp. 71–156. Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader, pp. 293–331; Bowler, Evolution, pp. 218–81. A. Grant, ‘Philosophy and Mr. Darwin’, Contemporary Review, 17 (May 1871), 179, quoted in Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought, p. 11. Tuesday, 10 Oct. 1854, Lubbock, Diary, 1853–63, SAP, Add. MSS 62679, f. 49; and Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, p. 261.

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19. John Lubbock, ‘The President’s Address’, Journal of the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London (1866), lii–lxv (lxi, lxiv). See Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, pp. 139–42. Darwin developed his argument more extensively in his Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects. In addition, see Lorch, ‘The Discovery of Nectar’, 531. 20. Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization, p. 1; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 154–5; Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 10–16; Rivière, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi; Murphree, ‘The Evolutionary Anthropologists’, esp. 272–82; and Gillespie, ‘The Duke of Argyll’. Both Stocking (p. 153), and Weber, ‘Science and Society’, 281, discern similarities between ‘armchair anthropology’ and some of Lubbock’s myrmecological observations. In general, there are many similarities between the armchair ethnology of the likes of James Cowles Prichard and ‘anecdotalist’ comparative psychology. ‘The “primitive” like the “unconscious” is rather frightening, and I think these scholars wanted to tame it, to domesticate it’: Clifford Geertz, ‘Notions of Primitive Thought: Dialogue with Clifford Geertz’, in Jonathan Miller, States of Mind (Toronto: Methuen, 1983), pp. 192–210 (200). In addition, see Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, p. 172, for his description of the natives of Tierra del Fuego. 21. ‘I painted 12 bees green & am going to see if I can tame them’: Wednesday, 14 May 1873, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–79, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, f. 44. John Lubbock, Natural History Observations (1861–72) LUA.22, f. 316, Royal Society of London Library. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 315–16; Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, pp. 70–1; Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, vol. 1, pp. 141–2; Suckling, Our Insect Helpers, p. 5; ‘A Philosopher’s Pet’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 62–3 (7 Sept. 1872), 97; ‘Notes’, Nature, 7 (20 Mar. 1873), 391; and Ingold, ‘The Architect and the Bee’. For the semiotics of the flea circus, see Stewart, On Longing, p. 56. 22. Lubbock, Natural History Observations, f. 378. Royal Society of London Library. Saturday, 12 July 1873, Wednesday, 13 Aug. 1873, Friday, 15 Aug. 1873, Saturday, 4 July 1874, and Tuesday, 10 Nov. 1874, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, ff. 51, 54, 55, 102, 115. And see Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 275–6; and Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, p. 63. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 185–6, stated explicitly: ‘From the observations of Sprengel there could of course be little, if any, doubt, that bees are capable of distinguishing colours; and I have proved experimentally . . . that this is the case. Under these circumstances, I have been naturally anxious to ascertain, if possible, whether the same holds good with ants.’ 23. [Mann], ‘Sir John Lubbock on Ants and Bees’, 377. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, p. 2. P. Huber, The Natural History of Ants, pp. 12–13, 61–5, 310–28, for detailed descriptions of his ‘glass apparatus’. Auguste Forel, The Social World of the Ants, vol. 1, pp. 379–404, provides the best historical survey of myrmecological ‘observation apparatus’. See, especially, pp. 383–4 for details of the ‘Lubbock nests’, which ‘are in very common use’. While acting as exchange professor at the University of Paris in 1925, Harvard myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler ‘re-discovered’ the unpublished manuscript for the projected seventh volume of R. A. F. Réaumur’s Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Insectes. Written between October 1742 and January 1743, the manuscript was a natural history of ants. Evidently, Réaumur employed modified glass bee hives as formicaries. Unbothered by the unpublished state of Réaumur’s description, Wheeler declared that it ‘shows that Réaumur actually constructed for his ants the same type of artificial nest as that employed by Lubbock and since regarded as his invention!’ See Réaumur, The Natural History of Ants, esp. pp. 145–6, 229 n. 25. 24. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 4, 41; and Friday, 29 July 1887, and Thursday, 9 Aug. 1888, Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, ff. 72, 82. Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, vol. 1, p. 144; 29 June to 10 Aug. 1880, SAP, Add.

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30. 31.

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N O T E S t o p p. 9 4 – 97 MSS 62682, ff. 29–31. Sunday, 22 Aug. 1886, Alice, Lady Avebury, Diary, 1884–8, SAP, Add. MSS 62691, f. 13. See Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, p. 125, where he refers to some ‘Lasius flavus (belonging to one of my nests of domesticated ants)’. For a discussion of insects domesticated to a laboratory regime, see Kohler, ‘Drosophila’, p. 282. Richards, Darwin, pp. 169–72; Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, pp. 56–68; Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–30), vol. 2 (1924), pp. 211–82; Durant, ‘The Meaning of Evolution’, pp. 180–224; and Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 92–6. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. v, 5, and Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, p. 2. Michael William Taylor, ‘The Paradise Lost of Liberalism’, delineates a healthy political grouping which altered mid-century liberalism to sustain a Spencerian Individualist attack on New Liberalism. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 38–40, 375–8; Francis Galton, Memories of my Life (London: Methuen, 1908) p. 247; and Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 2 (1924), pp. 215–17. Saturday, 23 Feb. 1878, Saturday, 2 Mar. 1878, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, f. 212. Francis Galton, ‘Hydrogen Whistles’, Nature, 27 (22 Mar. 1883), 491–2; and Wednesday, 20 June 1883, Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, f. 9. Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 2, p. 217. Geison, Michael Foster, pp. 116–47; and Morrell, ‘The Chemist Breeders’. A. J. Southward and E. K. Roberts, ‘One Hundred Years of Marine Research at Plymouth’, Journal of the Marine Biology Association (UK), 67 (1987), 465–506 (esp. 465–76); and ‘Psychological Laboratory at University College, London’, Mind, new series, 7 (July 1897), 448. Barton, ‘The X Club’, pp. 26, 44–6 (26). Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, p. 160. T. H. Huxley to J. Lubbock, 10 Dec. 1856, AP, Add. MSS 49638, f. 51. Lubbock, ‘On the Objects of a Collection of Insects’. A ‘List of British Entomologists’ and their collection interests appeared in the same volume (pp. 14–25). Lubbock acknowledged his research interest in crustacea, and noted that he had ‘no collection’ (p. 21). Kirby, ‘Introductory Address’, 2, 5. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 36. Francis Galton, ‘Psychometric Experiments’, Brain, 2 (July 1879), 148–62 (148). John Lubbock, On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888), p. 279. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, pp. 86–7. In addition, see Barton, ‘The X Club’, pp. 115, 178–9; and Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 81–119. As Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 30–2, 105, 113, asserts, late Victorian whig-liberals concerned themselves with a perceived pervasiveness of ‘materialism’ in society. See Suckling, Our Insect Helpers, p. 22. T. H. Huxley to J. D. Hooker, 29 July 1859, in Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 1, p. 165. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 27–50, 96–115. Wednesday, 12 Sept. 1877, Friday, 26 Sept. 1877, Saturday, 27 Sept. 1877, Saturday, 23 Feb. 1878, Saturday, 24 Aug. 1878, Friday, 30 Aug. 1878, Saturday, 31 Aug. 1878, Friday, 6 Sept. 1878, Sunday, 23 Feb. 1879, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, ff. 193, 194, 212, 229, 239; and Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, p. 200. On Monday, 24 November 1879, Lubbock made ‘some experiments on Ants with the telephone, but they had no result’. Lubbock, Diary, 1879–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62682, f. 14. In addition, see Duff, Notes from a Diary, vol. 2, p. 116. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 181, 273, 291–310 (181). For an assessment of Lubbock’s contributions to entomology and sensory physiology, see J. Arthur Thomson, ‘Zoology (Animal Behavior)’, and H. St J. K. Donisthorpe, ‘Entomology (Ants)’, in Duff, The Life-Work of Lord Avebury, pp. 115–56, 157–67; Pumphrey, ‘The Forgotten Man’; G. Richard, ‘The Historical Development of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Studies on the Behavior of Insects’, in Smith, Mittler and Smith, History of Entomology, pp. 477–502; and Wigglesworth, ‘The Contributions of

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Sir John Lubbock’. For a statement of Lubbock’s goals in sensory physiology, explained within the context of his ideology of progress, see his The Pleasures of Life, Part II, pp. 242–8. Lubbock, Scientific Lectures, p. v. See Christopher Hamlin, ‘Robert Warington and the Moral Economy of the Aquarium’, Journal of the History of Biology, 19 (Spring 1986), 133–53 (esp. 150–3); and Graeme Gooday, ‘ “Nature” in the Laboratory’. For contemporary accounts of Lubbock’s weekend parties, see Galton, Memories of my Life, pp. 177–8. And Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life. A Record of Events and Opinions (2 vols, London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), vol. 2, p. 33. On the March 1877 visit to Darwin, see Sunday, 11 Mar. 1877, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, f. 173; William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians, p. 164; and John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, London: Macmillan, 1903), vol. 2, p. 562. Morley notes that Gladstone ‘makes no mention of his afternoon call’ in his diary. In fact, W. E. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968 sqq.), vol. 9 (1986), p. 199, reveals that he did record his visit with ‘Mr. Darwin’. Morley was, perhaps, employing literary licence to emphasize Gladstone’s antipathy and indifference to science and scientific men. Moore, ‘Charles Darwin Lies in Westminster Abbey’, 100; and Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 608, notes that Lubbock’s friendship with Darwin ‘chilled’ after Lubbock sold him the sandwalk for top price in 1874. Lubbock’s diary reveals, however, that he continued to be Darwin’s ‘Mercury’ until the latter man’s death. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, p. 2; Lubbock, Chapters in Popular Natural History, p. 6; Lubbock, ‘On the Habits of Ants’, 287; and 1 Dec. 1874, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, f. 115. Anna Grant Duff is, perhaps, best remembered as the recipient of J. F. Stephen’s musings on Liberalism, through a series of letters written during the 1880s. See John Roach, ‘Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 13 (1957), 58–81 (esp. 60). Duff, Notes from a Diary, vol. 1, pp. 178–9. Friday, 9 Dec. 1881, Lubbock, Diary, 1879–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62682, f. 108. Friday, 16 Aug. 1878; and Tuesday, 20 Aug. 1878, Lubbock, Diary, 1872–9, SAP, Add. MSS 62681, ff. 227, 229. Tuesday, 29 Nov. 1881, Lubbock, Diary, 1879–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62682, f. 106. Tuesday, 3 Nov. 1885; Tuesday, 18 Jan. 1887; Saturday, 17 Oct. 1885; and Thursday, 27 Oct. 1892 Lubbock, Diary, 1883–94, SAP, Add. MSS 62683, ff. 50, 66, 49, 121. Greenwood, Eminent Naturalists, pp. 34–45 (38). See Gillian Beer, ‘Darwin’s Reading’, p. 546. Lubbock, ‘Recent Observations’; Lubbock, ‘Can Insects Reason?’; Lubbock, ‘Observations on Bees and Wasps’, Linnean Society’s Journal – Zoology, 12 (1874), 110–39; Lubbock, Scientific Lectures, pp. 69–140; and Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps. J. Lubbock to Macmillan’s, 15 Feb. 1879, Macmillan Archive, British Library, Add. MSS 55213, ff. 23–4. On the Athenaeum Club, see Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 13–19. For a general overview of ‘reception theory’, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 74–90. Wherever possible, I have tried to provide multiple references for each Lubbock citation. John Ruskin, ‘The Best Hundred Books’, Pall Mall Gazette, 19 Jan., 15 Feb., 23 Feb. 1886, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols, London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 34 (1908), pp. 582–8 (582, 584); and Lubbock, ‘On the Pleasure of Reading’. In addition, see Sunday, 12 June 1881, Lubbock, Diary, 1879–82, SAP, Add. MSS 62682, f. 65: ‘In the evening Mr. G.D. (Grant Duff) tried to make out a list of the 100 books best worth reading’. For more on the concept of the psychic unity of man, see Heelas, ‘Intellectualism’, pp. 67–85. John Lubbock, The Use of Life, p. 97, quoted in Kuklick, The Savage Within, p. 107. For explicit references to ants as ‘Lilliputians’, see Gould, An Account of English Ants, p. 80; White, ‘ “A Little People,” but “Exceeding Wise” ’, 5; and Büchner, Mind in

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N O T E S t o p p. 1 0 1 – 107 Animals, pp. 99–100. See Stewart, On Longing, pp. 54, 67–8, for Lilliput and the ideological uses of an island. Beer, ‘Darwin’s Reading’, p. 563, detects ‘tones of Gulliver among the Lilliputians’ in Darwin’s discussion on ants. Interestingly, Richard Grove, ‘The Origins of Environmentalism’, Nature, 345 (3 May 1990), 11–14, asserts that ‘isolated oceanic islands’, such as Mauritius, provided mental and physical allegories of an early nineteenth-century global conservationist image. Beer, ‘Darwin’s Reading’, pp. 561–2, 574. On ‘reform Darwinism’ and its variants, see Rogers, ‘Darwinism and Social Darwinism’; Bannister, Social Darwinism; Jones, Social Darwinism, pp. 54–77; and Freeden, The New Liberalism, pp. 76–116. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Varieties of Social Darwinism’, in her Victorian Minds, pp. 314–32. Worster, Nature’s Economy, pp. 320–5, places William Morton Wheeler’s studies on ants within the context of American Progressivism. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 13–50. J. Addison, in Social Democrat, 13 (15 Mar. 1909), 299, quoted in Jones, Social Darwinism, p. 75. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 35–9 (38), 253–4. In addition, see Jones, Social Darwinism, pp. 76–7; and Bannister, Social Darwinism, pp. 158–60. T. H. Huxley to W. Platt Ball, 27 Oct. 1890, in Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 2, pp. 267–8. See Ball’s detailed response to Huxley: W. P. Ball to T. H. Huxley, 3 Nov. 1890, T. H. Huxley Papers, vol. 10, ff. 220–1, Imperial College. According to Büchner, Mind in Animals, p. 42, ‘ants have shown us a specimen of Socialism in practice, carried to its fullest consequences.’ J. G. Myers, ‘Lubbock as an Entomologist and Comparative Psychologist’, in John Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, reprint of 17th edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1929), ix–xv. p. x. Durant, ‘Scientific Naturalism’. Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization, pp. 262–3. In a letter to A. R. Wallace, dated 1 May 1910, Lubbock stated: ‘It surprises me . . . how much we differ . . . Apart from the hardship of Socialism, have you considered the inevitable loss of freedom, & tyranny of bureaucracy which it would involve? You say you yourself are lazy which I should never have suspected. How much more so are others & how many there are who will do little or no work unless directly, or indirectly, compelled. As to spiritualism my difficulty is that nothing comes of it . . .’, Wallace Papers, British Library, Add. MSS 46442, ff. 98–9. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 93–118, 285–6; and Lubbock, ‘On the Habits of Ants’, 295–7. Helfand, ‘T. H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” ’. Writing in the Conservative National Review for May 1890, individualist and feminist Florence Fenwick Miller took Lubbock’s political tack on the social insects to its fullest extreme, see Florence Fenwick Miller, ‘Insect Communists’, National Review, 15 (May 1890), 392–403. ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits. – No. 97’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 19 Aug. 1882, p. 82. John Lubbock may be best remembered as the architect of the Bank Holidays Act, which was passed on 15 May 1871. See Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, vol. 1, pp. 119–26. Punch’s verse illustrates the connection between Lubbock’s provision for greater ‘leisure’, and his commitment to self-help. Drummond, Tropical Africa, p. 123. On Drummond, see James R. Moore, ‘Evangelicals and Evolution’.

