Old-fashioned natural history
Sometimes 'newer' isn't better
In the 1930s, the US Biological Survey made a voyage to the Aleutian islands off of Alaska, for the purpose of studying the flora and fauna of that isolated and windswept archipelago. This was during the days, left over from the Victorian era, when it was a matter of national prestige to fund Biological Surveys and such things. I’m sure that the schmoozing politicians who signed the go ahead had no more interest in nature than their modern equivalents, but it did provide funding for naturalists to do important descriptive work which laid the foundation for a lot of modern ecology- something which is much needed, and sadly lacking, today.
In any case, a series of Beetles from this expedition arrived at the desk of Dr. Melville Hatch, a young professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hatch, at the time one of America’s chief experts on the esoteric world of Coleoptera, wrote up the material in a short paper which presents a classic example of the old kind of natural history, usually done by one naturalist, on a low budget, largely out of passion for the subject. Hatch’s paper belongs to a former era, and is in a sense a ‘fossil’ of a kind of work that mostly stopped being produced some time in the late 20th century.
Of note to those who are familiar with science papers: Hatch notes ‘ of the 27 species listed, eight have not apparently been recorded previously from the Aleutian Islands…’ . Notice that he says ‘apparently’- a perfectly acceptable word at the time. It was alright to admit that one didn’t know everything, a humility which is rarely found today.
After a brief introduction, the document consists of a list of species collected on the aforementioned expedition, including locality, date collected, and Hatch’s notes about wider distribution and taxonomy- ‘comparisons I have made indicate the identity…..with the Palaearctic micropterus…’. It has a certain literary ring to it- like something an entomologically inclined Sherlock Holmes might have said.
It is accurate, and detailed, but it is also a very ‘analogue’ work, so to speak. It is obvious that no machines (save a printing press) were involved in the making of the document. There were no online databases in those days: Hatch had to consult his own collection, or communicate- usually by letter- with other entomologists across the world. Notice the conspicuous lack of ‘big data’- the huge sample sizes, GPS coordinates, and DNA information that fill page after page of nearly unreadable modern studies. An AI program wouldn’t have much fun extracting statistical ‘signal’ from such work! Instead, we have one scholar’s careful consideration of something real.
To me, old-fashioned studies such as this have both scientific and aesthetic value. They are not the bland, lifeless productions of hundreds of anonymous white-coated lab workers, but are the result of the work of one idiosyncratic, very human individual. Someone like you and me. And that humanity has relevance far beyond the specialized field in which the author worked.
There is something even slightly lyrical, almost like a little Haiku, in the terse but evocative descriptions and references to far-off places. The archaic beetle Lyrosoma opacum is also known ‘…from Kamchatka, where, according to Van Dyke, “it lives in the rotting kelp and is at times completely submerged by the tides.” Not only interesting, but presented in a perfectly worded statement. Van Dyke obviously had a poetic side- his beetle is at times submerged, not by the sea or even the tide, but ‘the tides’. It makes me want to walk on a cold misty beach in the Russian Far East…. Such language would never survive the editing process in a modern journal.
In fact, the entire paper would be considered almost unpublishable today, lacking as it does any sort of statistical analysis and database-ready information and the sort of clinical language easily accessible to the ‘minds’ of the computers used to extract the data, as they like to put it.
One of my greatest mistakes as a young student was to think that I could study entomology at college and still be able to publish this kind of work. I soon discovered that times had changed. The ‘rural Victorian vicar’ style of entomology, which had lasted well into the 20th century, has been replaced, in professional circles, with the same emotionless ‘lab culture’ that has swamped the entire field of biology. Well, I would have been quite happy as a Victorian vicar, and I much prefer the field and the musty old collection cabinet to the bright lights and humming machines of the lab, so after having a few tries at the academic biology field I ended up with a degree in English. And so you find me here…
Finally, there is a personal connection here: through an odd concatenation of circumstances, as Jeeves would say, a number of years ago I acquired several of Professor Hatch’s fine old handmade insect boxes. Here is a photo of one, a bit worn with the steady accumulation of time, containing a few specimens from my own collection.
