BOOK OF THE DAY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews Bugs and the Victoriansby JFM Clark Yale University Press 322pp; £25
AS ANYONE knows who has ever been on a picnic, insects greatly outnumber human beings. According to John F McDiarmid Clark, an environmental historian of St Andrews University, there are about 8,000,000 insect species, compared with only 4,500 species of mammal.
The Victorians, alarmed by insect infestation, established entomology as an academically important discipline.
Clark calls the 19th century "the heyday of natural history" with an interest in insects growing particularly rapidly. The specialisation in some cases was obsessional, as personified on the book's jacket by the reproduction of an engraving, dated about 1830, titled Insects Are My Life.
It depicts a man whose body is composed entirely of insects, in the style of collagist portraits by Arcimboldo. In the opinion then prevailing, Clark writes, “collection and study of insects was a worthy, sacred endeavour”.
Evangelical zealots of that period pointed to the social organisation of certain insects, especially ants, bees and termites, as proof of God’s plan for all species. Ants could be regarded as paragons of frugal co-operative labour as opposed to the profligate frivolity of grasshoppers. In the words of the Old Testament, “Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” On the other hand, secular reformers deplored ants’ practice of slavery, while royalists could argue that bees endorsed the rule of a hierarchical social order, with a queen at the top, as beneficially productive and morally proper, though the queen bee might be considered parasitical. Perhaps termites were less equivocal evidence that millions of creatures could live together efficiently and tranquilly even in the closest proximity, admiral models for human migrants from country to town.
“As apiarists and myrmecologists [ant specialists] explicitly acknowledged,” Clark writes, “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”.
Darwinians and their creationist opponents found ways of using insects. “Throughout the 19th century,” Clark writes, “the social insects played an important role in debates surrounding the transformationists’ search for the origins of life. Although the scientific naturalists 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’ ”.
Clark’s thoroughly researched and lucid history of insects and the men and women who studied them is stimulatingly suggestive. The book is a gallery of eminent entomologists whose dedication to their science sometimes verges on the bizarre. John Lubbock, for example, used “a sensitive flame apparatus to detect any ant sounds” and attempted to eavesdrop on ants with the aid of “a very sensitive microphone” supplied by Alexander Graham Bell himself, in person.
The book should be of great interest to entomologists and would-be entomologists, but Clark’s lengthy, detailed accounts of professional rivalries may make the average lay reader feel, as I did, rather itchy.
Patrick Skene Catling has written 12 novels and nine children’s books