6 Darwin and the Entomologists 1. Allen, ‘The Early Professional’. Farber, Finding Order in Nature, p. 85. Desmond, ‘Redefining the X Axis’, 7, 11. 2. Ruse, Monad to Man, pp. 205–44. D. E. Allen, ‘On Parallel Lines: Natural History and Biology from the Late Victorian Period’, Archives of Natural History, 25 (1998), 361–71. 3. A. R. Wallace, quoted in The Darwin–Wallace Celebrations Held on Thursday, 1st July 1908 by the Linnean Society of London (London, 1908), pp. 8–9. C. Darwin to John

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Lubbock, Thursday (before 1857), in Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters, vol. 2, p. 141. Charles Darwin, ‘Autobiography’, in Darwin, The Life and Letters, p. 50. Darwin, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 50–1. Darwin’s contributions to Stephens’s Illustrations of British Entomology (1827–45) are reprinted in Kenneth G. V. Smith, Darwin’s Insects, pp. 7–10. Darwin, ‘Autobiography’, p. 52. Leonard Jenyns, Memoir of the Rev. John Stevens Henslow (London: John van Voorst, 1862), pp. 50–1. Meeting of the Entomological Society of London, 25 June 1822, Minutes of the Aurelian Society 1801–1822, RES M54, Royal Entomological Society of London Archives. See Meeting of the Entomological Society, 25 June 1822, for a comprehensive list of Darwin’s extant Beagle and British insects at the Natural History Museum, the Zoology Museum at Cambridge, the Hope Entomological Collections, University Museum, Oxford, the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, and Down House; see K. G. V. Smith, ed., Darwin’s Insects and Duncan M. Porter, ‘The Beagle Collector’, pp. 973–88, 994, 1009–12. To give some idea of the scale of his Beagle insect collection, the British Museum purchased 5,628 specimens of all orders in 1858. This was only a fraction of the total. C. Darwin to J. Lubbock, in Darwin, The Life and Letters. Darwin recorded these observations in a series of field notes, which remained unpublished during his lifetime. See R. B. Freeman, Charles Darwin on the Routes of Male Humble Bees. Remington and Remington, ‘Darwin’s Contributions to Entomology’, 4. C. Darwin to Asa Gray, 23 July (1862), in Charles Darwin, More Letters, vol. 1, pp. 202–3. In addition, see Michael T. Ghislein, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 13–59. Durant, ‘The Meaning of Evolution’, pp. 94–6. In addition, see Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader, pp. 179–81. Richards, Darwin, pp. 187–9. Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, p. 446. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 87. Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, pp. 448, 452, 465, 446–7. Lubbock, Ants, Bees and Wasps, pp. 108–52, devised experiments to test ants’ abilities to recognize, remember and communicate with coinhabitants of the same nest. Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, pp. 512–13. In addition, see Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, pp. 27–9; and ‘Ants’, Westminster Review, 368–9, for their interesting remarks on this analogy. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, pp. 3, 93–4, 98. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, p. 183. Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, pp. 625–72. Colp, ‘Charles Darwin and Mrs. Whitby’; and Richardson, A Veteran Naturalist, pp. 42–50, 98–112. For a relatively extensive index of Darwin’s insect references, see Kritsky, ‘Charles Darwin’s Contribution’. C. Darwin to C. Lyell, 17 Mar. (1863), in Darwin, The Life and Letters, vol. 3, pp. 15–17. In addition, see Michael Bartholomew, ‘Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of the Evolutionary Ancestry of Man’, British Journal for the History of Science, 6 (1973), 261–303. CD to H.W. Bates, 22 Nov. (1860), in Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 484–6 (485). Also in Stecher, ‘The Darwin–Bates Letters, 5–6 (6). George Herbert Carpenter, ‘Obituary. John Obadiah Westwood’, Natural Science, 2 (Feb. 1893), 131–3; and Audrey Z. Smith, A History of the Hope Entomological Collections, pp. 35–46. Darwin incorrectly attributed a review in The Athenaeum in 1859 to Westwood. See Westwood’s communication of 11 Feb. 1860, reprinted as ‘Mr. Darwin’s Theory of Development’. In addition, see CD to Gardeners’ Chronicle, (14–19 Jan. 1860); and CD to H. W. Bates, 22 Nov. [1860], in Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 32–3, 486, n. 3. Francis Darwin in Darwin, The Life and Letters, vol. 2, p. 267.

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15. Desmond and Moore, Darwin, pp. 433–6. T.V. Wollaston to CD (16 Sept. 1860), in Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 8 (1993), p. 362; in addition, see Charles Lyell to CD, (13–14 Feb. 1860); CD to Charles Lyell (15 and 16 Feb. 1860); CD to J. D. Hooker (20 Feb. 1860); and CD to W. E. Darwin (4 Mar. 1860) in ibid., pp. 80–2, 87–9, 96–7, 118–19. 16. Wollaston, ‘Bibliographical Notice’. 17. ‘The Late Andrew Murray, F.L.S.’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society of London, 5 (1879), 46–8; and ‘Mr. Andrew Murray, F.L.S.’, Canadian Entomologist, 10 (1878), 32–4. See J. F. M. Clark, ‘Andrew Murray (1812–1878)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 39 pp. 864–5; Murray, ‘On Mr. Darwin’s Theory’, esp. 286–8. In addition, see CD to Charles Lyell, 10 Jan. (1860); CD to T. H. Huxley, 11 Jan. (1860); CD to W. E. Darwin (4 Mar. 1860); CD to C. Lyell, 27 and 28 Apr. (1860); CD to Andrew Murray, 28 Apr. (1860), in Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 28–30, 30–1, 118–19, 170–2, 175–9, 179–80. 18. C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 14 Dec. (1859), in Darwin, The Life and Letters, vol. 2, pp. 243–4. For biographical information, see Gunther, ‘A Note on the Autobiographical Manuscripts of John Edward Gray’. For more on Gray’s opposition to Darwin, see Frederick Burkhardt, ‘England and Scotland’, pp. 53–5. Frederick Smith, ‘On the Construction of Hexagonal Cells’, 132–3. ‘Notices of Books’, Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, 9 (1860–1), 78–9 (78); and ‘The Origin of Species: A New Song’, Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, 10 (1861), 78–80. Edward Newman, ‘Letters on Variation in Lepidoptera. Letter the First. – Introduction. – Sexual Variation’, Zoologist, 2 (1867), 721–7. In addition, see Thomas Prichard, Memoir of the Life and Works of Edward Newman (London: John Van Voorst, 1876), pp. 20–5, for background on the Entomologist and the Zoologist. 19. C. Darwin to E. Haeckel, 21 May 1867, in Darwin, The Life and Letters, vol. 3, pp. 68–70 (69). Westwood, Wollaston and Murray were not synonymous with Entomological Society of London. Andrew Murray ‘was on the List of the Entomological Society, but he rarely attended, and his name has ceased to appear in connection therewith for several years’; see ‘Andrew Murray, F.L.S.’, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 14 (1877–8), 215–16 (216). 20. See Blaisdell, Darwinism and its Data, pp. 243–302 (269). 21. After being proposed by three current members, a person (man or woman) could be elected by a two-thirds vote. On the prehistory, the origins and the constitution, see Griffin, ‘The First Entomological Societies’; MS letter from George Robert Gray, Assistant in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, to W. Burchell, 13 May 1833, Hope Library X584, University Museum, University of Oxford; ‘Establishment of the Entomological Society of London’; and ‘Entomological Society’, Entomological Magazine, 2 (1834), 54–9. On the Entomological Society’s ‘reception of Darwinism’, see Burkhardt, ‘England and Scotland’, pp. 60–5. See Journal of Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London (1866), pp. xxxiv–xlviii; Wallace, ‘Natural Selection’; Westwood, ‘Mimicry in Nature’; and Sharp, ‘Natural Selection’. Kimler, ‘Mimicry’, p. 97. 22. Moon, Henry Walter Bates 1825–1892; and Dickenson, ‘Henry Walter Bates’. For price estimates, see excerpt from Bates’s journal for 20 Mar. 1851, in Clodd, ‘Memoir’, p. xxvi. 23. Bates, ‘Contributions to an Insect Fauna’. In addition, see Blaisdell, Darwinism and Its Data, pp. 63–139; Kimler, ‘One Hundred Years of Mimicry’, pp. 1–10, 62–147; and Mary Alice Evans, ‘Mimicry and the Darwinian Heritage’. 24. C. Darwin to H. W. Bates, 20 Nov. (1862), in Stecher, ‘The Darwin–Bates Letters’, pp. 36–7. Charles Darwin, ‘Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley’, Natural History Review, new series, 3 (1863), 219–24 (222). For an analysis of Bates’s conception of speciation, see Kottler, ‘Isolation and Speciation, 1837–1900’,

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26. 27.

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pp. 158–66. Westwood, ‘Mimicry in Nature’, concluded his discussion of mimicry: ‘The admission that the God of Nature created these species in their present mimetic condition for some wise, but hidden, purpose, disposes of all difficulty.’ For a historical examination of natural theological accounts of mimicry, see Blaisdell, ‘Natural Theology and Nature’s Disguises’. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, vol. 2, p. 346. H. W. Bates to C. Darwin, 2 May 1863, in Clodd, ‘Memoir’, p. lxiii. Blaisdell, Darwinism and its Data, pp. 140–241; Sorensen, Brethren of the Net, pp. 197–234; and Kimler, ‘One Hundred Years of Mimicry’, pp. 148–232. Müller, ‘Ituna and Thyridia’; and Dr. Fritz Müller, ‘On Bitten Wings of Acraea thalia’, Kosmos, 13 (1883), 197–201 (typescript translation, Hope Library 18663, University Museum, University of Oxford). Marchant, Raphael Meldola. For his support for Müllerian mimicry, see Meldola, ‘Mimicry between Butterflies’. C. Darwin to R. Meldola, 27 Sept. 1877, Darwin MSS, Hope Library, University Museum, University of Oxford. R. Meldola to C. Darwin, 3 and 6 Feb. 1882, Darwin MSS, Hope Library; and C. Darwin to H. W. Bates, 17 Feb. 1882, in Stecher, ‘The Darwin–Bates Letters’, 124. For a published version of the Meldola–Darwin correspondence (1871–82), see Poulton, Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection, pp. 199–218. Poulton, ‘The Influence of Darwin upon Entomology’, 75. Edward B. Poulton, ‘Naturalist’, in Marchant, Raphael Meldola, pp. 78–112 (esp. pp. 86–87); and Edward B. Poulton, ‘Notes upon, or Suggested by, the Colours, Markings, and Protective Attitudes of Certain Lepidopterous Larvae and Pupae, and of a Phytophagous Hymenopterous Larvae’, Transactions of the Entomological Society of London (1884), 27–60. Raphael Meldola, ‘Translator’s Preface’ in Weismann, Studies in the Theory of Descent, pp. vii–xiv (vii). In addition, see August Weismann, ‘The Metamorphosis of Flies’ [trans. A.S. Packard, Jr], American Naturalist, 8 (1874), 603–12, 661–7, 713–21; and Churchill, ‘August Weismann’ and Mayr, ‘Weismann and Evolution’. Charles Darwin, ‘Prefatory Notice’, and Weismann, Preface to the English Edition in Weismann, Studies in the Theory of Descent, pp. v–vi and pp. xv–xviii, respectively. Kimler, ‘Advantage, Adaptiveness and Evolutionary Ecology’; and Kimler, ‘One Hundred Years of Mimicry’, pp. 233–319. See F. Churchill, ‘The Weismann–Spencer Controversy over the Inheritance of Acquired Characters’, in E. G. Forbes (ed.), Human Interpretations of Scientific Advance: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of the History of Science (1978), pp. 451–69 (462–63). Poulton, The Colours of Animals, p. 287. On the division between closet and field naturalists, see Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, pp. 39–40. For the extension of this debate to the laboratory scientists, see Gooday, ‘ “Nature” in the Laboratory’. A. R. Wallace to R. Meldola, 4 Feb. 1895, Wallace MSS (Box), Hope Library. Smith, A History of the Hope Entomological Collections, pp. 1–22. J. O. Westwood to A. H. Haliday, 21 Jan. 1863, Box 8/74, Royal Entomological Society Archives (hereafter RES). J. O. Westwood to the Very Reverend the Vice-Chancellor, 27 Nov. 1873, in Westwood, An Address, pp. 5–6 (6). See Janet Howarth, ‘Science Education in Late-Victorian Oxford: A Curious Case of Failure?’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987), 334–71. Smith, A History of the Hope Entomological Collections, pp. 45–6, 55. R. Meldola to E. B. Poulton, 16 Oct. 1892, Poulton MSS, Hope Library. C. Swinhoe, ‘On the Mimetic Forms of Certain Butterflies of the Genus Hypolimnas’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 53 (1893); C. Swinhoe, ‘Protective Resemblance and Mimicry in Nature’, Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society (1894), 1–8. R. Meldola to E. B. Poulton, 4 Nov. 1890, Poulton MSS.

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35. See printed letter from H. Goss, ‘Election of a President’, 4 Jan. 1893, Box 14/3, RES; E. B. Poulton to H. Goss, 11 Dec. 1892, Box 14/1, RES; Lord Walsingham to Poulton, 13 Dec. 1892, 22 Dec. 1892, Xmas 1892; J. W. Tutt to Poulton, 7 Jan. 1893; C. Swinhoe to Poulton, 9 Dec. 1892, 7 Jan. 1893; and R. Meldola to Poulton, 14, 15, 16, 22 Dec. 1892, 11 Jan. 1893, Poulton MSS. 36. R. Meldola to E. B. Poulton, 14 Dec. 1992, Poulton MSS. 37. H. J. Elwes to Poulton, 25 Dec. [1892], Poulton MSS. 38. Printed letter from E. B. Poulton and C. Swinhoe, ‘To the Fellows of the Entomological Society of London’, 7 Jan. 1893, Box 14/2; printed letter from David Sharp, 12 Jan. 1893, Box 14/7, RES. See J. F. M. Clark, ‘David Sharp (1840–1922)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 50, pp. 10–11. Churchill, ‘The Weismann–Spencer Controversy’. 39. ‘Annual Meeting. January 18, 1893’, Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London for the Year 1892, p. xliii; Elwes, An Address, pp. 3–4. In addition, see Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader, pp. 174–97. Meldola, Address, pp. 7–23. 40. C. Swinhoe to E. B. Poulton, 9 Dec. 1892; R. Meldola to E. B. Poulton, 16 Dec. 1892, Poulton MSS. 41. G. F. Hampson to H. Druce, 25 Apr. 1892, Box 14/34, RES. C. Swinhoe to E. B. Poulton, 7 Jan. 1893; and R. Meldola to E. B. Poulton, 11 Jan. 1893, Poulton MSS. Edward B. Poulton to the electoral board of the Hope Professorship of Zoology, 3 Apr. 1893, in Testimonials in Favour of Edward B. Poulton, M.A., Candidate for the Hope Professorship of Zoology (n.p., 1893), Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.A. Oxon 8 ° 620 (14), pp. 13–14. 42. Testimonials, pp. 8, 7, 23–4, 26–8. 43. Blaisdell, Darwinism and its Data, pp. 281–2. 44. Lubbock, ‘On the Objects of a Collection of Insects’, p. 116. Godman, ‘The President’s Address’, esp. l–lv. 45. Poulton, ‘The Influence of Darwin upon Entomology’, 75–6. Ruse, Monad to Man, esp. pp. 205–84. 46. E. B. Poulton, ‘Introduction’, in Neave and Griffin, The History of the Entomological Society, pp. xxix–xlvi. 47. J. W. Tutt, ‘Our Century Number’, Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, 13 (1901), 1–3. On Tutt, see Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation (James William Tutt Memorial Number), 23 (15 May 1911). A. W. Bacot, ‘Weismannism and Entomology’, in ibid., 44–7. J. W. Tutt, British Moths (London: George Routledge, 1896). 48. Desmond, ‘Redefining the X Axis’, 12. E. B. Poulton, Science and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), pp. 43–4.

