The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors (History) - Hardcover

Michael A. Salmon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0946589402 ISBN 13: 9780946589401

Publisher: Brill, 2000

Synopsis

Although the collecting of butterflies is today an emotive subject, it is impossible to separate a history of British butterflies from a history of their collectors, without whose activities our knowledge of the identification, occurrence, distribution, and variation of British butterflies would be much the poorer.
Liberally laced with contemporary quotations, this book brings to life the past three hundred years of butterfly study, with details of early societies, collecting equipment, biographies of 101 deceased lepidopterists, with portraits where available, as well as the chequered history in Britain of some 35 species of butterfly. The colour plates include some of the finest butterfly illustrations ever.

About this title

Review:

Although it has pained some professionals to admit it, gifted amateurs have done much to advance the cause of science. Perhaps nowhere is this more true, English physician Michael Salmon writes, than in the field of lepidopterology.

The figure of the eccentric butterfly collector is a staple of British comedy, and indeed, as Salmon shows, many early collectors offered easy targets as the very definition of eccentricity. Over the years, more and more ordinary men and women came to share their passion for nature study, so that, by Victorian times, households throughout Britain "boasted a cabinet of shells, butterflies, or fossils, together with a series of George Routledge's shilling volumes on natural history, or a book of newspaper cuttings from the weekly 'nature' column." By the late 19th century, the fields and woods were crowded with collectors, so many that the numbers of butterfly species like the Large Blue, Black-veined White, and Large Tortoiseshell were considerably thinned. (They and many other species are now extinct or nearly so, Salmon writes, though not through the fault of collectors.) Some collectors were indeed mere hobbyists, but field notes and reports by amateurs formed an essential record for more formal scientific descriptions of range, behavior, and other aspects of lepidopteran natural history.

In a series of essays, Salmon offers a history of butterfly collecting in Britain, describes some 35 species of particular historical or biological interest (including the wayward North American monarch and the remarkable Camberwell Beauty, "the Holy Grail of British butterfly collectors"), and profiles more than a hundred prominent "Aurelians," or butterfly collectors, from 1550 to the present. His handsomely illustrated book, brimming with lore and trivia on such matters as the first recorded use of the butterfly net and the origin of butterfly names in English, makes lively reading--and an ideal gift--for Aurelians today. --Gregory McNamee

From the Inside Flap:

"A unique historical record. . . . No other book exists which covers this material."—Thomas C. Emmel, illustrator of An Introduction to Ecology and Population Biology

About this edition

• Publisher: Brill
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0946589402
• ISBN 13: 9780946589401
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432