Happy Birthday, Gilbert White

White of Selborne

Today’s the birthday of the great British naturalist Gilbert White (1720-1795), also known as White of Selborne, for his great book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,  about the countryside around his home in the Hampshire village of Selborne.

I didn’t have room for him in my book The Species Seekers, because White was more an observer than a discoverer of species.

But in her delightful 1982 book The Heyday of Natural History, journalist Lynn Barber gives a lovely account of his achievements:

“He was the first person to differentiate between the three species of ‘willow wren’ (the willow warbler, wood warbler and chiff-chaff); the first to describe the British harvest mouse and its nest; the first to observe that swifts copulate on the wing, that earthworms are hermaphroditic, and that male and female chaffinches form separate flocks in winter.  He examined many birds’ crops and droppings to discover their diet; he noted that owls hoot in B flat and cuckoos mainly in D; he shouted at bees through a loud-hailer to test their sense of hearing.  He had a fine eye for ecological detail.  He described how men riding over close turf are often followed by parties of swallows which seize the small insects thrown up by the horses’ hooves; and how cattle, standing in a pond during hot weather, drop dung which nurtures insects ‘and so supply food for the fish, which could be poorly subsisted but for this contingency.’”

My friend Fred Strebeigh has also written well about White, in a 1988 profile for Audubon Magazine:

Most important, White, in his book of letters, sounded human.  Gone was the stuffiness of earlier naturalists.  [Robert] Plot, for example, began his chapter on the animals of Oxford with embroidered fustian …            White’s readers, then, must have read with astonishment Selborne‘s first encounter with bird or beast–a story.  For years, ravens had nested high in the jutting bulge of an ancient Selborne oak, the “Raven-tree.”  Generations of village youths had tried to reach the ravens’ aerie, but none could clamber round the lower skirt of the bulge.  “So the ravens built on,” wrote White, “nest upon nest, in perfect security.”  Then came the day when the oak was sold, for twenty pounds, to build a bridge near London.

The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted to the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the [raven] dam sat on.  At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.

            Here was the dawn of something new:  natural history that watched closely and spoke with a human voice. 

Why Scientists Should Not Be Spies

In a commentary on my “Species Seekers and Spies” column, Lukas Rieppel, a PhD candidate at Harvard, adds some interesting examples to the list of scientists who were also spies.  But I was most impressed with this paragraph, in which Franz Boas gets at the fundamental problem of scientists using their research as a cover:

During World War One, the Columbia University Anthropologist Franz Boas serendipitously learned that Sylvanus Morley and a number of other archeologists were gathering intelligence for the United States Government.  After the war, he wrote a strongly worded letter  denouncing their actions to The Nation that was published in December, 1919.  In it, he argued that espionage work and scientific research were fundamentally at odds, because “the very essence of [a scientist’s] life is in the service of truth.”  As such, anyone “who uses science as a cover for political spying … prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.”  As a result of their unconscionable actions, he concluded, “every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work,” thus making it all but impossible to conduct serious natural history research.  Rather than having it’s intended effect, though, the publication of this letter led to an official censure of Boas by the American Anthropological Association and led to his resignation from the National Research Council.

Great Species Seekers: William Doherty

The Cincinnati-bred  lepidopterist William Doherty worked in the Indo-Pacific in the 1880s and 90s, and was frequently vexed with tropical afflictions.  He wrote home that he couldn’t keep his specimen pins from rusting in the rainy season.  “Salt and sugar here liquefy every night and have to be dried over the fire every day,” he added, “and the boots I take off at night are sometimes covered with mould in the morning.”

Doherty was generally too busy to dwell on his misfortunes.  He once summed up a year’s work in the Indo-Pacific islands in telegraphese, sounding a bit like Fearless Fosdick, the comic book hero who could describe it as “merely a flesh wound” even when machine gun bullets made his midsection look like Swiss cheese:  “Loss of all my collections, money, journals and scientific notes at Surabaya in Java.  Proceed by way of Macassar to the island of Sumba.  Dangerous journey in the interior.  Discovery of an inland forest region, and many new species of Lepidoptera.  King Tunggu, human sacrifices,

A Southern Minister Against “Scientific Moonshine”

John Bachman

There are plenty of reasons to admire John Bachman, a minister and naturalist  born 180 years ago today.  When he wasn’t tending his multi-racial flock at St. John’s Lutheran in Charleston, South Carolina, he published studies in botany, ornithology, and mammalogy.