7 The Colorado Beetle 1. ‘The Man in the Streets’, Funny Folks, 3, 21 July 1877, p. 18. On biological invasions, see Pauly, ‘Fighting the Hessian Fly’; C. Smout, ‘The Alien Species in 20th-Century Britain: Constructing a New Vermin’, Landscape Research, 28 (2001), 11–20; and Mark Williamson, Biological Invasions (London: Chapman & Hall, 1996). 2. G. Waldbauer, Insights from Insects: What Bad Bugs Can Teach Us (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2005), pp. 13–16. L. Zuckermann, The Potato (London: Macmillan, 1999). 3. G. Ordish, The Great Wine Blight; (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1972). Ordish, The Constant Pest, pp. 149, 156–60; S. Jansen, ‘An American Insect in Imperial Germany: Visibility and Control in Making the Phylloxera in Germany, 1870–1914’, Science in Context, 13 (2000), 31–70; and Campbell, Phylloxera. ‘Notes’, Nature, 14 (15 Oct. 1876), 516; ‘Insectology’, The Times, 4 Oct. 1876, p. 10; ‘Our Insect Foes’, Nature, 15

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(23 Nov. 1876), 84–5. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 6, 10; J. H. Perkins, Insects, Experts and the Insecticide Crisis, p. 243; Sorenson, ‘Uses of Weather Data’, 169–72; Lockwood, Locust, pp. 89–92. Report from the Select Committee on Wild Birds Protection, p. 796. ‘Entomology and Agriculture’, The Times, 1 Mar. 1877, p. 4; and Murray, ‘On Extirpation of Injurious Insects’. ‘Injurious Insects and Fungi’, Journal of the Board of Agriculture, 1 (1895), 300; and Select Committee on Wild Birds, pp. 825–7. W. Lu and J. Lazell, ‘The Voyage of the Beetle’, Natural History, 105 (1996), 36–9; R. A. Casagrande, ‘The “Iowa” Potato Beetle, its Discovery and Spread to Potatoes’, Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America, 33 (1987), 142–50; Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 17–26. Charles Riley, The Colorado Beetle, p. 20. Riley, The Colorado Beetle, pp. 104–5, 106. B. D. Walsh, ‘The New Potato-Bug, and its Natural History’, Practical Entomologist, 1 (1865), 2–4. H. W. Bates, ‘The Colorado Potato-Beetle’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 2nd series, 11 (1875), 361–2. Burnett, Plenty and Want, 133–4. J. Brown, Agriculture in England: A Survey of Farming, 1870–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 9–10; Chambers and Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1850, pp. 180–1; and Holderness, ‘Agriculture and Industrialization’, pp. 184–5. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 235, 1877, col. 411. Colorado Beetle, p. 411. A Bill Intituled ‘An Act for Preventing the Introduction and Spreading of Insects Destructive to Crops’ [40 & 41 Vict.], Parliamentary Papers, 1877, vol. 2, pp. 409–22. Colorado Beetle, p. 413. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 235, 1877, cols 410–11. Mr Phillips, ‘The Ixworth Farmers’ Club’, Farmers’ Magazine, 51 (Apr. 1877), 242–4; ‘The Colorado Beetle’, Farmer’s Magazine, 52 (Oct. 1877), 260; ‘The Colorado Beetle Scare’, The Times, 1 Aug. 1877, p. 10; ‘The Colorado Beetle’, Farmer’s Magazine, 52 (Aug. 1877), 83–4. ‘That Blessed Beetle!’, Punch, 73 (14 July 1877), 6. ‘Summary of News. Domestic’, Guardian, 19 Sept. 1877, p. 5. ‘Prince’s Theatre: The Christmas Pantomime’, Guardian, 19 Dec. 1877, p. 5. Riley, The Colorado Beetle, pp. 8–10; and Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora, pp. 48–9. Pauly, ‘Fighting the Hessian Fly’. Riley, The Colorado Beetle, p. 13. ‘The Flight of the Potato-Bug’, New York Times, 28 July 1876. Edmund Russell, War and Nature, pp. 21–2. David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, ‘The Secret History of the Dismal Science: Brotherhood, Trade, and the “Negro Question” ’, Library of Economics and Liberty Contributors’ Forum at www.econlib.org/library/Columns/LevyPeartdismal2.html (accessed 21 Dec. 2005). ‘Fenians and the Colorado Beetle’, Guardian, 17 Sept. 1881, p. 9. ‘The Hessian Fly’, The Times, 13 Sept. 1887, p. 3. Alfred Smee, The Potatoe Plant, its Uses and Properties: Together with the Cause of the Present Malady (London: Longman, Brown, Green, 1846), p. 16, passim. J. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 275, 265–6. R. K. Connell, ‘The Potato in Ireland’, Past and Present, no. 23 (1962), 66. Orwin and Whetham, History of British Agriculture, p. 121. Burnett, Plenty and Want, pp. 129–30. C. V. Riley, ‘The Colorado Beetle Abroad’, New York Tribune, 1 Apr. 1874; ‘The Colorado Beetle’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 Jan. 1875, p. 5. J. F. McArdle, The ColoradoBeetle Collared at Last (London: Hopwood & Crew, 1889), p. 5. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 235, cols 410–11, 687–8; 1180. ‘Notes’, Nature, 16 (16 Aug. 1877), 334–5; and ‘The Colorado Beetle’, The Times, 10 Aug. 1877, p. 7. A Bill Instituted ‘An Act for Preventing . . .’, pp. 1–4.

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19. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 236, cols 780–1. 20. I. Pattison, The British Veterinary Profession, 1791–1948 (London: J. A. Allen, 1983), p. 61. J. R. Fisher, ‘The Economic Effects of Cattle Disease in Britain and its Containment, 1850–1900’, Agricultural History, 54 (1980), 282. Brown, Agriculture in England, pp. 47–50. 21. Board of Agriculture (Intelligence Division). Annual Report of Proceedings . . . for the Year 1901, Parliamentary Papers, 20, 1902, pp. 485–6. 22. Sykes, ‘Agriculture and Science’, pp. 265–6; Reader, Professional Men, p. 170; and Pattison, The British Veterinary Profession. Whitley, ‘The Establishment and Structure of the Sciences’. ‘The Colorado Beetle’, The Times, 30 July 1877, p. 7. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 258, cols 630–1. 23. G. Woodcock, Henry Walter Bates, Naturalist of the Amazons (London: Faber & Faber, 1969); and Evans, ‘Mimicry and the Darwinian Heritage’. Neave and Griffin, The History of the Entomological Society, p. 144. Bates, ‘The Colorado Potato-Beetle’, 372–3. R. McLachlan, ‘Remarks on the Colorado Beetle, and on the Panic as to the Possibility of its Becoming Obnoxious in this Country’, Report of the Forty-Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, 1878), p. 102; and ‘The British Association and the Colorado Beetle’, Farmer’s Magazine, 52 (Sept. 1877), 205. 24. Riley, The Colorado Beetle, pp. 112–15. Brown, Agriculture in England, pp. 1–6; Orwin and Whetham, History of British Agriculture, pp. 242–5; and D. N. Ferro, ‘Insect Pest Outbreaks in Agroecosystems’, in P. Barbosa and C. Schultz (eds), Insect Outbreaks (London: Academic Press, 1987), pp. 195–215. 25. Morrell, ‘Individualism and the Structure of British Science’, 190; and Alter, The Reluctant Patron, pp. 116–27. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life. 26. ‘The Colorado Beetle’, Farmer’s Magazine, 52 (Aug. 1877), 83; and ‘The Colorado Beetle’, The Times, 5 July 1877, p. 7. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish and the Order of Life; J. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology. 27. ‘Andrew Murray, F.L.S.’, 216. 28. A. Murray, ‘The Colorado Potato Beetle’, The Times, 3 Oct. 1876, p. 4. 29. A. E. Smith and D. M. Secoy, ‘Organic Materials’. W. W. Fletcher, The Pest War. Lodeman, The Spraying of Plants. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 16–26. 30. R. A. Casagrande, ‘The Colorado Beetle: 125 Years of Mismanagement’, Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America, 33 (1987), 142–4. 31. R. A. Wardle and P. Buckle, The Principles of Insect Control (London: Manchester University Press, 1923), p. 72. 32. Does It Pay to Spray? Bulletin (Special) (Toronto: Ontario Department of Agriculture, 1897), p. 5. In addition, see J. H. Panton, Instructions in Spraying (Toronto: Ontario Department of Agriculture, 1897). 33. John L. Lahmer, MS letter to Hon. Mr Fisher, Minister of Agriculture, Ottawa, 21 July 1896, National Archives of Canada, RG 17 I-1, Docket # 88171, 102113. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, p. 30. 34. On this change, and its relationship to the professionalization of American agricultural entomology, see Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis, pp. 241–64; and Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture. Coppel and Mertins, Biological Insect Suppression, p. 22. For the development of American economic entomology, and the increasing use of insecticides, see Sorensen, ‘The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology’ Dunlap, ‘Farmers, Scientists, and Insects’; and Dunlap, ‘The Triumph of Chemical Pesticides’. 35. Bailyn et al., The Great Republic, pp. 297–8, 557–62. Holderness, ‘Agriculture and Industrialization’; and Holderness, ‘The Victorian Farmer’. In a letter to Arthur Young, George Washington noted this difference between the two countries’

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approach to agricultural practice. See Fred W. Kohlmeyer and Floyd L. Herum, ‘Science and Engineering in Agriculture: A Historical Perspective’, Technology and Culture, 11 (1961), 379, n. 18. 36. E.C. Large, ‘Thanks to the Colorado Beetle’, Agriculture, 59 (1953), 463–8. Theobald, ‘Some Notable Instances’. H. W. Evans, The Pleasures of Entomology, p. 164. For comparative purposes, see S. Castonguay, ‘Naturalizing Federalism: Insect Outbreaks and the Centralization of Entomological Research in Canada, 1884–1914’, Canadian Historical Review, 85 (2004), 1–34.

8 A Female Entomologist 1. ‘Death of Miss Ormerod’, The Times, 20 July 1901, p. 15; ‘Current Notes’, Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, 13 (1901), 280; Robert Wallace quoted in ‘Obituary: Eleanor A. Ormerod, LL.D.’, Entomologist, 34 (Aug. 1901), 235–6; and C. J. S. Bethune, ‘Miss Eleanor A. Ormerod’, Canadian Entomologist, 13 (1901), 280. 2. ‘A Lady Entomologist’, Nature, 70 (7 July 1904), 219–20. On Somerville and Herschel, see Patterson, ‘Mary Somerville’; and Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, ‘Women Astronomers in Britain, 1789–1930’, Isis, 75 (1984), 534–47. Tomaselli, ‘Collecting Women’. On Cobbe, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘Maria Mitchell and the Advancement of Women in Science’, in Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, p. 134. 3. Tomaselli, ‘Reflections’; Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Patriarchal Science’, Science as Culture, 2 (1991), 443–57; Outram, ‘Fat, Gorillas and Misogyny’. For the observation on ‘lady entomologist’, see Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds, p. 140. 4. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, pp. 10–11; Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 2. Harriet Martineau, ‘Female Industry’, Edinburgh Review, 109 (Apr. 1859), 293–336. See Anderson, ‘The Social Position of Spinsters’, for a quantitative analysis of the 1851 census statistics as they pertain to single women. For a sample of the literature devoted to ‘redundant women’ in Victorian England, see Freeman and Klaus, ‘Blessed or Not?’; Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950, pp. 3–14; and Vicinus, Independent Women, pp. 1–45. On separate spheres, see Vicinus, Independent Women, pp. 2–10 and Jordanov, ‘Natural Facts’. 5. Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 53, 8–12, 14–19; Anderson, ‘The Social Position of Spinsters’, 392; and Davidoff, The Best Circles, pp. 50–2 6. Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 14. 7. Anderson, ‘The Social Position of Spinsters’, 382; Diana Latham, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 19; and Robert Wallace, in ibid., p. 73. Ormerod received a further considerable inheritance on the death of her brother, Arthur, in 1884. See Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds, p. 149. 8. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, pp. 10–11; Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 2, 54–5; Latham in ibid., p. 16; and Patterson, ‘Mary Somerville’. 9. Lewis, Women in England, pp. 3–4. The Schools Enquiry Commission as quoted in Reader, Professional Men, p. 170. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies, pp. 22–3, discusses the Commission and women’s education. Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 3–4. 10. Lewis, Women in England, pp. 3–4. Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour (London, 1859). In addition, see Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 15; and Holcombe, Victorian Ladies, p. 9 11. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 21 Nov. 1892, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 214. See Vicinus, Independent Women, pp. 33–4 for Nightingale as a ‘heroic woman’. For Becker, see Ann B. Shteir, ‘Botany in the Breakfast Room: Women and Early Nineteenth-Century British Plant Study’, in Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, pp. 36–7, 39; Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 30–1; and Lady Hooker, quoted in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 86.

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12. See Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 15, for capture of unclaimed areas. See the evidence of Albert Müller in Report from the Select Committee on Wild Birds Protection, pp. 795–9. Specifically, Q. 3121; and C.O. Groom Napier, ‘Statement as to the Reproductive Powers of Insects. Appendix No. 3’, in ibid., pp. 825–7. The quotation comes from: ‘Insectology’, The Times, 4 Oct. 1876, p. 10, col. 6. In addition, see ‘Economic Entomology’, The Times, 16 Sept. 1876, p. 11, col. 2. Murray, ‘On the Extirpation of Injurious Insects’. On the Royal Horticultural Society, see Fletcher, The Story of the Royal Horticultural Society. Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 59–60; Fream, ‘Agricultural Entomology’; and Eleanor Ormerod, ‘Notes for Observers’, (repr. of Notes for Observations of Injurious Insects, London, 1877), in her Notes of Observations of Injurious Insects. Report, 1877 (London: T. P. Newman, 1878). 13. On ‘network research’ in natural history, see Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, p. 67; James A. Secord, ‘Darwin and the Breeders: A Social History’, in David Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 528–33; and Reginald Lennard, ‘English Agriculture under Charles II: The Evidence of the Royal Society’s “Enquiries” ’, Economic History Review, 6 (1932), 23–45. 14. Secord, ‘Darwin and the Breeders’, pp. 519–42, and James A. Secord, ‘Nature’s Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons’, Isis, 72 (1981), 163–86 examine how marginalized agriculturists used science for social mobility. ‘Andrew Murray, F.L.S.’, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 14 (1877–8), 216; Neave and Griffin, The History of the Entomological Society, pp. 139–40; and Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 244. 15. See Brent Elliott, Victorian Gardens (London: Batsford, 1986). 16. Joshua Major, The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), pp. 121–2. In addition, see Baldwin, ‘Joshua Major’. Major, A Treatise on the Insects. 17. See Economic Entomology Box 42, Westwood MSS, Hope Library; and J. O. Westwood, ‘Notice sur John Curtis’, Annales de la Société Entomologique de France, 3 (1863), 525–40 (532). J. O. Westwood, ‘On the Most Advisable Methods for Discovering Remedies against the Ravages of Insects; and a Notice of the Habits of the Onion Fly’, Magazine of Natural History, 7 (1834), 425–31. 18. Köllar, A Treatise on Insects. Bea Howe, Lady With Green Fingers: The Life of Jane Loudon (London: Country Life, 1961), pp. 76–7; and June Taboroff, ‘ “Wife, Unto Thy Garden”: The First Gardening Books for Women’, Garden History, 11 (1983), 1–5. Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds, p. 146, notes Ormerod’s self-described role as helpmate. 19. F. V. Theobald, ‘Economic Entomology’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edn, pp. 632–6 (632). Ormerod, A Lecture on Injurious Insects, p. 4. Rothman, ‘Insect Pest Control Research’, p. 83, makes the same general point. 20. Lefroy, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 8. 21. See Krohn and Schafer, ‘Agricultural Chemistry’; and Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science, esp. pp. 10–46. Goddard, Harvests of Change, pp. 12–16; and D. C. Moore, ‘The Corn Laws and High Farming’. 22. Ormerod, A Lecture on Injurious Insects. Sykes, ‘Agriculture and Science’. Spring, The English Landed Estate, pp. 45–58; David Spring, ‘Aristocracy, Social Structure, and Religion in the Early Victorian Period’, Victorian Studies, 6 (Mar. 1963), 263–80; and G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1962; repr. London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 217–18. 23. On the founding of the RASE, see Ernest Clarke, ‘The Foundation of the Royal Agricultural Society’; and Goddard, Harvests of Change, pp. 1–30. On the RASE’s contribution to agricultural science, see Sykes, ‘Agriculture and Science’, p. 261; and Goddard, ‘Agricultural Societies’, pp. 246–51. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization. Henry Handley, A Letter to Earl Spencer (President of the Smithfield Club) on the Formation of a National Agricultural Institution (London: James Ridgway, 1838),

