Archives of natural history, Volume 38, No. 2 (2011)
Archives of natural history, Volume 38, No. 2 (October 2011) is available online at Edinburgh University Press.
Patron’s review. SACHIKO KUSUKAWA: The role of images in the development of Renaissance natural history.
K. FREDGA, T. STJERNBERG & I. SVANBERG: An early (1834) illustration of the wood lemming, Myopus schisticolor (Lilljeborg, 1844), from Finland.
S. G. SEALY & M. F. GUIGUENO: Cuckoo chicks evicting their nest mates: coincidental observations by Edward Jenner in England and Antoine Joseph Lottinger in France.
P. G. MOORE: Eric Fitch Daglish (1892–1966): naturalist, illustrator, author and editor.
R. B. WILLIAMS & P. G. MOORE: An annotated catalogue of the marine biological paintings of Thomas Alan Stephenson (1898–1961).
H. J. NOLTIE: A botanical group in Lahore, 1864.
D. G. MEDWAY: The contribution of Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), Welsh naturalist, to the Australian ornithology of Cook’s first voyage (1768–1771).
P. G. MOORE: The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.
H. O. CLARK, Jr: The history of arid-land fox discoveries in North America.
T. KINUKAWA: Natural history as entrepreneurship: Maria Sibylla Merian’s correspondence with J. G. Volkamer II and James Petiver.
R. J. BERRY: John Ray, physico-theology and afterwards.
Short notes
C. H. SMITH: Alfred Russel Wallace notes 3: two early publications.
C. H. SMITH: Alfred Russel Wallace notes 4: contributions to The garden, 1875–1912.
G. C. CADÉE: Sea heart and nickar nuts in a Flemish painting of 1617.
E. C. NELSON & J. B. RISTAINO: The Potato Late Blight pathogen in Ireland, 1846: reconnecting Irish specimens with the Moore–Berkeley correspondence.
Archives of natural history, Volume 38, No. 2 (2011) Abstracts
In publication sequence
Patron’s review.
SACHIKO KUSUKAWA: The role of images in the development of Renaissance natural history
This review surveys recent scholarship on the history of natural history with special attention to the role of images in the Renaissance. It discusses how classicism, collecting and printing were important catalysts for the Renaissance study of nature. Classicism provided inspiration of how to study and what kind of object to examine in nature, and several images from the period can be shown to reflect these classical values. The development of the passion for collecting and the rise of commerce in nature’s commodities led to the circulation of a large number of exotic flora and fauna. Pictures enabled scholars to access unobtainable objects, build up knowledge of rare objects over time, and study them long after the live specimens had died away. Printing replicated pictures alongside texts and enabled scholars to share and accumulate knowledge. Images, alongside objects and text, were an important means of studying nature. Naturalists’ images, in turn, became part of a larger visual culture in which nature was regarded as a beautiful and fascinating object of admiration.
K. FREDGA, T. STJERNBERG & I. SVANBERG: An early (1834) illustration of the wood lemming, Myopus schisticolor (Lilljeborg, 1844), from Finland.
The wood lemming, Myopus schisticolor, was described as a new species by the Swedish zoologist Wilhelm Lilljeborg in 1844 from a specimen captured in Norway the year before. With the original description was a fine hand-coloured lithograph by the artist Magnus Körner. A Latin translation of the description published later that year also used an illustration by Körner, but it was of lesser quality. However, the species had been observed, described and depicted earlier, but these renderings never reached the scientific community. In 2008 and 2009 respectively, one illustration of the wood lemming made by the Finnish-born artist Wilhelm von Wright was sold twice at auctions in Stockholm. The illustration is dated 1834 and shows a specimen that was found dead at the artist’s native home, Haminalaks, in Kuopio parish, Central Finland, that year. However, an accurate description of the species had already been made in 1765, by a group of young naturalists on a tour in the Swedish province Dalecarlia.
S. G. SEALY & M. F. GUIGUENO: Cuckoo chicks evicting their nest mates: coincidental observations by Edward Jenner in England and Antoine Joseph Lottinger in France.
For centuries, naturalists were aware that soon after hatching the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) chick became the sole occupant of the fosterer’s ngst. Most naturalists thought the adult cuckoo returned to the nest and removed or ate the fosterer’s eggs and young, or the cuckoo chick crowded its nest mates out of the nest. Edward Jenner published the first description of cuckoo chicks evicting eggs and young over the side of the nest. Jenner’s observations, made in England in 1786 and 1787, were published by the Royal Society of London in 1788. Four years before Jenner’s observations, in 1782, Antoine Joseph Lottinger recorded eviction behaviour in France and published his observations in Histoire du coucou d’Europe, in 1795. The importance of Lottinger’s and Jenner’s observations is considered together.