Among the many new species he discovered were the Swainson’s warbler, Helinaia swainsonii, and Bachman’s warbler, Helminthophila bachmani.

He and John James Audubon collaborated on a book, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, and published detailed descriptions of dozens of mammal species, making taxonomic distinctions of a high standard for the day. The families also collaborated in their personal lives, with two Audubon sons marrying two Bachman daughters.

But I like Bachman most because he also stood up against some of the most dunderheaded and determined racists of his day.  It was the primetime for scientific racism–”scientific moonshine,” as Frederick Douglass put it–the theory put forward by some white scientists that other human races were actually separate species.

Bachman neatly sliced this argument to shreds, using simple anatomical evidence from Homo sapiens and other species.  (You can read more about it in Chapter  12 of The Species Seekers.) In making the case that humans are in fact a single species, he was defending scientific truth and (for once) religion, too.

The most rabid voice of scientific racism in the 1850s was an Alabamba physician named Josiah Nott.  His Hippocratic oath did not keep  Nott from voicing his wish to “kill of{f} Bachman,” to “skin Bachman,” to see  him “cut up into sausage meat.”  After what he deemed a particularly effective riposte, he wrote of Bachman, “I really feel as if a viper had been killed in the fair garden of science, and I hope his death will be a warning to all such blasphemies against God’s laws”–the laws, that is, that made blacks a separate, inferior species, and keeping them as slaves the work of righteousness.

A Revolution in the Ways We Live and Die

One night in 1877, in a squalid port city on the southeastern coast of China, a Scottish doctor named Patrick Manson performed a small experiment that would soon revolutionize the ways we live and die.  What was his subject?

1.  A dog.

2.  A mosquito.

3.  A human being.

4.  A laboratory rat.

And the answer is:

Living on Insects, at Three Pence Apiece

The passion for natural history has often had an upper class image, for better or worse. Period movies and novels treat it as a country house pursuit, with governesses helping the children net frogs in the reflecting pool and young ladies rearing butterflies in the hothouse.  And many celebrated naturalists, including Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin, did in fact come from wealthy backgrounds.

Social connections made it easier to land a suitable post in the foreign service, or on a Naval expedition; money also obviously helped in a field that was never likely to prove useful or remunerative.  British naturalist Edward Forbes, who struggled to get by on the dismal wages available to a marine zoologist, once remarked, “People without independence have no business to meddle with science.”   The anatomist Richard Owen was more adept at currying the favor of the good and great; he got the essayist Thomas Macaulay to pass the hat on his behalf:  “The greatest natural philosopher may starve while his countrymen are boasting of his discoveries.”

But many naturalist, like the Amazonian explorer Henry Walter Bates, supported themselves as freelancers, by gathering specimens for sale to collectors back home.  By good fortune, Bates found a capable specimen dealer named Samuel Stevens to dispose of his duplicates on a commission basis.  Stevens, whose shop was on Bedford Street around the corner from the British Museum, expected to sell a typical insect specimen for four pence, with three pence going back to the collector in the field.

With this meager funding, Bates spent eleven happy years of hard work in the Amazon.  He headed out into the forest

Raffles of the Eastern Isles

Stamford Raffles, the British naturalist and empire builder of the Far East, was a particularly poignant example of how families became caught up, and often sacrificed, to the greater cause of collection and conquest.

The child of a slave trader, he went to work at 14, as a clerk for the British East India Company.  Ten years later, the company sent him to Penang, and he started his long career in Southeast Asia.   In 1811, he orchestrated an invasion of Java by a British expedition of 11,000 men.  He then served as lieutenant-governor there, and among other progressive measures, ended the slave trade and established rules of self-government.  But his first wife died on Java, of tropical disease.

Back in England a few years later, Raffles remarried and brought his new wife, Sophia Hull, with him to the Far East, where he became governor general of Bencoolen in Sumatra.  The two of them would have five children together while Raffles governed Sumatra, founded the city of Singapore, and somehow also managed to make significant contributions to the study of natural history.  He discovered several dozen new species, including the sun bear (Ursus malayanus), the crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis), the great-billed heron (Ardea sumatrana) and the milky stork (Mycteria cinerea), as well as the world’s largest flower, a genus of plants that parasitize palm trees, now named Rafflesia in his honor.