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pp. 6–7. Yeo, ‘An Idol of the Market-Place’. ‘Royal Charter, Incorporating the English Agricultural Society as the Royal Agricultural Society of England. March 26, 1840’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (hereafter JRASE), 2nd series, 12 (1876), xxxvi. Ordish, ‘Scientific Pest Control’; Ordish, John Curtis; Ordish, The Constant Pest, pp. 146–66; and Westwood, ‘Notice’. Goddard, Harvests of Change, pp. 94–138, helps place Curtis and Ormerod within the RASE’s expanding consultancy work. ‘Obituary. James Charles Dale, M.A., F.L.S.’, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 8 (1872), 255–6. J. Curtis to J. C. Dale, 25 Aug. 1840, Dale MSS, Hope Library, University Museum, Oxford. For a complete list of Curtis’s articles as ‘Ruricola’, see Westwood, ‘Notice’, 532–4. Curtis, ‘Observations’. Curtis, Farm Insects. Curtis to Dale, Letter 202, 22 Dec. 1841, Dale MSS, Hope Library. See ‘Mr. John Curtis, F.L.S., &c’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 19 Nov. 1842, p. 774; Curtis to Dale, 24 Jan. 1843, 1 Feb. 1843, Dale MSS, Hope Library; and MacLeod, ‘Science and the Civil List’, esp. 50. In the same year, Richard Owen received a civil list pension of £200 per annum; see Rupke, Richard Owen, p. 52. When he was debilitated by blindness, Curtis’s pension was raised to £150 a year in 1861. See Ordish, ‘Scientific Pest Control’, 302. Goddard, Harvest of Change, pp. 12–16; and Moore, ‘The Corn Laws and High Farming’. On the uses of science for social mobility, see Thackray, ‘Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context’; Berman, ‘ “Hegemony” and the Amateur Tradition’; and see Ian Inkster, ‘Introduction’, in Inkster and Morrell, Metropolis and Province, pp. 16–20, 39–45. S. E. D. Shortt, ‘Physicians, Science, and Status: Issues in the Professionalization of Anglo-American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 51–68, applies Thackray’s model of the marginalized, provincial man to a study of the process of the professionalization of medicine. Secord, ‘Darwin and the Breeders’, pp. 519–42, and Secord, ‘Nature’s Fancy’ explore this borderland, and examine how marginalized agriculturists used science for social mobility. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 56–9. ‘Report of the Council, May 22nd, 1882’, JRASE, 2nd series, 18 (1882), p. xxxii. Canon Fowler, ‘The President’s Address’, Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, part 5 (1901), xxxiv. See Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds, p. 152 for evidence that the RASE offered Ormerod a salary. Obituary of Eleanor Ormerod, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 2nd ser., 12 (1901), 230. Ormerod, The Hessian Fly Cecidomyia Destructor in Great Britain in 1887 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1887); and [Charles Whitehead], Report on the Hessian Fly, Giving its Life History, and Methods of Prevention, and Remedies, C. 4944/1887. Copies of Circulars and Memoranda which have been Issued by the Lords of the Committee of Council for Agriculture Relating to the Hessian Fly, C. 5160/1887. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 319, 1887, col. 74. See MS letter from Ormerod to Westwood, 30 Dec. 1887, attached to Ormerod, Hessian Fly, in Hope Library. Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Government to Enquire into the Present Visitation of the Hessian Fly on Corn Crops in Great Britain, C. 5217/1887. In addition, see ‘The Hessian Fly’, The Times, 30 Sept. 1887, p. 8, col. 1; and C. V. Riley, ‘The Hessian Fly in England – its Origin; its Past; its Future’, The Times, 17 Oct. 1887, p. 4, col. 5. Whitehead, Retrospections, pp. 81–2. On Gray, see Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (London: Whittaker, 1887). On ministerial responsibility, see F. M. G. Willson, ‘Ministers and Boards: Some Aspects of Administrative Development since 1832’, Public Administration, 33 (1955), 43–58. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 336, 1889, cols 1785–8; vol. 317, 1887, cols 354–5; vol. 261, 1881, cols 438–45; and vol. 247, 1879, cols 1919–55. On veterinary science in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, see Sykes, ‘Agriculture and Science’, pp. 265–6; and Reader, Professional Men, p. 155. On the

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N O T E S t o p p. 1 6 8 – 172 creation of the Board of Agriculture, see Orwin and Whetham, History of British Agriculture 1846–1914, p. 202; and Floud, The Ministry of Agriculture, pp. 1–20. Charles Whitehead, Retrospections, pp. 75–8. Whitehead started to receive remuneration for his government work in 1888. In addition, see Ordish, John Curtis, pp. 104–5; and Burr, The Insect Legion, p. 300. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 13 Feb. 1890, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 202. In addition, see Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 20 Jan. 1890, in ibid. ‘ “The Diamond-Back Moth Caterpillar”, Royal Agricultural Society of England, Proceedings of the Council, Wednesday, July 29, 1891’, JRASE, 3rd series, 2 (1891), lxxxv–lxxxviii. ‘ “Seeds and Plant Diseases”, Royal Agricultural Society of England, Proceedings of the Council, Wednesday November 4, 1891’, JRASE, 3rd series, 2 (Dec. 1891), clxx. Eleanor Ormerod, ‘The Diamond-Back Moth’. When it was proposed that she should receive a government pension, Ormerod proclaimed: ‘assuredly I should feel inexpressibly lowered if I accepted a pension’. See Ormerod to Robert Wallace, 1 Apr. 1901, in her Eleanor Ormerod, p. 322. ‘ “Seeds and Plant Diseases”, Royal Agricultural Society of England, Proceedings of the Council, Wednesday, July 27, 1892’, JRASE, 3rd series, 3 (1892), lxxxvii–lxxxviii. Nature, 44 (10 Sept. 1891), 451; and Nature, 44 (1 Oct. 1891), 528, indicated that Ormerod’s resignation was not solely due to poor health. This was more clearly stated in ‘Personal’, Illustrated London News, 99 (12 Sept. 1891), 334. Ormerod to Robert Wallace, 18 Aug. 1892, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 281. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, pp. 111–12. For a sociological analysis of science as a profession, see Ben-David, ‘The Profession of Science’. For a historical treatment of the traditional (i.e. liberal) professions, see Reader, Professional Men. For a cautionary tale on professionalization and the history of science, see Cannon, Science in Culture, pp. 137–65. Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology’. MacLeod, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–24; and MacLeod, ‘Science and Examinations’. Stewart Arthur Richards, ‘Agricultural Science’. Charles Dickens, ‘Farm and College’, All the Year Round, 20 (10 Oct. 1868), 414. In addition, see Boutflour, ‘The Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester’. The Local Government Act of 1888, the Technical Instruction Act of 1889, the Board of Agriculture Act of 1889, and the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act of 1890. See Richards, ‘Agricultural Science’, pp. 118–19. Moreton, ‘Preface’, to W. Fream, Elements of Agriculture (London: John Murray, 1892); Henry Edmunds, ‘Eighty Years of Fream’s Elements of Agriculture’, JRASE, 134 (1973), 66–77. Eleanor Ormerod, Report of Observations of Injurious Insects and Common Farm Pests during the Year 1890, with Methods of Prevention and Remedy. Fourteenth Report (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1891), p. v. Ormerod to Robert Wallace, 19 Mar. 1896, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 282; and Ormerod to Wallace, 30 Jan. 1899, in ibid., pp. 285–6. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 15 May 1897, in ibid., pp. 224–5; J.A. Scott Watson, ‘The University of Oxford’, Agricultural Progress, 14 (1937), 95–100. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 24 Dec. 1889, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 200–1. Gwyn E. Jones, ‘William Fream’ 36–7. ‘ “Seeds and Plant Diseases”, Royal Agricultural Society of England, Proceedings of the Council, Wednesday, March 1, 1893’, JRASE, 3rd series, 4 (1893), xxxviii. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, pp. 1–74, studies Humphry Davy as a ‘technological scientist’. Jordanova, ‘Natural Facts’, pp. 57–8. See MS letter, Eleanor Ormerod to Prof. Westwood, 20 Apr. 1888, attached to her Hessian Fly, in Hope Library. Pattison, The British Veterinary Profession; E. L. Jones, ‘The Changing Basis of Agricultural Prosperity, 1853–73’, Agricultural History Review, 10 (1962), 102–19; Sykes, ‘Agriculture and Science’, pp. 265–6; and Reader, Professional Men, p. 155. Ormerod to J. C. Medd, 14 July 1900, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 272–3.

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39. Eleanor Ormerod, ‘Annual Report for 1889 of the Consulting Entomologist’, 181–4. 40. First Annual Report of the Agricultural Adviser to the Lords of the Committee of Council for Agriculture, 1887, C. 5275/1888, pp. 360–1. Eleanor Ormerod, Report of Observations of Injurious Insects and Common Farm Pests during the Year 1889, With methods of Prevention and Remedy. Thirteenth Report (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1890), pp. 70–1. ‘James Fletcher, LL.D. Memorial Number’, Ottawa Naturalist, 22 (1909), 189–211. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 28 Dec. 1889, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 201. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, p. 20. Whorton gives an excellent summary of his book in his ‘Insecticide Spray Residues and Public Health’. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 17–26; and Ordish, The Constant Pest, pp. 149–56. 41. Perry, British Farming in the Great Depression, pp. 120–3. John Burnett, Plenty and Want, pp. 123–48. Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to Enquire into and Report upon the Fruit Industry of Great Britain, Cd. 2589/1904, p. 547. Coppock, ‘The Changing Face of England’, pp. 295–373. 42. Hudson, ‘Fruit Crops’. 43. ‘The Preservation of Small Birds, etc.’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 3rd series, 7 (29 Mar. 1890), 386–7; ‘Editorial Notices’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 3rd series, 7 (10 May 1890), 585; Ormerod, ‘Annual Report for 1889’, pp. 176–7; Ormerod, ‘Reports of Consulting Entomologist’; Ormerod to Professor Riley, 10 Apr. 1890, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 183. 44. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 6 Oct. 1890; and Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 2 Feb. 1891, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 204, 206–7. 45. George Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 22 (1997), 176–90. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 24–69. For information on the use of Paris green in Britain, see ibid., pp. 68–88; Ormerod, Report of Observations . . . during the Year 1889, pp. 70–5; Ormerod, Report of Observations . . . during the Year 1890, pp. 84–96; and Ormerod, Paris-Green (Or Emerald-Green). 46. Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning Arising from the Consumption of Beer and Other Articles of Food or Drink, Cd. 1845/1904, pp. 100, 290. 47. Whorton, Before Silent Spring, pp. 32, 39. 48. E. John Russell, ‘Rothamsted Experimental Station’, Agricultural Progress, 14 (1937), 1–3; and E. John Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, pp. 88–106, 143–75. For a survey of the different sprayers that were available, see Charles Whitehead, ‘Methods of Preventing’. Ormerod to Dr J. Fletcher, 23 Mar. 1891, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 208–9. Reader, Professional Men, pp. 123–5. Ormerod, Report of Observations . . . during the Year 1889, pp. 70–1. 49. Ormerod and Tegetmeier, ‘Appendix’. As Secord has shown, Tegetmeier was, like Ormerod, a person who operated on the borderland between natural scientists and agriculturists. Tegetmeier assisted Darwin with his work on artificial selection. See, especially, Secord, ‘Nature’s Fancy’, pp. 174–6. As an eminent pigeon fancier, ornithologist and apiarist, Tegetmeier was well placed to aid Ormerod. On Tegetmeier’s entomological connections, see Richardson, A Veteran Naturalist, pp. 42–50. Ormerod to W. B. Tegetmeier, 14 Sept. 1898, in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 167–8. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London, 1938), p.92, quoted in Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950, p. 196. 50. To put the house sparrow in historical perspective, see E. L. Jones, ‘The Bird Pests of British Agriculture’, esp. pp. 118–20, 123–4; and Dannenfeldt, ‘The Control of Vertebrate Pests’, 553–4. D Summers-Smith, The House Sparrow, pp. 217–19. 51. O’Connor and Shrubb, Farming and Birds, pp.10–11. 52. Ibid., pp. 57–78, 186. Caird, High Farming, is the classic nineteenth-century statement on high farming. Perry, ‘High Farming in Victorian Britain’, provides a historiographical overview. In addition, see F. M. L. Thompson, ‘The Second Agricultural Revolution’; and B. A. Holderness, ‘The Origins of High Farming’, in B. A. Holderness

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N O T E S t o p p. 1 7 9 – 186 and Michael Turner (eds), Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700–1920: Essays for Gordon Mingay (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 149–64. Coppock, ‘The Changing Face of England’, pp. 303–7; and Perry, British Farming in the Great Depression. Summers-Smith, The House Sparrow, p. 224; and O’Connor and Shrubb, Farming and Birds, p. 72. Tegetmeier, The House Sparrow, p. 65. Tegetmeier, The House Sparrow pp. 66–8, reprinted the rules of this club as a model for others to follow. Leaflet no. 84 of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, 1908, provided details for organizing a sparrow club. See Jones, ‘The Bird Pests of British Agriculture’, 120. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, pp. 191–9, 231–3. See, for instance E. A. Ormerod, ‘The House Sparrow’, in Watson, Ornithology, p. 52. Doughty, The English Sparrow; Cathcart, ‘Wild Birds in Relation to Agriculture’ 326–9; and Summers-Smith, The House Sparrow, pp. 175–6, 209, 218–19. Rev. J. E. Walker to E. A. Ormerod, 13 Aug. 1897, in ‘Spare the Sparrow’, Animals’ Friend, 4 (Oct. 1897), 16–17. In addition, see J. E. Walker to E. A. Ormerod, 10 Aug. 1897, in ‘God Save the Sparrow’, Animals’ Friend, 3 (Sept. 1897), 241. Carrington, ‘Miss Edith Carrington’. Elston, ‘Women and Anti-vivisection’. For information on nineteenth-century bird protectionism, see Barclay-Smith, ‘The British Contribution’; and E. S. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, pp. 172–200. Worster, Nature’s Economy, pp. 185–6. See, for example, Carrington, The Farmer and the Birds, which was published for the Humanitarian League; and Carrington, ‘The Sparrow-Hawk’. For a historical overview of the philosophical underpinnings of preservationism, see Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, pp. 1–40. Egerton, ‘Changing Concepts’. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, p. 24. Eleanor A. Ormerod, Report of Observations . . . during the Year 1883, with Methods of Prevention and Remedy (London, 1884), p. 42, and Report of Observations . . . during the Year 1884, with Methods of Prevention and Remedy. Eighth Report (London, 1885), p. vi. Tegetmeier, The House Sparrow, p. 46. Ormerod, ‘The Diamond-Back Moth’, 627–9. G. W. Murdock, ‘The English Sparrow in America’, in Watson, Ornithology, pp. 186–8. See Merchant, The Death of Nature, and Keller, ‘A World of Difference’; and James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 3. Canon Tristram, ‘Preface’ to Carrington, The Farmer and the Birds, pp. vi–vii; Carrington, The Farmer and the Birds, p. xi; H. G. Wells, ‘The Good Intentions of Nature Explained’, Pall Mall Gazette, 58 (9 Feb. 1894), 4. See Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 42–68; and Colin Tudge, So Shall We Reap (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 185–220. Ludovic Grant, quoted in Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 95–6. Merchant, The Death of Nature; and Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Baconian Science: The Arts of Mastery and Obedience’, in her Reflections on Gender and Science (London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 33–42. See Evelleen Richards and John Schuster, ‘The Feminine Method as Myth and Accounting Resource: A Challenge to Gender Studies and Social Studies of Science’, Social Studies of Science, 19 (Nov. 1989), 697–720; Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Just What is so Difficult about the Concept of Gender as a Social Category? (Response to Richards and Schuster)’, ibid., 721–4; and Richards and Schuster, ‘So What’s Not a Social Category? or You Can’t Have it Both Ways (Reply to Keller)’, ibid., 725–9. Woolf, ‘Miss Ormerod’, 474. Ormerod, Notes on the Australian Bug and Notes and Descriptions of a Few Injurious Farm & Fruit Insects of South Africa. In addition, see Lounsbury, ‘The Pioneer Period’, esp. 10. Ormerod, A Few Preliminary Observations on the Sugar-Cane Shot-Borer Beetle. Ormerod, Hessian Fly.