Pendant des siècles, les naturalistes étaient conscients qu’au cours de quelques jours après l’éclosion, le coucou gris (Cuculus canorus) devenait le seul occupant du nid de l’hôte. La majorité des naturalistes croyaient que le coucou adulte retournait au nid et enlevait ou mangeait les œufs et les oisillons de l’hôte, ou que l’oisillon coucou encombrait et forçait les autres oisillons hors du nid. Edward Jenner a publié la première description des oisillons coucous expulsant les œufs et les oisillons de l’hôte du nid. Les observations de Jenner, faites en Angleterre en 1786 et 1787, ont été publiées par la Société Royale de Londres (Royal Society of London) en 1788. Quatre ans avant les observations de Jenner, en 1782, Antoine Joseph Lottinger a documenté le comportement d’expulsion en France et a publié ses observations dans l’Histoire du coucou d’Europe, en 1795. L’importance des observations de Lottinger et de Jenner est prise en considération.
P. G. MOORE: Eric Fitch Daglish (1892–1966): naturalist, illustrator, author and editor.
Eric Fitch Daglish (1892–1966) was a naturalist by inclination, a free-lance author and editor in business and, by practice, a wood-engraver of high repute. Taught wood-engraving skills by Paul Nash, he was a close friend also of other famous engravers (John Nash, Eric Gill) within the Society of Wood Engravers. He applied these skills to illustrating his own books for popular audiences on topics ranging from flowers to birds, beasts and the English countryside. Fluent in German, he translated books from that language to supplement his income in the years succeeding the First World War. He is perhaps best known for his bird books: Woodcuts of British birds, The life story of birds and Birds of the British Isles, but was also a prolific writer about dogs. His oeuvre is examined, and his contribution compared with other contemporary bird artists who embraced wood-engraving techniques. A bibliography of his natural history works as author and as editor is included.
R. B. WILLIAMS & P. G. MOORE: An annotated catalogue of the marine biological paintings of Thomas Alan Stephenson (1898–1961).
Thomas Alan Stephenson (1898–1961) was a greatly gifted marine biologist and artist. The British sea anemones (1928, 1935) and his essay on beauty in nature and art, Seashore life and pattern (1944), both of which he illustrated himself, are his best-known works. A participant with his wife Anne in the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928–1929, the couple subsequently travelled world-wide studying rocky-shore zonation patterns, summarized eleven years after Stephenson’s death in Life between tidemarks on rocky shores (1972). During those travels Stephenson painted marine organisms (mostly invertebrates and algae) and shorescapes, many of which were reproduced in books and scientific papers. His paintings represent a valuable artistic and scientific resource of international significance that deserves to be better known. Some are listed in the catalogues prepared for a memorial exhibition in 1964. Others were discovered from letters between Stephenson and museum curators, and yet more were identified from further diverse sources. Catalogued here are 99 paintings on various marine themes in watercolour, gouache or oil, of which 55 are known in institutional collections or in private hands; the rest could not be traced. Yet more marine biological artworks probably remain undocumented..
H. J. NOLTIE: A botanical group in Lahore, 1864.
The sitters in a previously misunderstood nineteenth-century Indian group photograph are identified as four East India Company surgeons with wider interests in natural history: William Jameson, Thomas Caverhill Jerdon, John Lindsay Stewart and Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn, taken in Lahore at the Punjab Exhibition of 1864. The image was previously believed to depict the committee of the Madras Literary Society and to have been taken in Madras. No portraits of Jameson or Stewart have previously been known, and Jameson had mistakenly been identified as E. G. Balfour. Brief biographies are given of the individuals figured, the circumstances under which they coincided in Lahore explained, and their rôles in forest conservation and the documentation of Indian biodiversity outlined. The photographer is confirmed as Samuel Bourne, and information is provided on the Scottish individuals to whom Cleghorn sent copies of the photograph.
D. G. MEDWAY: The contribution of Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), Welsh naturalist, to the Australian ornithology of Cook’s first voyage (1768–1771).