The transformation of Singapore into a thriving British colony filled him with unabashed mercantile delight: “Here all is life and activity; and it would be difficult to name a place on the face of the globe with brighter prospects or more pleasant satisfaction.”

His private life, on the other hand, had taken a much darker turn.   Within a period of just six devastating months, his first three children died, of dysentery and other afflictions.  A new child arrived in 1823, but soon also died. He and his wife had only a young daughter left, and in Raffles’ letters it became an urgent question whether they could find a ship to get them home “in time to save our lives.”

Raffles packed up all his notes, maps, books, paintings, musical instruments, and other mementoes, as well as boxes filled with thousands of specimens of different species.  He neglected to get insurance, and shipped all their property, valued at £25,000, a sizable fortune then, at their own risk.

Two days out to sea, a fire broke out beneath their cabin.  Everyone aboard was able to get off into lifeboats, but “less than ten minutes afterwards she was one grand mass of fire,” Raffles wrote, and with the ship went much of what was left of his own shattered life.

Raffles, Sophia, and their surviving daughter would eventually get back to London, where he would become the driving force behind the creation of the London Zoo and then die, one day short of his 45^th birthday.  Along with the new species he had brought to the attention of science, Singapore would be his real legacy.  Soon after the deaths of his children, he had referred to it as “this, my almost only child.”  It was as if, however reluctantly, he had swapped his flesh-and-blood for the glories of empire–a bargain many men implicitly accepted then when they voyaged out into the world as naturalists and colonizers—their lives, marriages, children, even perhaps their souls, for the glory of a new city or a new species.

Ironically, because of his anti-slavery stance, he was refused burial inside his local parish church (St. Mary’s, Hendon) by the vicar, whose family had made its money in the slave trade. The actual whereabouts of his body remained unknown until it was found in a churchyard vault, in 1914.  His tomb was incorporated into the body of the church when it was enlarged a few years later.

Naturalists Set on Taming Nature

Du Chaillu the Explorer

We think of naturalists as conservationists.  But in the nineteenth century, many of them gladly saw themselves as pioneers for the taming of nature.  Looking out on the “immense virgin forests” of Gabon in 1856, for instance, the French-American explorer Paul Du Chaillu would write:

“I began to think how this wilderness would look if only the light of Christian civilization could once be fairly introduced among the black children of Africa.  I dreamed of forests giving way to plantations of coffee, cotton, and spices; of peaceful negroes going to their contented daily tasks; of farming and manufactures; of churches and schools …”

To hammer home the defectiveness of untamed nature, Du Chaillu noted that, at this moment in his reverie, as he sat in the shade of a tree, he lifted his eyes up into the branches and spotted a 13-foot-long black snake, which he shot.  Then he watched in disgust as his men promptly roasted and ate it.

Civilization could not, evidently, come soon enough.

Great Species Seekers: The Amazing Mary Kingsley

Late one afternoon in 1895, that rare animal, a female species seeker, was hiking alone through a forest in the interior of Gabon.  It was treacherous country.  Her guides had pointed out the shredded bark of trees along the forest trail, meaning leopards in the neighborhood.  The human inhabitants were also fearsome, said to be cannibals.

But Mary Kingsley was in equal parts self-assured and self-deprecating, an attractive unmarried woman in her 30s with an independent income, roaming footloose over “the white man’s grave.”  Where male explorers often resorted to the chest-thumping language of conquest, she relied instead on her understated wit.  She was also unmistakably intrepid.

This time, though, going ahead on her own proved foolish.  It was five p.m., and the path through the woods grew indistinct–she could just pick it out.  But then she came to a place where it vanished completely.  She peered ahead, and thought she saw it resume again on the other side of a clump of brush.  So she pushed on—and plunged to the bottom of a 15-foot-deep pit lined with sharpened spikes.

“It is at times like these that you realise the blessing of a good skirt,” Kingsley wrote. “Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England, who ought to have known better … and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for.  Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fulness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out. “

Like other naturalists, Kingsley wanted to find new species, and in 1896, she eagerly reported the “verdict” on the haul from her second expedition to West Africa:  “one absolutely new fish” and one equally new snake, among other treasures.  Kingsley was relieved, “for I was beginning to fear I was an utter wind bag.”

Being Well Read

This is kind of a hoot.  I just looked at my Christmas card from Evolutionary Anthropology magazine and realized that it shows Charles Darwin reading the issue with my cover story about the discovery of the gorilla.

All I need now are a few more readers among the living.

Happy New Year!