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9 Insects and Empire 1. Frank M. Turner, ‘Public Science in Britain’. Olby, ‘Social Imperialism and State Support’; and MacLeod, ‘Introduction’. T. H. Huxley to J. D. Hooker, 26 Mar. 1889, in Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 2, p. 231. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, pp. 7–8. 2. Scott, Seeing like a State, pp. 262–306. Brown and Beecham, ‘Crop Pests and Diseases’, p. 311. 3. Alter, The Reluctant Patron, pp. 98–116; and Cardwell, The Organisation of Science, pp. 111, 188. 4. Brock, ‘The Spectrum of Scientific Patronage’, pp. 173–206. Richards, ‘Agricultural Science’, p. 96. See Sharp ‘The Entry of County Councils’; Floud, The Ministry of Agriculture, pp. 90–2; E. John Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, p. 187; and Cardwell, The Organisation of Science, p. 160. 5. Reader, Professional Men, esp. pp. 2–72. Warington, Agricultural Science, p. 39. Somerville, The Bearings of Education and Science, p. 12. Richards, ‘Agricultural Science’, pp. 68–75; Boutflour, ‘The Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester’. 6. Jones, ‘William Fream’; Gwyn E. Jones and B. K. Tattersfield, ‘John Wrightson and the Downton College of Agriculture’, Agricultural Progress, 55 (1980), 69–77 (esp. 73); Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, pp. 182–3. Richards, ‘Agricultural Science’, pp.131–3; and Shearer, ‘Edinburgh University’. Hall, ‘The South-Eastern Agricultural College’, esp. 2–3; Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, pp. 214–26; C. S. Orwin and S. Williams, A History of Wye Church and Wye College (Ashford: Kentish Express Office, 1913), pp. 205–13; Laing, ‘F. V. Theobald’, and F. W. E., ‘Obituary: Fred. V. Theobald’, Entomologist, 63 (1930), 95–6. R. Ede, ‘The School of Agriculture’, esp. 138; Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, pp. 198–9; and Hugh Scott, ‘Cecil Warburton’. Like other agricultural entomologists, Warburton later did work on medical entomology. In 1912–13, he identified African ticks with G. H. F. Nuttall at the Quick Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. See Colonial Reports – No. 781. Entomological Research Committee. Report for 1912–13, Cd. 7050–22, p. 5. 7. Prevention of Disease (Fruit Trees), Bill 60/1903, pp. 135–40; and ‘Summary of Recommendations and Suggestions Made by the Committee’, in Report of the Departmental Committee, Cd. 2589/1905, pp. 581–3. In addition, see Minutes of Evidence, Cd. 2719/1906, esp. evidence given by P. S. U. Pickering, pp. 134–51, and by Cecil Warburton, pp. 294–9; and Hansard, 5th series, 40, 1912, cols 344–5. 8. See ‘The Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm’, Nature, 52 (19 Sept. 1895), 508–10; Pickering, ‘The Woburn Experiments’, 29–39; A. D. H., ‘Spencer Pickering, F.R.S.’, Nature, 106 (16 Dec. 1920), 509–10; Bedford and Pickering, Sixth Report of the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm; Bedford and Pickering, Science and Fruit Growing, pp. 1–15, 145–230. For the involvement of Newstead and Ormerod in the currant mite investigations, see Newstead, ‘The Currant Bud-Mite’; and Ormerod, Reports of Injurious Insects, pp. 44–7. According to Imms, ‘The Scope and Aims of Applied Entomology’, 81: ‘In this country, the best work so far prosecuted on insecticides, is the series of experiments carried out at the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm.’ Report of the Departmental Committee, Cd. 2589, p. 556. Hansard, 5th series, 40, 1912, col. 390; and Hansard, 5th series, 43, 1912, col. 1808. 9. Harris, Unemployment and Politics, pp. 273–368; Olby, ‘Social Imperialism and State Support’; Russell, A History of Agricultural Science, pp. 268–71; and Floud, The Ministry of Agriculture, pp. 94–5. 10. Development Commission. Second Report of the Development Commissioners, House of Commons Papers, 1912–13, pp. 845, 909–11. 11. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester, pp. 153–213. ‘Man versus Insect: Scientific Warfare: Entomologists in Manchester’, Guardian, 22 July 1937, p. 13; Gibson and

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N O T E S t o p p. 1 9 3 – 200 Swaine, ‘Charles Gordon Hewitt’, esp. 98; and ‘Economic Entomology: Board of Agriculture and Manchester University’, Guardian, 19 July 1918, p. 6. Olby, ‘Social Imperialism and State Support’, 513. Worboys, ‘The Imperial Institute’; and Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’. See Ballard, ‘ “Rus in Urb” ’, for a description of Chamberlain’s personal passion for orchids. See Correspondence Relating to the Development of Entomological Research in the British Colonies and Protectorates, Cd. 6429/1912–13, pp. 493–511; Colonial Reports – No. 781; Colonial Reports – No. 834. Imperial Bureau of Entomology. Report for 1914, Cd. 7622–25/1915; ‘Entomological Research’, Guardian, 26 Mar. 1910, p. 4; Shipley, ‘Foreword’. Marshall, ‘Preface’; and Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’, pp. 300–1. ‘The Entomology of the Empire: Insects and Disease’, The Times, 28 Dec. 1912, p. 3. In addition, see Marshall, ‘The Work and Objects of the Entomological Research Committee’. Worboys, ‘The Emergence of Tropical Medicine’; Worboys, ‘Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy’; Worboys, ‘The Emergence and Early Development of Parasitology’; and Farley, ‘Parasites and the Germ Theory’. Hunter, ‘American Interest in Medical Entomology’, p. 28. Hope, ‘On Insects and their Larvae’, p. 259. W. Spence to F. W. Hope, 29 Mar. 1837; and W. Kirby to F. W. Hope, 14 Mar. 1837, Hope MSS, Hope Library. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn, pp. 42–77. Hope, ‘On Insects’, 256. Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction’; and Christopher Herbert, ‘Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew’s London’, Representations, 23 (Summer 1988), 1–25. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn, p. 43. Kirby, On the Power, vol. 1, pp. 12–14. See Futcher, ‘Notes on Insect Contagion’; Busvine, Insects, Hygiene, and History; J. L. Cloudsley Thompson, Insects and History; Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History; and Pelling, ‘Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity’. For an intriguing piece of recent speculation, see James C. Riley, ‘Insects and the European Mortality Decline’. Working from purely speculative causal links, Riley attributes the first phase of the 1670–1950 mortality decline to ‘environmentalist’ measures. Medical practitioners, he argues, unwittingly reduced the density of disease-carrying insect populations through programmes of lavation, drainage and ventilation. Nuttall, ‘On the Rôle of Insects’. Service, ‘A Short History of Early Medical Entomology’; Foster, A History of Parasitology; Farley, ‘Parasites and the Germ Theory’; Worboys, ‘The Emergence and Early Development of Parasitology’; and Howard, ‘A Fifty-Year Sketch History’. Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities since 1880 (London: John Murray, 1978), pp. 31, 38, 68. Harrison, Public Health in British India, p. 115; and Dumett, ‘The Campaign against Malaria’. Marie Boas Hall, All Scientists Now: The Royal Society in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 173–4. Stearn, The Natural History Museum, pp. 205, 211–16; and N. D. Riley, The Department of Entomology of the British Museum’, pp. 1–8. J. Chamberlain to The Officer Administering the Government of——, 6 Dec. 1898, in Theobald, A Monograph of the Culicidae, vol. 1 (1901), p. x. In addition, see E. Ray Lankester, ‘Preface’, in ibid., pp.iii–iv. Austen, The House Fly. Ridewood, Guide to the Specimens. Cummings [W. N. P. Barbellion], The Journal of a Disappointed Man, p.106. In what appears to be almost a humorous retort to Cummings’s lament, ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man (Review)’, Nature, 103 (10 July 1919), 363, declared that ‘one might have regretted to see another promising morphologist pinned for life to systematic entomology’. Theobald, First Report on Economic Zoology. Austen, ‘Mosquitoes and Malaria’, 583.

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24. Lefroy, ‘The Training of an Economic Entomologist’, 55–6. For Lefroy’s assessment of the relationship between economic entomology and insect systematics, see Lefroy, ‘Priority and Practical Entomology’; Lefroy, ‘Nomenclature of Economic Insects’; and Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, pp. 52–60. Cummings, The Bed-Bug, p. 19. 25. Imms, ‘The Scope and Aims of Applied Entomology’, 73. Pickering and Theobald, Fruit Trees and their Enemies, p. 2. For similar statements, see Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, pp. 71, 85. 26. B. G. Maegraith, ‘History of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’, Medical History, 16 (1972), 354–68 (esp. 359); F. Laing, ‘Obituary: Professor Robert Newstead, M.Sc., F.R.S.’, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 83 (1947), 109; ‘Obituaries. Prof. Robert Newstead, F.R.S.’, Nature, 159 (29 Mar. 1947), 428–9; and Robert Newstead, Monograph of the Coccidae of the British Isles (2 vols, London: Ray Society, 1901–1903). Rothman, ‘Insect Pest Control Research’, pp. 226–9. R. Newstead, ‘The Injurious Scale Insects and Mealy Bugs of the British Isles’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 23 (1899–1900), 219–62; and Newstead, ‘The Results of Some Experiments’. In addition, see Cousins, ‘Fumigation with Hydrocyanic Acid’. 27. Worboys, ‘The Emergence of Tropical Medicine’; and Worboys, ‘Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy’. For Ross’s insect vector control ‘expeditions’, and the entomologists’ involvement, see Ronald Ross, Mosquito Brigades; Austen, Report of the Proceedings; and Dumett, ‘The Campaign against Malaria’. On Alcock, see The India Museum 1814–1914 (Calcutta: India Museum, 1914), pp. 119–22. 28. Grove, ‘Colonial Conservation’, p. 22. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 101–2. Thomason, ‘The New Botany in Britain’, pp. 154–77. Edelsten, ‘John Claud Fortescue Fryer 1886–1948’. Wigglesworth, ‘August Daniel Imms 1880–1949’; Barnes, ‘Obituary Notice: Dr. A. D. Imms’; and Lefroy, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 11. 29. ‘Obituary: Prof. H. Maxwell Lefroy’, Entomologist, 58 (1925), 279–80; ‘Obituary: Prof. H. Maxwell-Lefroy’, Nature, 116 (1925), 651–2; Bateman, ‘The Imperial Entomologist’, 5. 30. Sidney F. Harmer, Obituary of Sir Arthur Everett Shipley, Proceedings of the Linnean Society for 1912–28, pp. 130–7. Shipley, ‘Malaria and the Mosquito’; Shipley, ‘The Danger of Flies’; and Shipley, The Minor Horrors of War. MacLeod, ‘Scientific Advice for British India’, 349, n. 21; and Thomason, ‘The New Botany in Britain’, pp. 169–72. John Benn, Tradesman’s Entrance (London, 1935), p. 37, as quoted in Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, p. 55. 31. Worboys, ‘The Emergence and Early Development of Parasitology’, pp. 3–5. 32. J. Stanley Gardiner secured the position for A. D. Imms. While at Cambridge, Imms produced what has become a seminal text in entomology, Outlines of Entomology (1942). See Wigglesworth, ‘Augustus Daniel Imms’, 465–6; and D. M. S. Perkins, The Organization of Entomology, pp. 14–15. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, pp. 31–60 (esp. p. 42). Shipley, ‘Historical Introduction’. Shipley, ‘J.’: A Memoir of John Willis Clark, p. 288. In addition, see Lucas, ‘David Sharp’; and F. M. ‘Obituary: Dr. David Sharp, M.B., C.M. (Edinb.), F.R.S. etc.’, Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, 34 (1922), 186–8. G. S. G.-S. and D. K., ‘George Henry Falkiner Nuttall’. 33. Dyer, ‘What Science has Done for the West Indies’, 252. Worboys, ‘The Imperial Institute’, pp. 166–7; Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’, pp. 30–44; and Parry and Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies, pp. 237–51. 34. Morris, ‘The Imperial Department of Agriculture’; Ballou, ‘Entomology in the West Indies’, esp. 296–7; Lefroy, ‘Moth Borer in Sugar-Cane’; and Howard, A History of Applied Entomology, pp. 446–51. 35. E. J. Russell, ‘The Transvaal and Indian Departments’; Dyer, ‘Agricultural Research in India’; MacLeod, ‘Scientific Advice for British India’, 352–3; Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, pp. 209–58; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, pp. 13–33; Grove, Green Imperialism; and Masefield, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service,

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43.

44.

N O T E S t o p p. 2 0 6 – 210 pp. 14–30. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj 1857–1905 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 90–3; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 25–59, 141–75 (33). Edward Balfour to the Under Secretary of State for India, 8 Aug. 1885, in Balfour, The Agricultural Pests of India, pp. 5–6. For Eleanor A. Ormerod’s letter to Balfour, dated 25 Sept. 1885, see ibid., pp. 7–9. To complete the intellectual genealogy, Lefroy’s Indian Insect Pests opened with an epigrammatic quotation from Ormerod’s letter of 25 Sept. 1885. Grove, Green Imperialism. Kumar, Science and the Raj, p. 99. Kumar, Science and the Raj, pp. vii–viii, 85–86. Cotes, A Preliminary Account. When Cotes resigned from the museum, Lionel de Niceville assumed his position and became first Entomologist to the Government of India (1901). For instance, Indian Museum Notes, 2 (1891–3), pp. 133–42, contained extracts from D. W. Coquillet’s report on ‘Gas Treatment for Scale Insects’, for the US Department of Agriculture, Division of Entomology; from A. E. Shipley’s note on the same gas treatment, applied to the scale insects of Indian coffee and tea plants, in the Kew Bulletin, no. 57 (1891); and from Ormerod’s Paris-Green (Or Emerald-Green) (1891). Cotes, The Experimental Introduction of Insecticides, p. 1. As H. Maxwell Lefroy noted in ‘The Training of an Economic Entomologist’, 51, insect eradication campaigns in India would be impeded by Jains and orthodox Hindus, who objected to the taking of any form of animal life. Similarly, influential orientalist William Jones had discouraged the pursuit of entomology in India. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘deprive the butterfly its natural enjoyment because it has the misfortune to be rare or beautiful?’ See Centenary Review of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 3 (Calcutta, 1885), p. 57, quoted in Kumar, ‘The Evolution of Colonial Science in India’, p. 61. Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, pp. 64–5. Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, p. vi. As the quotation indicates, however, the collection of information could not proceed as an autocratic, coercive operation. British scientists would have to work through indigenous elites. Harrison, Public Health in British India, pp. 117–38, 146, makes this point in the context of cholera and plague measures. E. C. Cotes, The Experimental Introduction of Insecticides into India, p. 1; and Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, p. 70. For brief histories of Indian entomology, see B. Vasantharaj David and T. Kumaraswami, Elements of Economic Entomology, 2nd rev. edn (Madras: Popular Book Depot, 1978), pp. 3–12; Hem Singh Pruthi, Textbook on Agricultural Entomology (New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1969), pp. 22–9; and Maxwell-Lefroy (assisted Howlett), Indian Insect Life, pp. 17–20. On the question of India as a ‘ ’gigantic laboratory’, see Harrison, Public Health in British India, pp. 139–65; Grove, Green Imperialism; Stafford, Scientist of Empire, pp. 110–31; and Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 31. Hannah Gay, The History of Imperial College London 1907–2007 (London: Imperial College Press, 2007), pp. 149–50, 174, 195–6, 206. In addition, see Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’, pp. 295–346; and Alter, The Reluctant Patron, pp. 149–72. Rosenberg, ‘Science, Technology, and Economic Growth’; and Knight, ‘Entomology and the State Agricultural Experiment Stations’. Lefroy, ‘The Training of an Economic Entomologist’, 54. In addition, see Thompson, Insects and History, pp. 201–22. Lefroy, ‘The Training of an Economic Entomologist’, p. 57. ‘Obituary. Prof. H. Maxwell-Lefroy’, Nature, 116 (1925), 652; and Bateman, ‘The Imperial Entomologist’. Lefroy, ‘Scale Insects of the West Indies’, 318; Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, pp. 75–9; Lefroy, ‘Inaugural Lecture’, p. 10. ‘Spraying Operations in London: Extermination of Caterpillars in Richmond Park’, Tropical Life, 9 (May 1913), 84. Lefroy and Fletcher, Insecticides, pp. 1–5.

N O T ES t o p p. 2 1 1 – 219

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45. ‘Medical News’, British Medical Journal (1915), no. 1, 270; H. M. Lefroy, ‘Extermination of Vermin Infesting Troops’, ibid., 317; Lefroy, ‘Scale Insects of the West Indies’, 319; Lefroy, ‘Crude Oil and Soap’; and Lefroy, Indian Insect Pests, pp. 82–3. 46. F. W. Gamble, ‘Impending Developments in Agricultural Zoology’, Annals of Applied Biology, 1 (1914), 5–8 (5). 47. Worboys, ‘Science and British Colonial Imperialism’, p. 301, makes this point. See also Lemaine et al., Perspectives; and Whitley, ‘The Establishment and Structure of the Sciences’. Brierley, ‘The Association of Applied Biologists’; and Walter E. Collinge (ed.), Proceedings of the Association of Economic Biologists, 1 (1905–8). 48. H. Maxwell Lefroy, ‘The Annals of Applied Biology: Editorial’, Annals of Applied Biology, 1 (1914), 1–4 (2–3). When the association took control of its own journal in 1914, the Honorary Secretary, Lefroy, became Honorary Editor. Lefroy held the latter position until 1916, when he handed the reins over to E. E. Green, former Government Entomologist in Ceylon. Brierley, ‘The Association of Applied Biologists’, 183; and ‘Proceedings of the Association of Economic Biologists’, Annals of Applied Biology, 6 (1919–20), 314. 49. ‘Posts for Entomologists’, The Times, 20 Nov. 1919, p.13. Keogh, ‘Posts for Entomologists’, p. 8; Gardiner, ‘Zoologists’ Salaries’. Gay, The History of Imperial College, p. 207. H. M. Lefroy, 23 Nov. 1920 and 14 Dec. 1920, Royal Entomological Society Library, 30/32, 30/33. 50. ‘Obituary. Harold Maxwell Lefroy, F.E.S.’, Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, 61 (1925), 259–60 (259); and H. Maxwell-Lefroy, Measures for Avoidance and Extermination of Flies, Mosquitoes, Lice and Other Vermin, 2nd edn (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1916), p. 10. 51. Westminster Hall. Report to the First Commissioner of H. M. Works, &c., on the Roof Timbers of Westminster Hall, Cd. 7436/1914. 52. See the president’s remarks in H. M. Lefroy, The Death-Watch Beetle (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1926), p. 2. ‘Obituary. Professor Lefroy: A Great Economic Entomologist’, The Times, 15 Oct. 1925, p. 16. 53. Bateman, ‘The Imperial Entomologist’; and ‘Rentokil Initial – About Us – History’, at www.rentokil-initial.com/about/history.php (accessed 4 Sept. 2006). ‘Obituaries. Professor H. Maxwell Lefroy’, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 30 (1925), 899–900 (899). ‘Professor Lefroy’s Death: Inquest Verdict’, The Times, 17 Oct. 1925, p. 9. 54. For knowledge about Lefroy’s children, I am grateful to personal information from one of his descendants, Philippa Lewis, 31 Aug. 2007.