Thomas Pennant – Welsh traveller, antiquary, naturalist, and author – visited Joseph Banks in September 1771 shortly after Banks returned from his voyage around the world (1768–1771) with James Cook. It was almost certainly on the occasion of this visit that Pennant was given access to manuscript descriptions of various birds and other animals that had been met with on the voyage, saw the specimens Banks had brought back to England, and was given some of them. Among the Pennant papers in the National Library of Wales is a collection of descriptions in Pennant’s handwriting that relate to birds met with by Banks on Cook’s voyage. These descriptions may be only part of what was once a more extensive collection in that regard. Of especial interest and importance among them are those of 13 Australian landbird species. Some years later, Pennant must have noticed that John Latham, in his monumental A general synopsis of birds (1781–1785), had not described some species that Pennant possessed specimens or descriptions of, or that Latham’s information about some of those he described was deficient in certain respects. Pennant communicated descriptions and notes on those birds to Latham, most notably in relation to several landbirds that had been collected in eastern Australia by Banks in the course of his voyage with Cook. It is apparent from the sources discussed in this paper that Banks took more specimens of Australian birds back to England from the first Cook voyage than has previously been realised. It is a strange quirk of history that, today, more evidence in that regard is available from Pennant, who did not go on the voyage, than from Banks who did.
P. G. MOORE: The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.
Food shortages, particularly of proteins, in Britain during the Second World War led to the suggestion re-surfacing that marine plankton might be harvested on an industrial scale first as human food, then turning to its potential use as a supplement to stock and poultry feed. The notion emanated in the United Kingdom from Sir John Graham Kerr, at Glasgow University. He encouraged Alister Hardy, at Hull, to develop the idea and the natural testing ground was the Clyde Sea Area (given the extensive history of plankton researches at Millport). Unpublished documents from the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science shed new light on the interactions behind the scenes of this project between Kerr, Hardy and the Millport Marine Station’s then director, Richard Elmhirst. Elmhirst, who was sceptical about the feasibility of the plan from the outset, went along with it; not least as a way of attracting welcome research funding during lean times but also, doubtless, regarding it as his patriotic duty in case the proposal proved worthwhile.
H. O. CLARK, Jr: The history of arid-land fox discoveries in North America.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805 wrote the first substantial details of an arid-land fox. It was not until 1823, however, that Thomas Say described this same species of fox scientifically, and gave it a Latin name. Since then several other arid-dwelling foxes have been discovered. It almost seems that each south-western state in the United States and northern Mexico had its own fox, neatly described and named. But with the advent of modern biology and genetics, and the re-thinking of the “species concept”, has the rich history of arid-land fox discoveries become just a footnote? In this paper I bring the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century explorers and naturalists to the modern reader, providing the historical accounts that can only be found in library archives. I focus only on foxes that occur in North American desert and prairie habitats, excluding those fox species that occur in woodland and forested communities.
T. KINUKAWA: Natural history as entrepreneurship: Maria Sibylla Merian’s correspondence with J. G. Volkamer II and James Petiver.
The artist, naturalist and entrepreneur Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) constructed her network by exchanging natural history specimens with other naturalists in Europe, created a market for her publication Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), and had her book reviewed in major literary journals in northwestern Europe. Two collections of letters provide information on this process: those exchanged between James Petiver (1664–1718) and his correspondents in Amsterdam and those between the German physician and botanist J. G. Volkamer II (1662–1744) and his friends in Amsterdam. Merian’s strategies demonstrate that patronage played a limited role in her success as naturalist, while her skill as an entrepreneur provided a chance to engage in communication with other naturalists and have other naturalists receive her work positively. Merian’s work epitomizes the growing role played by entrepreneur-naturalists in the accumulation of knowledge about the natural resources of overseas colonies and the distribution of this knowledge to European readers. Although her gender prevented her from obtaining membership of academies, Merian’s book was reviewed by major European literary journals, including Acta eruditorum in Leipzig. The article analyzes her letters in the context of larger networks of correspondence between Holland, England and Germany.
R. J. BERRY: John Ray, physico-theology and afterwards.
Ray’s most widely read book was his Wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation (1691), probably based on addresses given in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge 20 years previously. In it he forswore the use of allegory in biblical interpretation, just as he had done in his (and Francis Willughby’s) Ornithology (1678). His discipline seeped into theology, complementing the influence of the Reformers and weakening Enlightenment assumptions about teleology, thus softening the hammer-blows of Darwinism on Deism. The physico-theology of the eighteenth century and the popularity of Gilbert White and the like survived the squeezing of natural theology by Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises a century after Wisdom …, and contributed to a peculiarly British understanding of natural theology. This undergirded the subsequent impact of the results of the voyagers and geologists and prepared the way for a modern reading of God’s “Book of Works” (“Darwinism … under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend”). Natural theology is often assumed to have been completely discredited by Darwin (as well as condemned by Barth and ridiculed by Dawkins). Notwithstanding, and despite the vapours of vitalism (ironically urged – among others – by Ray’s biographer, Charles Raven) and the current fashion for “intelligent design”, the attitudes encouraged by Wisdom … still seem to be robust, albeit needing constant re-tuning (as in all understandings influenced by science).