© 2001 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
BOOK REVIEW
1 Department of Zoology University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195
The Aurelian Legacy. British Butterflies and their Collectors. MICHAEL A. SALMON. California University Press, Berkeley, California, 2001, 432 pp. (ISBN 0-520-22963-0, $35.00).
A review of a book on British butterflies and their collectors may seem more appropriate to the pages of an entomological journal than to American Zoologist. But, even allowing for your editor's bias, this is a most remarkable book and worthy of broad attention. First, the price alone is remarkable: 432 pages of 8 1/2 x 11'' format, with 42 excellent color illustrations for $35.00!—I even checked with the publisher to make sure there was no mistake, (Elsevier, Kluwer et al., please note what is possible), but it is also a storehouse of delights for the historian of biology.
This book is more than a lepidopterological history of Britain, and more than a collection of butterfly hunters' biographies (although it does indeed include potted life histories of 101 British lepidopterists, including some famous names from earliest times such as John Ray, and from more recent times such as Bernard Kettlewell and E. B. Ford, together with some of the great eccentrics such as Lionel Walter Rothschild, Baron Rothschild of Tring—the "greatest collector of them all").
Beyond its immediate significance as the first detailed history of butterfly collecting, this book looks at the evolution of amateur natural history as a public pursuit with its origins among the wealthy and the clergy in the mid seventeenth century and its rapid rise in popularity until it had become a craze by the end of the century. As Salmon points out, entomology had become a social, even a fashionable pursuit by the early 1700s. The Royal Society was founded in 1662. John Ray was a founding member and he, and his colleague and fellow founder James Petiver, were probably the first scientific natural historians devoted to the systematic collecting and naming of insects. It was the custom in the early eighteenth century for amateur natural historians, initially plant collectors, to meet for learned discussions in coffee houses, and it was from this burgeoning practice that insect collectors began to meet at the Swan Tavern in London in the 1720s. These were the Society of Aurelians, and although they did not survive beyond the early nineteenth century, they were the forerunners of the Royal Entomological Society of London and with that, the evolution of modern insect study, from mid-nineteenth century as a largely professional pursuit, but still also the domain of skilled amateurs—in the best sense of that word (from amare, to love). The histories of botany, ornithology, ichthyology etc. follow similar patterns. As such pursuits dwindle in the face of the supremacy of modern molecular biology, this splendid book serves to remind us where we integrative and comparative biologists came from. It concludes fittingly with a look to the future, to the emerging practice that places emphasis on observation and conservation of butterflies rather than their capture and accumulation.
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