10 House flies 1. Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1922; repr. London: Red Fox, 1991), p. 98. 2. The Guardian. 13 Apr. 1907, p. 8. Michael Worboys, ‘Tropical Disease’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, eds. (2 vols, London: Routledge, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 512–36 (503). 3. J. A. Louis Downey, The House Fly Danger: The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth (West Hartlepool: Health Department, 1924). 4. Hansard, 3rd series, 208 (1871), cols 102–12; [J. Lubbock], ‘The Fly in its Sanitary Aspect’, Lancet, part 2 (1871), 270; G. E. Nicholas, ‘The Fly in its Sanitary Aspect’, Lancet, part 2 (1873), 724; and see, for example: ‘The Pestiferous Fly’, Lancet, part 1 (1873), 156; W. Moore, ‘Diseases Probably Caused by Flies’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1893), 1154; and W. S. Patton and F. W. Cragg, A Textbook of Medical Entomology (London: Christian Literature Society for India, 1913), pp. 338–9. For a historical appreciation of house flies as vectors of disease, see Thompson, Insects and History, pp. 124–45. 5. G. Hurlstone Hardy, The Book of the Fly (London: William Heinemann, 1915), p. 5. Howard, Fighting the Insects, pp. 141–3. Although examples of the natural theological

282

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

N O T E S t o p p. 2 1 9 – 229 approach to house flies were relatively rare by the late nineteenth century, they can be found. See W. H. Harris, ‘Flies’, Girl’s Own Paper, 8 (1887), 627–9; and James Samuelson, Humble Creatures; Part I. The Earthworm and the Common Housefly, 2nd edn (London: John Van Voorst, 1860). Bernard Greenberg, Flies and Disease (2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971–3), vol. 2 (1973), pp. 3–18. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726/1735; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 98. For a cultural history of the fly, see Steven Connor, Fly (London: Reaktion, 2007), esp. pp. 101–23. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861; repr., 4 vols, New York: Dover, 1968), vol. 3, pp. 24–42. Christopher Herbert, ‘Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew’s London’, Representations, 23 (1988), 1–24 (2). See L. O. Howard, The House Fly: Disease Carrier, 2nd edn (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1911), pp. xvi–xvii. Naomi Rogers, ‘Germs with Legs: Flies, Disease, and the New Public Health’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 63 (1989), 599–617 (610). In addition, see Andrew McClary, ‘ “Swat the Fly”: Popular Magazines and the Anti-Fly Campaign’, Preventive Medicine, 11 (1982), 373–8. See E. E. Austen, ‘The House Fly and Certain Allied Species as Disseminators of Enteric Fever among Troops in the Field’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 2 (1904), 651–68. Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918 (London: Tavistock, 1987), esp. pp. 1–48. G. S. Graham-Smith, Flies in Relation to Disease: Non-bloodsucking Flies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), pp. 252–65. Rogers, ‘Germs with Legs’. ‘Insurance against Fly Dangers’, The Times, 28 Apr. 1915, p. 3. ‘Flies and Babies’, The Times, 12 Oct. 1917, p. 9. R. Newstead, ‘On the Habits, Life-Cycle and Breeding Places of the Common House Fly (Musca Domestica, Linn.)’, Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, 1 (1907–8), 507–20 (+ plates). Newstead’s rather unpleasant photographs of maggot-infested manure became standard illustrations within fly literature. See, for example, Howard, The House Fly, figs. 1 and 2, opposite p. 18; and Graham-Smith, Flies in Relation to Disease, plate x. Austen, The House Fly as a Danger to Health; and Guide to the Specimens. H. Maxwell Lefroy, The House Fly Campaign (London: Zoological Society of London, 1915). A. E. Shipley, ‘Introduction’ to C. F. Plowman and W. F. Dearden, Fighting the Fly Peril (London: T. Fisher, 1915), p. 13. G. S. Graham-Smith, ‘The Relation of the Decline in the Number of Horse-Drawn Vehicles, and Consequently of the Urban Breeding Grounds of Flies, to the Fall in the Summer Diarrhoea Rate’, Journal of Hygiene, 29 (1929–30), 132–8 (133). Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Defence of Lucknow’ (1879–80), in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman Norton, 1969), p. 1253. Shipley, The Minor Horrors of War, p. 10 (lice quote); see pp. 66–82 for the house fly. ‘Danger from Winged Huns: “Truth” on the Fly Peril’, Observer, 20 Aug. 1916, p. 11. ‘Flies at the Front’, The Times, 14 Aug. 1915, p. 7. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 80–106 (esp. 98–100). See letter from E. E. Austen to R. Newstead, dated 2 June 1919, Robert Newstead Papers and Correspondence, University of Liverpool, TM/23/11; and ‘Flies at the Front’, Guardian, 23 Aug. 1915, p. 3. Colonel B. Kinner, quoted in P. J. Marett, ‘Sanitation in War’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 24 (1915), 365–6. P. J. Marett, ‘Fly Prevention Methods’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 25 (1915), 456–60. S. M. Monckton and E. E. Austen, ‘Do House Flies Hibernate?’, in Reports to the Local Government Board on Public Health and Medical Subjects, new series, no. 102 (1914). ‘Do House Flies Hibernate?’, Entomologist, 46 (1914), 69–70. For an environmental

N O T ES t o p p. 2 2 9 – 239

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

283

history of insect vector control in relation to US public health policies and practices during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14), see Paul S. Sutter, ‘Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal’, Isis, 9 (2007), 724–54. E. H. Ross, ‘Hibernation of Flies’, The Times, 4 Dec. 1915, p. 9; and C. J. Gahan, ‘Hibernation of Flies’, The Times, 7 Dec. 1915, p. 9. E. H. Ross, C. J. Gahan and M. D., ‘Hibernation of Flies’, The Times, 10 Dec. 1915, p. 10; 15 Dec. 1915, p. 11; 17 Dec. 1915, p. 5; 29 Dec. 1915, p. 10; 28 Dec. 1915, p. 5; and 30 Dec. 1915, p. 10. Cummings [Barbellion], The Journal of a Disappointed Man, pp. 232–3. F. M. Howlett, ‘Hibernation of Flies’, The Times, 31 Dec. 1915, p. 9; George Birdwood, ‘The Hibernation of Flies’, The Times, 4 Jan. 1916, p. 9; and R. P. McDonnell and T. Eastwood, ‘A Note on the Mode of Existence of Flies during Winter’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 29 (1917), 98–100. C. J. Gahan and E. H. Ross, ‘House Flies and Snails’, The Times, 29 Nov. 1919; 2 Dec. 1919, p. 10; 6 Dec. 1919; ‘The House Fly in the Winter’, The Times, 13 Dec. 1919, p. 15; E. E. Austen, ‘House Flies in Winter’, The Times, 18 Dec. 1919; H. M. Lefroy, ‘House Flies in Winter-Time: Hibernation Explanation’, The Times, 18 Dec. 1919, p. 8; and A. D. Imms, ‘House Flies in Winter’, The Times, 27 Dec. 1919, p. 6; C. J. Gahan, ‘House Flies in Winter’, The Times, 23 Dec. 1919. T. Crew, ‘Enemy of Man’, and ‘Song of the Fly’, in Health First in Verse, Prose and Epigram (Leicester: n.p., 1931), pp. 37, 38. S. M. Copeman, F. M. Howlett and G. Merriman, ‘Investigations at Postwick’, in Reports to the Local Government Board on Public Health and Medical Subjects, new series, no. 53 (1911), pp. 2–9. Luther S. West, The Housefly: Its Natural History, Medical Importance, and Control (London: Constable, 1951), pp. ix, 8. U. Beck, ‘From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions for Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment’, Theory, Culture and Society, (1992), 97–123. In addition, see Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear (London: Cassell, 1997), pp. 15–44. Russell, War and Nature; and Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe. Riley, ‘Insects and the European Mortality Decline’, 852. Nigel Morgan, ‘Infant Mortality, Flies and Horses in Later-Nineteenth-Century Towns: A Case Study of Preston’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), 97–132. Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, p. 134. Timothy Mitchell Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), esp. pp. 19–53.

11 Conclusion 1. William Kirby and William Spence, ‘Preface to the First Edition, 1815’, in their Introduction to Entomology, 7th edn (1856), p. ix. Moses Harris, The Aurelian (London, 1766), p. 34. Raven, John Ray, pp. 417–28, casts some doubt on the story of Lady Glanville. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 203. A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 126, 140. In addition see A. Conan Doyle, ‘The Story of the Beetle-Hunter’, Strand Magazine, 15 (1898), 603–12. 2. J. O. Westwood, The Entomologist’s Text Book (London: W. S. Orr, 1838), pp. 28–51. Kirby and Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 5th edn (1828), vol. 1, pp. 1–20; vol. 4, pp. 560–73. 3. Desmond, ‘Redefining the X Axis’. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Amateurs and Professionals in One County: Biology and Natural History in Late Victorian Yorkshire’, Journal of the History of Biology, 34 (2001), 115–47. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, pp. 85–6. Allen, ‘The Early Professional’.

284 4. 5. 6.

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N O T E S t o p p. 2 3 9 – 242 Desmond, The Politics of Evolution; and Desmond, ‘Lamarckism and Democracy’. Hilton, ‘The Politics of Anatomy’. Joseph A. Caron, ‘ “Biology” in the Life Sciences: A Historiographical Contribution’, History of Science, 26 (1988), 223–68. See John Pickstone, ‘Ways of Knowing: Towards a Historical Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine’, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 433–58 (esp. 436–40). For the persistence of this tension in twentieth-century taxonomy, see Keith Vernon, ‘Desperately Seeking Status: Evolutionary Systematics and the Taxonomists’ Search for Respectability 1940–60’, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 207–27. Cummings [Barbellion], The Journal of a Disappointed Man, p. 110. H. B. D. Kettlewell, ‘Darwin’s Missing Evidence’, Scientific American, 200 (Mar. 1959), 48–53; C.A. Clarke, ‘Henry Bernard Davis Kettlewell, 1907–1979’, Antenna, 3 (Oct. 1979), 125; J. A. Bishop, ‘A Century of Industrial Melanism’, Antenna, 3 (Oct. 1979), 125–9. For the peppered moth’s place in the history of air pollution, see Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution (Athens, Ga.: Onio University Press, 2006), p. 38. Jaap de Roode, ‘The Moths of War’, New Scientist, 196 (8 Dec. 2007), 46–9; Hooper, Of Moths and Men, p. 32. Darwin, ‘Contributions to an Insect Fauna’, 221; Allen, ‘On Parallel Lines’. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, vol. 2, p. 346; Sharp, Insects, p. 85.

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INDEX

Page references in italic indicate figures. Addison, Joseph 50, 100 Agricultural Gazette 160 agriculture: by ants 71–2 and capitalism 15–16, 18–19, 31 depression in 146, 174, 179, 188, 243 and education 164, 170, 188–91, 205 improvement 11, 18–19, 20–3, 57–9, 62, 64, 162–5, 239 industrial 154 mixed 178–9 and patriarchalism 16–17, 19–20 and pesticides 132–3 and political economy 16–18, 19, 34, 39, 52 and protective legislation 144–6 rational 164 and rational beekeeping 57–63 and science 164–84, 186, 187–92, 242 as source of national wealth 17, 64 in USA 150–2 see also Colorado potato beetle; entomology; horticulture; insecticides; Ormerod, Eleanor Anne Albert, Prince Consort 54, 55 Albin, Eleazor 9 Alcock, Lt-Col. Alfred William 201–2 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 4

amateurs: and entomology 10, 15, 24–5, 105, 170, 211, 237–9 and field naturalists 183 see also Lubbock, John American Agriculturist 150–1 analogy: and affinity 46–50, 62 and emblematic tradition 4–6, 59 and insect societies 70–1, 77, 110 anatomy: comparative 35, 46–7, 123, 127 and natural selection 36, 110 and use inheritance 36 Andrewes, Lancelot 49 animals, domestication 62 Animals’ Friend 182 anthropomorphism, and insect societies 6, 75, 79 Anti-Jacobin Review 25, 26, 29 Antommarchi, Francesco 32–3 ants: and agriculture 71–2 artificial nests 56–7, 69, 70, 77, 86–7, 91–3, 92, 97–100 Darwin’s study 73–5, 110 Lubbock’s study of 86–9, 91–3, 92, 93, 94, 95–100, 101–3 and slavery 71, 73–6, 89 and society 32–3, 53, 70–1, 101–3 aristocracy, intellectual 81, 84, 96–7, 99, 104, 240, 242

312

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aristocracy, landed: and agriculture 20–3, 25–6, 164–5 and clergy 25–6 arsenic, as insecticide 150–1, 153, 173–6, 210 Association of Economic Biologists 211–12 atheism: and Darwinism 123 and French Revolution 25, 31–2 and Philosophical Radicalism 17 and political economy 17–18, 239 and radical anatomy 53 Audubon, John James 8 Austen, Ernest E. 199, 200, 223, 227, 228–9, 231 Australian Bug 186 BAAS see British Association for the Advancement of Science Babington, Charles C. 108 Baines, Frank 214 Bairstow, S. D. 186 Balfour, Edward G. 206–7, 208 Banks, Sir Joseph 20–3, 46, 64, 165 Bates, Henry Walter 74, 77, 78, 106, 111, 242 and Colorado beetle 147–8 and Entomological Society 114–15, 128, 129 and mimicry 115–18, 117, 240, 241 Becker, Lydia 160 beehives: collateral 64–9, 65, 66 leaf/book 61–2, 63 observation 60, 61, 67–8, 70 rational 54–7, 55, 57–63, 64, 70, 77 straw skeps 56, 56, 57, 64 transparent 54, 55, 60, 69, 76, 91 wooden 57–9, 58, 64 bees: Darwin’s study 109 and design 37 and human society 4, 70–1, 71, 101–3 Kirby’s study 17, 28–30, 53, 238 Lubbock’s study 88–9, 91, 97, 101–2 and reproduction biology 59–60 swarms 57, 60, 67–8 beetles: Colorado potato beetle 132–42, 133, 136, 138, 141, 143–52, 145, 146, 153 and Darwin 106–8, 107 Death Watch 214 sugar-cane shot-borer 186 Bell, Alexander Graham 96 Bell, Sir Charles 96 Bentham, Jeremy 17, 67–8

Berman, Morris 68 Bethune, Charles 14 Biggar, Joseph 142 biology: applied see entomology, economic philosophical 104, 106, 115, 119, 121, 123–7, 128, 130, 238, 240 and professionalism 105–6 and social theory 100–4 bionomics 120, 128 Birdwood, George 230–1 Birkbeck, George 66 blackcurrant mite 191 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 18, 48–9, 114 bluebottles 229, 231 Blundell, Henry 16 Blundell, Spence & Company 16, 177 Board of Agriculture 20–1, 147, 167–9, 172, 192, 200 Horticultural Department 190–1 Bodington, Alice 77–9 Bordeaux mixture 151 botany, and zoology 32, 46 bread riots 21 Bridgewater Treatises 38, 42, 51–2, 196 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) 10, 83, 89, 98, 143, 148 British Critic 25, 29 British Museum (Natural History) 73, 75, 91, 113, 166, 197–200, 214 and campaign against the house fly 223, 226, 229–30 Brougham, Henry, 1st Baron 30, 36–8, 40–2 Büchner, Ludwig 75 Bulletin of Entomological Research 194 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 1st Baroness 159–60 Burke, Edmund 20, 21, 30 Busk, George 84 butterflies, and mimicry 115–18, 117 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean 36 Cambridge University, and entomology 190, 203–5, 212–13 Canada: and Colorado beetle 132, 135 and economic entomology 192 and insecticide use 151, 174–5 Canadian Entomologist 154 capitalism, and agriculture 15–16, 18–19, 31 Carlyle, Thomas 142 Carrington, Edith 181–2, 183–4 Cattle Diseases Prevention Act 1866 146

I NDEX cattle plague 144–6, 172 Chadwick, Edwin 66 Chalmers, Thomas 18 Chamberlain, Joseph 186, 193, 197, 205 Christian Political Economy 17–18 Church of England: broad church party 84 High Church Toryism 25–8, 40, 42–4, 52–3, 238 church and state, and Toryism 25, 29, 44–5, 214 Churchill, Winston S. 191 Clapham Sect 44, 164 Classical Political Economy 19 classification see taxonomy clergy: and High Church Toryism 25–6 and landed interest 23, 25–6, 31 and natural history 26–8, 29 Cobbe, Frances Power 155–6 Cobbett, William 19–20, 40, 64 cockchafers 135 Cole, Henry 70 Colenso, John William 84 collectivism 100–2 Collinge, W. E. 212 Colorado potato beetle 132–53, 133, 136, 138, 141, 145, 146, 153, 161 and Bates 147–8 and insecticides 150–2 and Ireland 136–7, 142, 143–4 and Murray 144, 148–9 and Ormerod 163 as threat to national security 141–2 commerce, and agriculture 15–16, 18–19, 22 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 237 Conrad, Joseph 237 consumer society, conspicuous consumption 7–8 Contemporary Review 98, 99, 125 Cook, Captain James 20 cooperation, and evolution 100–2 Copeman, S. Monkton 228–9 Coquillet, D. W. 201 Corn Law, and Spence 20, 21, 23 Cotes, E. C. 207–8 cotton boll weevil 150 creationism, and evolution 116–17, 241 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl 194 Crowe, J. A. 139 Cruikshank, George 71 Crumbine, Samuel J. 220 Cummings, Bruce Frederick 199–200, 199, 229–30, 240 Curtis, John 161, 165–6, 186

313

Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st Marquess of Kedleston 206 Cuvier, Georges 32, 35 Dale, James Charles 166 Dandridge, Joseph 9 Darwin, Charles 34 and ants 73–5, 110 Beagle expedition 108 and bees 109 as beetle collector 106–8, 107 and ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ 118–21 and entomology 106–21 and Galton 94 and instinct 41–2, 74, 88, 109 and Lubbock 82–6, 88, 97 and mimicry 115–18, 119 and race 75 and worms 86, 87, 87–8, 110 writings: Descent of Man 88, 101, 109–10 Insectivorous Plants 109 Origin of Species 74, 83, 88, 100, 109, 111–12, 116, 129 Questions on the Breeding of Animals 160 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication 110–11 The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised 109 see also evolutionism; selection, natural Darwin, Erasmus 36–7, 110 Darwin, Francis 112 Darwinism, reform 100 Darwinism, social 100 Daubeny, Charles 30 depression, in arable agriculture 146, 174, 179, 188, 243 design, argument from 9, 27–8, 36–7, 109, 116–17, 123, 218, 241 Desmond, Adrian 46 dessicationist theory 208 Destructive Insects Act 1877 144, 147, 149 Destructive Insects and Pests Act 1907 152 Development Commission 1909 191–2, 193 diarrhoea, infantile 216, 217–18, 220–2, 231–2, 233–5 Dickens, Charles 170 Dickson, James 60, 61 disease: and insects 11–12, 131, 188, 194, 195–202, 198, 243–4 house fly 216–28, 221, 222, 231–2 mosquitoes 196–7, 200, 212 tsetse fly 77, 194, 202

314

I NDEX

and overcrowding 66, 233 see also cattle plague domestication: of animals 62 of insects 89–91, 90, 93, 97, 103–4, 110–11 Doyle, Richard 54, 64, 69 Drummond, Henry 102–3 Drury, Dru 7, 7–8, Dunbar, William 60, 61 Eades, Elizabeth 214 Eastwood, Serj. T. 231 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 60, 61 Edinburgh Review 18, 24, 62, 91, 157 Edinburgh University, and agricultural education 171, 184–5, 188, 190 education: and agriculture 164, 170, 184–5, 188–91, 205, 209 and Lubbock 97–100 technical 188–9 for women 159, 171 Edwards, W. H. 115 Elwes, Henry J. 124–7, 129–30 Encyclopaedia Britannica 163–4 Enlightenment: and epistemology 62 and natural history 6–9, 33, 69, 77 Scottish 37 enteric fever 215, 216, 217, 220, 227 Entomological Research Committee 193–4, 197–9 Entomological Society of London 10, 72, 107, 161 and Darwin 112, 114–15, 119–20, 127–31 and economic entomology 161 and Lubbock 83, 88–9, 114, 128 and Ormerod 167 and Poulton 121–2, 123–7, 128–9, 240 see also Royal Entomological Society of London entomology: and agriculture 11, 15, 16, 20, 22–4, 31, 34, 132–5, 147–9, 150–3, 239 and amateurism 10, 24–5, 80–1, 94–5, 105, 170, 211, 237–9 applied see entomology, economic biological 105–31, 240 and Darwin 106–21, 130 economic 96, 131, 142, 154–86, 187–211, 242 and education 164, 170, 184–5, 188–91 and famine 206 and gardening 162–3

and imperialism 202–8, 209, 213, 216, 243 institutionalization 212–13, 244 and professionalism 170, 187–90, 211–15, 236 and public health 216–32, 233, 236 and research-entrepreneur 209–14 emergence 7–10, 34 evolutionary 106 female entomologists 153, 154–86 medical 104, 188, 194–202, 212, 216–17, 228–32, 236, 242–4 metropolitan 166, 186, 187, 198–200, 206, 208, 209–11, 216 and opposition to Darwin 111–14 and professionalism 10–11, 12, 24–5, 80, 95–7, 103–4, 105–6, 128, 148 systematic 121–2, 124, 128–9, 149, 228–30, 238, 240 and taxonomy 28–30, 35, 127–8, 200 and war 30, 131, 142 see also insects entomophobia 135 epistemology: female 183–4 sensationalist 36, 40, 51, 62 Espinas, Alfred 101 essentialism, in classification 28–9 Evans, Howard 152 evolutionism: and Darwin 83, 88, 109–14, 241 early 29, 34, 35–6, 38, 40 and mind 88–90, 242 opposition to 111–14, 129 and Poulton 128 social 89 see also selection, natural experimentation 80–2, 86, 128, 130, 239 and Lubbock 91–4, 95–7, 101–2 and observation 4, 59, 72, 95, 121 experts, scientific: government support for 187–8, 191, 193 and medical entomology 200–2, 223, 242–3 Ormerod as 154, 168–9, 170, 174–7, 183–4 Fabre, J. H. 229 Fabricius, J. C. 28–30, 49 faith, and reason 53 famine, and economic entomology 206 fear, and the house fly campaign 233–5 femininity, and women scientists 156–7, 159, 163, 171, 172–3, 184–5 feminism, early 156–7, 159–60, 171 flea, turnip 164 Fletcher, James 174, 175

I NDEX flies: bluebottle 229, 231 Hessian 22–3, 140–2, 152, 167–8, 186 house fly 202, 215, 216–36 larch saw-fly 192 ox-warble 164, 172–3, 173, 185 tsetse fly 77, 194, 202 turnip 167 Fox, William Darwin 106–7 France: and government entomologists 160 and insect pests 134 Frankland, Edward 84 Fream, William 170, 171, 190 free trade: and agricultural science 166, 239 and insect invasions 142, 145 free will, and instinct 37 Freeman, John 32 Freeman’s Journal 143 French, John Oliver 50–1 French Revolution: and British politics 13, 15, 44, 45, 52 and science 25, 28, 30, 31–2, 35, 45 and wheat supply 6, 23 Frisch, Karl von 97 fruit farming see horticulture Fryer, J. C. F. 191, 203, 205, 242 Funny Folks 132, 133 Gahan, C. J. 214, 229, 231 Galton, Francis 83, 94–5, 96 Gamble, F. W. 211 Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette 111, 158, 160, 166 gardening, and economic entomology 162–3 Gardiner, J. Stanley 213, 279 n.32 gas, hydrocyanic-acid 200, 201, 214 gender: and bees 59–60 and women in science 155–7, 168, 171, 175, 184–6 Gentleman’s Magazine 25, 44 Gesner, Conrad 4 Gladstone, William E. 97, 137 glasshouses 69–70 Gould, William 72 governance, and insect societies 79 government: and agricultural education 188–9, 191 and constructive imperialism 193–200, 244 and rise of the expert 187–8 technocratic 69, 131, 132, 142, 168, 232–3 Grant Duff, Anna 98

315

Grant Duff, Mountstuart Elphinstone 84, 96, 98 Grassi, Giovanni Battista 197 Gray, Asa 109 Gray, Charles Wing 168 Gray, John Edward 113 Green, E. E. 281 n.48 Greenough, George and Aikin, Arthur 160 Greenwood, Thomas 98 Grove, Richard 263–4 n.39 habit, and instinct 35–6, 41–2, 68, 88, 164 Hackney Phalanx 44 Hales, Stephen 69 Hall, A. D. 192 Hall, Charles 19 Hampson, George F. 126 Handley, Henry 165 Harris, Moses 7, 237 Hart Dyke, William, 2nd Baronet 189 Hartlib, Samuel 57–9 Heselden, W. K. 223, 223 Hecker, Col. F. 143 Henslow, John Stevens 83, 107 Herschel, Caroline 155 Hessian fly 22–3, 140–2, 152, 167–8, 186 Hewitt, Charles Gordon 192 Hickson, S. J. 192 hierarchy: and classification 45–9 in human society 25, 31, 33, 44–5, 49, 52, 62 in nature 6, 31, 33, 35, 48, 52 Hirst, Thomas Archer 84 HMS Beagle 108 Holderness Agricultural Society 16, 21–2 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 73, 83, 84, 112, 158 Hope, E. W. 222, 223 Hope, Rev. F. W. 72, 107, 121, 195–6 Hope Professorship (Oxford): and Poulton 119, 121, 123, 126–7, 240 and Westwood 121–3, 122, 126 Hopkins, Thomas 19 Horne, George 40, 43 horses, and house flies 234–5 horticulture: government support for 190 and insecticide use 174–7, 185 house fly 202, 216–36 campaign against 222–8, 223, 225, 226, 232–3, 234, 235 and disease 217–28, 221, 222, 231–2 and hibernation 228–32 and insecticides 215 and modernity 235–6 and risk society 232–5

316

I NDEX

house sparrow 177–84, 179, 185 Howard, L. O. 152, 218–19, 221 Howlett, F. M. 205, 223, 230 Huber, François 60–2, 63 Huber, Pierre 73, 75–6, 91, 110 Huish, Robert 64 Humanitarian League 182 Hume, David 40, 41 Hunter, W. D. 195 Hurlstone Hardy, Major G. 218 Hutchinson, John 42–3, 50–1 Hutchinsonianism 42–4, 49–52 Huxley, Thomas Henry 101 and biology 105–6, 204, 239 and Entomological Society 127 and evolution 106, 112, 116, 120, 130 and Lubbock 83, 95, 97 and Natural History Review 116 and rise of the expert 187, 242 and scientific naturalism 80, 96 and the X Club 84–5, 240 hydrocyanic-acid gas 200, 201, 214 hypothesis 39–40 imagination 51 Imms, A. D. 192, 200–1, 203, 205, 231 imperialism: constructive 186, 193–5, 244 and economic entomology 202–8, 209, 212–13 and insecticide development 207–8 and tropical medicine 195–202, 244 improvement: agricultural 11, 18–19, 20–3, 57–9, 62, 64, 77, 162–5, 239 social 64–70, 77 India, and imperial entomology 205–8 individualism 94, 100–1 induction 37, 40 infant mortality, and house flies 217–18, 220, 221–2, 222, 233–5 inheritance: and Darwin 36, 110, 120, 125 and human mental attributes 94 and Lamarck 36, 120, 125 innovation, and radicalism 29–30, 49, 239 insect pests 22–4, 131, 163–4, 187–8, 191–2 as divine punishment 196 and imperialism 193–4, 196–7, 200, 206, 242–3 and legislation 134–8, 144, 148–9, 152 and protectionism 22–3, 137, 142 see also Colorado potato beetle; house fly; mosquitoes; ox-warble fly insecticides 149–53, 200, 242 arsenical 150–1, 153, 173–6, 210

contact 200, 210–11 and economic entomology 212 effect on food crops 132, 150 gas 200, 201, 214–15, 233 and imperial agriculture 207–8, 210–11 lead chromate solution 210 and Lefroy 213–14 and Ormerod 173–7 see also Paris green insects: collection 7–8, 9–10, 12, 21, 24, 95, 106–8, 237–8 and disease 11–12, 131, 194, 195–202, 198, 216–17, 231–2, 243–4 and imperialism 187–215 and instinct and intelligence 34–53 morphology 7, 28, 35, 46, 77 as sentient 34 social 4, 5, 7, 32–3, 53, 56, 70–9, 80–1, 85, 100–4, 242 species 1, 134 see also ants; bees; entomology instinct: of bees 60–2, 68 and Darwin 41–2, 74, 88, 109–10 and free will 37 and habit 35–6, 41–2, 68, 88 and intelligence 32, 34–8, 42–4, 50–2, 97, 109–10, 118 and Kirby 35, 38, 42–4, 50–2 and natural selection 74 sensationalist theory 36, 40, 51 and Spence 34, 38–42, 50–1 and Zoological Club 49 intellect, and reason 51, 97 intelligence 34–53, 242 and instinct 34, 35–8, 40–1, 50–2, 97, 109–10 and natural selection 88–90 and senses 94, 97 International Scientific Series 85, 98 invasions, biological 132, 133, 135, 137–40, 143, 152–3 Ireland: and Colorado beetle 136–7, 142, 143–4 and Home Rule 142 potato famine 143 Jacobinism 21, 25, 214 Jameson, Anna 159 Jenyns, Leonard 108 Johnson, J. R. 73 Jones, William 43, 44, 51, 62 Jowett, Benjamin 84 Keilin, D. 231 Keogh, Alfred 213

I NDEX

317

Kessler, Karl 101 Kettlewell, Bernard 241 Kirby, W. F. 75 Kirby, Rev. William 9, 13, 27 and Banks 46, 165, 248–9 n.16, 249 n.22 and French Revolution 31–2, 52 and Hutchinsonianism 42–4, 49–52 and instinct and reason 35, 38, 42–4, 50–2 and political economy 16–17, 20, 23–5, 26, 29–30, 34 and providentialism 24, 31, 50, 196 and quinarian system 46–9, 50 as ultra-Tory 20, 24–5, 26–8, 38, 42–4, 52–3, 214, 238, 239 writings: Introduction to Entomology (with Spence) 14–15, 20, 23, 31–2, 38, 49, 165, 196, 238 Monographia Apum Angliae 17, 28–30 On the History Habits and Instincts of Animals 38, 42 politico-religious 26 Koenig, Samuel 37 Köllar, V. 163 Kropotkin, Peter 100–1

Loudon, Jane and Mary 163 Loudon, John Claudius 69–70, 161, 163 Lubbock, John (later Lord Avebury) 75–6, 80–2, 81, 239 and amateurism 80–1, 94–5 and Darwin 82–6, 88, 97, 114 and Entomological Society 83, 88–9, 114, 128 and Galton 94, 96 and house fly 217–18 and politics 101 and popular science 97–100, 104, 240 and psychic unity 89, 99, 102 and research 95–7 and science and religion 83–4, 217 study of ants 86–9, 91–3, 92, 93, 94, 95–100, 101–3 study of bees and wasps 88–90, 90, 97, 101–2 and the X Club 84–5, 240 writings: Ants, Bees and Wasps 84–6, 88, 94, 95–7, 98, 101 Origin of Civilisation 101 Scientific Lectures 98–9 Lyell, Charles 83, 111, 113, 259 n.7

laboratories: and Oxford University 123, 130 and physiology 94–5 and psychology 95 Lahmer, John 151 Lamarck, J.-B. de 32, 35–6, 40, 47–8, 50, 113 Lankester, E. Ray 197, 199 larch saw-fly 192 Latreille, Pierre-André 28, 76 Lawes, J. B. 176 lead chromate solution 210 Lefroy, Harold Maxwell 203, 205, 208, 209–15, 223, 227, 231 legislation: and cattle plague 144–6 and insect pests 134–8, 144, 148–9, 152 lice 224, 227 Liebig, Justus 164 Lindley, John 166 Linnaeus, Carl 7, 15, 28, 45 Linnean Society 46, 115–16 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine 193, 201 Livingstone, David 77 Lloyd George, David 191 locust, Rocky Mountain 134 Lofting, Hugh 216 London School of Tropical Medicine 193, 201–2, 202

McArdle, John F. 143–4, 145 McCook, Rev. 72 McCulloch, J. R. 18 McDonnell, Capt. R. P. 231 McLachlan, Robert 148 Macleay, Alexander 24 Macleay, William Sharp 46–8, 47, 49, 50 Magendie, François 96 Major, Joshua 162–3 malaria 196–7, 198, 202, 212 Malthus, T. R. 18, 19–20, 88 Manchester University, and agricultural zoology 192 manipulation: of human society 66–7, 69 of nature 54–6, 57–62, 64, 68–9, 77, 91 Mann, Robert James 76, 91 Manson, Patrick 196–7, 202, 212, 216 Marett, Capt. P. J. 227 Marshall, Guy 214, 242 Marsham, Thomas 23 Martineau, Harriet 157 Marx, Karl 18 Masters, Dr Maxwell 160 materialism: radical 25, 31, 53 scientific 31–2, 39, 50, 75, 102, 130, 182 Mayhew, Henry 219–20 Maynard, Constance 158 Medd, J. C. 172

318

I NDEX

medicine, tropical 188, 193, 195, 204, 212, 216, 244 Meldola, Raphael 118–20, 121, 123–7, 129–30 and neo-Darwinism 120, 125 mercantilism 205–6 Mew, William 57, 58, 59 microscopes 4, 5 Mill, James 17, 18, 19 Miller, Florence Fenwick 264 n.42 mimicry: and Bates 115–18, 117, 240, 241 and natural selection 115–18, 119–21, 129–30, 238 mind see intelligence Mitchell, Timothy 236 modernity, and house flies 235–6 Moggridge, John Traherne 72 morality, and social organization 101–2 Morgan, C. Lloyd 86 Morley, John 97 morphology, insect 7, 28, 35, 46, 77, 88, 128 Morris, Rev. F. O. 182–3 Morton, John Chalmers 160 mosquitoes 196–7, 198, 200, 212 moth: brown-tail 135 codling 164 diamond-back 169 gypsy 150, 152 peppered 241 Mouffet (Muffet), Thomas 4, 219 Müller, Albert 160 Müller, Fritz 118, 121 Murray, Andrew 113, 134–5, 144, 148–9, 161 Myers, J. G. 101 Napier, C. O. Groom 160 Napoleon Bonaparte 32–3 Nash, J. C. T. 221–2 natural history: and amateurs 10, 15, 24–5, 80–1, 94–5, 105 and clergy 26–8, 29 and conspicuous consumption 7–8 and emblematic tradition 4–6, 59 and French Revolution 28, 30, 31–2, 52 and human culture 4–6 and publishing 8–9 and scientific revolution 3–4, 59 specialization 10–11 Natural History Review 116 natural theology 9, 26–8, 29, 184, 242 and common context 239–40 and Darwin 109

and house flies 217–19 Hutchinsonian 42–4, 49–52 and insect instinct 36–7, 40–1, 42–4 and providentialism 196 rejection 80, 84, 102 and Westwood 121–3, 163 naturalism, scientific 74, 80–1, 83–97, 101–4, 129–30, 217–19, 239–42 naturalists: academic 105–6, 118, 121–7, 131 field 104, 106, 118–19, 121, 127–8, 130, 183, 238, 240 laboratory 80, 94–5, 103–4, 106, 120–1, 204, 238, 240–1 Nature 85–6, 90, 91, 156 nature: balance of nature 182, 184, 208, 212 human manipulation 54–6, 57–62, 64, 77, 90 Neave, S. A. 193–4 neo-Darwinism: and Meldola 120, 125 and Poulton 119, 120, 125, 128–31, 240 Newman, Edward 114 Newport, George 83 Newsholme, Arthur 221 Newstead, Robert 191, 201–2, 223, 227–8 Nicholas, G. E. 218 Nightingale, Florence 160 Niven, James 221 Nobody’s Friends 252 n.19 Nutt, Thomas, Humanity to Honey Bees 64–9, 65, 66, 70 Nuttall, G. H. F. 196, 204–5 observation 2, 40–1, 115, 118, 120–1, 123, 130 of ants 33, 56, 73, 75, 92, 95, 97, 110 of bees 6, 56, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67–8, 70, 91–2, 109 and experiment 4, 59, 72, 95, 121 Ormerod, Eleanor Anne 154–86, 155 and agricultural education 170–1, 184–5 calling card 161 and constructive imperialism 186, 206 education 159 and Entomological Society 167 as government entomologist 153, 154, 160, 167–8, 238 and house sparrow as pest 177–84, 185 and insect pests 153, 191 and insecticides 173–7, 185 obituaries 154, 156 and ox-warble fly 172–3, 173 professional status 156–7, 169, 171, 177–8, 185

I NDEX and Royal Agricultural College 170 and Royal Agricultural Society 166–7, 169–71, 172–3 as scientific expert 154, 168–9, 170, 174–7, 183–4 writings: Annual Reports of Observations of Injurious Insects 201 Autobiography and Correspondence 155, 156, 185 Guide to Methods of Insect Life 170 A Manual of Injurious Insects 167 Notes on the Australian Bug 186 Notes and Descriptions of a Few Injurious Farm & Fruit Insects 186 Notes for Observations of Injurious Insects 160 A Text-Book of Agricultural Entomology 170 Ormerod, George 157–9 Ormerod, Georgiana 156, 158 ornithology 180 ox-warble fly 164, 172–3, 173, 185 Oxford University: and agricultural science 171 and biological entomology 106, 119, 121–3, 130–1 Hope Professorship 119, 121–2, 123, 126–7, 240 Packard, A. S. 134 Paine, Thomas 23, 26 Paley, William 9, 27, 30, 36–7 Pall Mall Gazette 99, 139 Paris green, as insecticide 132, 133, 140, 150–1, 153, 173–7, 185 Parnell, Charles Stewart 142 patriarchalism 6, 33 and agrarian economy 16–17, 19–20 Anglican 52–3 domestic 157, 159, 185 Tory 44, 45, 52 Paxton, Joseph 166 Peel, Robert 166 Penny, Thomas 4 Philosophic Radicals 17–18 Phipps, Henry 206 phylloxera aphid 134, 164 Physiocracy 17–18, 19, 21–3, 52 physiology: and insects 4, 6, 94, 96–7, 128 and instinct and intelligence 35 and politics 52 research 94–6 sensory 94, 96–7 Pickering, spencer 191, 201 Place, Francis 17

319

Playfair, John 30 Playfair, Lyon 97 poisons see insecticides political economy: agrarian 16–18, 19–20, 39 Christian 17–18 Classical 19 and landed interest 20–3, 25–6, 31 and Physiocracy 17–18, 19, 21–3, 52 Radical 19 and war 17 politics: and insect society 6–7, 242 and science 6–7, 14–33, 131, 132–8, 147 and social Darwinism 100 and Spence 15–18, 34, 38–9, 52 Porter, Roy 170 potatoes: and Colorado beetle 135–9, 143–4, 150 and Phytophthora infestans blight 143 Potter, John 51–2 Poulton, Edward B. 4, 12, 13, 106, 119–21, 119, 131 and Entomological Society of London 121–2, 123–6, 128, 129–30, 240 and evolution 128–9 and Hope Professorship 119, 121, 123, 126–7, 240 and neo-Darwinism 119, 120, 125, 128–31, 240 poverty, and house flies 219–20 Power, John O’Connor 142 Prain, Lt-Col. David 203 Proclamation Society 43 professionalism: in biology 105–6 in economic entomology 170, 187–90, 211–15, 236 in entomology 10–11, 12, 24–5, 80, 95–7, 103–4, 128, 148 and Ormerod 156–7, 169, 171, 177–8, 185 in science 24–5, 80–1, 95–7, 103–4, 105–6, 128, 170, 239–40 protectionism 15, 239 and insect pests 22–3, 137, 142 providentialism 24, 31, 50, 117, 163, 196 psychology: associationist 94 comparative 85–6, 99, 238 laboratory research 95 physiological 87–8, 94 public health, and entomology 11–12, 216–32, 233, 236 publishing, and natural history 8–9

320

I NDEX

Punch 54, 55, 89–90, 90, 102, 103, 139–40, 146, 153 Quarterly Review 165 quinarianism 46–9, 47, 50 radicalism: and innovation 29–30 and materialism 25, 31, 53 Philosophic Radicals 17–18 and political economy 19 Ravenstone, Piercy 19 Ray, John 9, 27 reason: and faith 53 and insects 89 and intellect 51 see also intelligence Réaumur, R. A. F. 37, 60, 62, 128, 261 n.23 Reed, Walter 220 reform, social 45, 57, 64–70, 77 and instinct 36–7 Reid, Thomas 40 religion: and political economy 17–18, 238 and science 9, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 34, 39, 80, 83–4, 217–19, 239 Rennie, James 10 Repton, Humphrey 162 research: government-supported 189–92, 193–4, 197 network 160–1, 186, 206 private patronage 188, 191 and scientific naturalism 95–7, 130 revelation: and Kirby 24, 38, 42, 51, 53 and scientific naturalism 80 and Spence 20, 40–1 Review of Applied Entomology 194 Ricardo, David, Principles of Political Economy 17, 18 Richards, Robert 50 Rigby, Robert 16 Riley, Charles Valentine 134, 136–7, 141, 148, 150, 173 Ritvo, Harriet 77 Robinson, David 48–9 Robison, John 30, 45 Rodwell, George 14 Rolleston, George 123 Romanes, George J. 86 Romanticism, and natural history 9 Ross, E. Halford 229, 230–1 Ross, Ronald 196–7, 201 Rothamsted Experimental Station 188, 192, 231

Royal Agricultural College 170, 188, 190 Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) 165, 166, 186 and Ormerod 166–7, 169–71, 172–3 Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning 176 Royal Entomological Society of London 106, 213 Royal Horticultural Society 21, 113, 149, 158 Royal Institution 20, 21, 88, 93, 96 Royal Society 59, 160, 197 Runciman, Walter 191 Ruskin, John 99 Say, Thomas 135, 149 scale insects 186, 201 Schirach, Adam Gottlob 60 science: and agriculture 164–84, 186, 187–92, 242 and British Empire 187 disciplinary fragmentation 10, 97, 104, 123, 240 and experts 187, 191, 193, 200–2, 223, 242 French 25, 28, 30, 31–2, 35, 45–6 ideological ambiguity 26–7, 30 materialist 31–2, 39, 50, 102, 130, 182 and politics 6–7, 14–33, 131, 132–8, 147, 193, 242 popular 97–100 and religion 9, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 34, 39, 80, 83–4, 217–19, 239 scientific method 39–40, 52 and secularism 80–104 and technical education 188 technocratic 69, 131, 132, 142, 152–3, 168, 219 women in see Ormerod, Eleanor Anne see also experimentation; professionalism; veterinary science scientific revolution, and natural history 3–4, 59 secularism, and science 80–104 Sedgwick, Adam 209 Séguy, M. E. 231 selection, artificial 110, 112, 160 selection, natural: academic study 106, 130–1 and instinct 88 and mimicry 115–18, 119–21, 240, 241 opposition to 111–14, 125 and sexual selection 109, 115 and state socialism 101 support for 115–18

I NDEX sensation: and ants 86–7, 94 and bees 88–9 and intellect 51, 94 and physiology 94, 96–7 and worms 86 Seton, E. T. 181 Sharp, David 77, 115, 125, 204–5 Shipley, Arthur Everett 86, 203–5, 212, 214, 223, 229 Simo, Melanie 70 Simpson, J. J. 193–4 Sinclair, Sir John 22 Skinner, Henry 228 slavery: among ants 71, 73–6, 89 Smeathman’s involvement 2–3 Smeathman, Henry 1–3, 11 as collector 7–8 and slavery 2–3 studies of termites 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 Smee, Alfred 143 Smellie, William 37 Smith, Frederick 73, 113–14 Smith, W. H. 168 social Darwinism 100 social theory, and biology 100–4 socialism, and insects 100–4, 238 society: insect 70–9, 242 organismic theories 54–6, 68, 70–1 social engineering 66–7, 77 Society of Arts 135 Somerville, Mary 155, 158 Somerville, William 212 South Africa, and economic entomology 186 sparrow clubs 178–80 Spence, William: and Banks 20–2 and Cobbett 19–20, 40 and Holderness Agricultural Society 22 and Hope 196 and instinct and intelligence 34, 38–42, 50, 51 and political economy 15–18, 21–3, 34, 38–9, 52 and religion 20, 39–40 and under-consumptionism 19 writings: Agriculture the Source of Wealth in Britain 248 n.10 Britain Independent of Commerce 16–20, 22, 40 Introduction to Entomology (with Kirby) 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 29, 31, 39, 196, 238

321

The Objections against the Corn Bill Refuted 20, 22 Spencer, Herbert 84–5, 125 spinsters 157–60, 184–5 Spottiswoode, William 84, 96 Spratt, G. 243, 244 Sprengel, Conrad 88, 94, 261 n.22 Stainton, H. T. 114 Stebbing, E. P. 203 Stelluti, Francesco 4, 5 Stephens, James F. 10, 107, 158 Stevens, William 252 n.19 Stewart, Dugald 18, 39–40 Sumner, J. B. 45 Swammerdam, Jan 4, 60 Swift, Jonathan 219 Swinhoe, Col. Charles 123–6 Sykes, Lt-Col. W. H. 72 taxonomy: and comparative anatomy 35, 46–7 entomological 28–30, 35, 127–8, 149, 200, 238–9 and hierarchy 45–9 quinary system 46–9, 47, 50 Taylor, John 151 Taylor, William M. 69 Tegetmeier, William B. 111, 177–9, 182–3 Temple, Sir William 235–6 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 223 termites: as social insects 1, 3, 4, 5 Smeathman’s studies 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 Theobald, F. V. 190, 197, 200–1, 212 Thomas, Cyrus 134 The Times 143, 149, 154, 160, 194, 211, 213, 230–1 tithes 23 Toryism: and church and state 25, 29, 44–5, 214 High Church 25–8, 40, 42–4, 52–3, 238 and political economy 15, 20–1, 70 and science 34–53 ultra-Toryism 18, 20, 24–5, 52, 239 transformism 34, 36–7, 48, 50, 242 transmutationism 29, 112–13 Trimen, Roland 118 tsetse fly 77, 194, 202 Turner, Dawson and Dillwyn, Lewis Weston 160 turnip fly 167 Tutt, James 123, 130–1 Tylor, E. B. 85 Tyndall, John 84–5, 96 typhoid fever 194, 217–18, 220–1, 221 typhus 194, 227

322

I NDEX

ultra-Toryism 18, 20, 24–5, 52 under-consumptionism 19 United States: and economic entomology 209–10 and government entomologists 160 and house sparrow 180, 181, 182–3 and insect pests 134–42, 148, 201 and insecticide use 150–3, 174–6, 207–8, 210–11 unity, psychic 89, 99, 102 urbanization: and disease 217, 223, 232–4 effects on bird population 178–9 and insect collecting 9–10 and public health 11–12 and Toryism 44 use inheritance 36, 120, 125 utilitarianism, theological 30, 196, 218 utility: and Cobbett 64 and entomology 24, 31, 70, 96 and political economy 15, 19 variation: in Bates 116–17 and creationism 36, 116 in Darwin 110–11, 114, 116–17, 120 in Galton 94 in Lamarck 36 in Macleay 46–7 in Westwood 111–12 in Wollaston 112–13 veterinary science 145–6, 172 Victoria, Queen 54, 55, 98 Vigors, Nicholas Aylward 46, 50 Virey, Julien-Joseph 35, 51 Walker, Francis 108 Walker, J. E. 180–1, 184 Wallace, Alfred Russel 130 and Darwin 101, 114–15 and mimicry 118 as neo-Darwinist 120 and Poulton 106, 120, 121, 123 Wallace, John 142 Wallace, Robert 154, 169 Walpole, Horace 43 Walsingham, Thomas De Grey, 6th Baron 124, 126 war: and disease 217, 220–1, 223–7 and entomology 30, 131, 142 and political economy 17 warble fly 164, 172–3, 173, 185 Warburton, Cecil 171, 190, 205, 214 Warington, Robert 189–90

Waterhouse, George Robert 108 Watson, George 43 Watson, H. C. 169 Weismann, August 106, 118, 120–1, 125, 130 Wells, H. G. 184 West Indies, and imperial entomology 203, 205 West, Luther S. 232–3 Westminster Review 72, 74–5 Westwood, John Obadiah 111–12, 115, 129–30, 171, 237–8, 266–7 n.24 and Colorado beetle 136 and gardening and entomology 163, 168 and Hope Professorship 121–3, 122, 126 Wheeler, William Morton 261 n.23 Whewell, William 10–11 Whigs: conservative 51 and intellectual aristocracy 84, 97, 104 and science 80, 82, 239 and social reform 69 Whitby, Mary A. F. 110–11 Whitehead, Charles 167–9, 173 Wigglesworth, Vincent 12, 13 Wilberforce, William 43 Wilkes, Benjamin 9 Wilkin, Simon 165 Wilson, James 14 Wollaston, Thomas Vernon 112–13, 114 women: and animal welfare 181–2 education 159, 171 as entomologists see Ormerod, Eleanor Anne in gardening 163 and poisons 175 spinsters 157–60, 184–5 Wood, Rev. J. G. 8–9, 182–3 Woolf, Virginia 178, 185 Working Men’s College 82, 98, 99 worms: Darwin’s study of 86, 87, 87–8, 110 filarial 196 Wotton, Edward 4 Wren, Christopher 57, 58, 59 X Club 84–5, 105, 240 Youmans, Edward Livingstone 84–5 Young, Arthur 22 Zoological Club 46, 49–50 zoology, and botany 32, 46