The Great Plan of Economy: “The Life of North American Insects” by B. Jaeger (1859)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History  3 Responses »
Jun 032022
 

The book is quite literally falling apart. The pages are browned and foxed, the cover fabric (sporting a gilt impression of a moth) is pulling loose from the spine, the binding disintegrating. It feels like an old book. And it is. B. (Benedict) Jaeger’s volume on North American Insects predates the Civil War. It is the oldest book I have read for this blog so far, taking us back toward the beginnings of the late 19th Century’s fascination with nature. My volume is copyright 1859, though the book was published five years earlier, in a more limited edition that included five color plates (and costs considerably more today than this one). And 1859 was — as diehard natural historians likely know — the year that Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species”. Jaeger’s writing offers a window into the foreign and intriguing world of natural history before evolution revolutionized it. Terms and concepts that evoke a kind of proto-ecology jostle on the page with paeans to God’s handiwork, in a book that at times is as much a religious text as a biological one. And through it all, the rambling voice of Benedict Jaeger, world traveler, natural philosopher, and bane of editors.

Who was Jaeger? The title page of the book notes that he was a “late Professor of Zoology and Botany for the College of New Jersey.” According to Bugguide.net, a catalog of his papers at Princeton University notes that he was a professor of natural history and modern languages at Princeton from 1832 until 1843. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1789, and died in Brooklyn, New York in 1869. He supposedly wrote many books on insects. And that is all I was able to find out about him, besides what might be gleaned from his travel stories scattered throughout this book.

Given the year the book was published, and the fact that Henry David Thoreau lived until 1861, could he have read this book, or at least glanced at it? For all that it is unknown today, Jaeger’s rather slender tome was the first general book on North American insects ever published. Though far from a field guide as we know it today (relatively few insects are covered at the species level, and amounts of information on different types of insects vary widely), the book was still a landmark in American entomology. So I like to imagine Thoreau thumbing through it (and possibly frowning at some of its more extreme anthropocentric declarations). And, in fact, he probably did. The Concord Library website includes a listing of books from the library of Edwin Way Teale (scholar of Thoreau and a nature writer to boot). The list includes the following item:

Jaeger, Benedict. The Life of North American Insects. By B. Jaeger … Assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D. With Numerous Illustrations from Specimens in the Cabinet of the Author. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.

319 pages. Illustrated. 19.5 cm.

Inscription in ink on front free endpaper: A duplicate of one / of the insect books / that Thoreau used. / For the Teales from / the Walter Hardings. / Hampton, Conn., August / 20th, 1963.

A few marginal markings in pencil.

How exciting! That said, I am quite confident that Jaeger’s outlook on nature was not one that Thoreau shared. And as a tool for insect identification, it was definitely wanting.

“Philosophy,” Jaeger declares in his opening line, “has invested even the commonest objects of Nature with charms unknown to the uneducated.” But why study insects, in particular? Ultimately, because insects are useful:

It is time that our people in general, and particularly our youth, should be made acquainted with a class of animals which everywhere surround us, day and night, and which furnish us amusements, food, coloring substances, and medicines, in order that they may be able to distinguish the useful from the injurous ones, the harmless from the noxious, and to discover those which may furnish new articles for manufacture, commerce, and domestic industry.

There is a deeper reason, though (cue choir of heavenly angels). Learning about insects opens the door to “…a more general knowledge of Natural History, and a deeper admiration of the ten thousand sublime and beautiful creatures that, in one common song of praise, pour out their gratitude and proclaim their dependence upon one common Father.” In this image, Jaeger evokes spiritual unity — there is a whole to nature because nature is holy. And that implies that the individual constituents of the natural world (living and nonliving) must interact and function as one great system. Here, he was inspired in part by Alexander Humboldt, whose first volume of Cosmos was published in 1845:

…we find all these different varieties of the three natural kingdoms [plant, animal, mineral] united under one general law; all dependent upon one another, as component parts of one great universal whole, aand we are forced, with he great philosopher Humboldt, to exclaim, “Nature is the unity in variety.”

Intriguingly, going down this path leads Jaeger to affirm principles that would years later be echoed in rudimentary ecology. Since nature is a system created by God, there cannot be any part that is irrelevant or without purpose: “…none of the works of nature are so insignificant as to be wholly without use in the great plan of economy.” How does that plan work? Consider the caterpillars, Jaeger suggests, who feed on plants and therefore pose a threat to agriculture. The obvious choice would be to kill them all, to safeguard our crops and flowers. But that would be unwise, Jaeger cautions:

…were we to annihilate caterpillars, our gardens, wods, and fields would be abandoned by the whole feathered tribe who feed on them, and melancholy sadness shroud the abodes of man. Ardently, then, would bwe long for the return of the oxious Caterpillars, and with them the joyous songsters of the forest. …so beautifully is the doctrine of compensation illustrated throughout the Animal Kingdom, as well as in all the objects of Nature.

Elsewhere, Jaeger refers to this same principle as the law of antagonization instead:

[Insects] afford a constant evidence of the working of Nature’s great law of antagonization — the one undoing wha the other does; the injuries which one species would infliec upon man are checked by other species, which prevent their superabundance and keep an even balance in the scale of being.

Carrying capacity, anyone? Ironically, this law does not prevent Jaeger from declaring firmly a few pages later that herbivorous beetles “are noxious and should be destroyed wherever encountered.” There appears to be a disconnect between Jaeger’s pre-ecological mindset and practical reality.

Lest we extoll this pre-Darwinian model of the Cosmos as brilliant and ahead of its time, while Nature may be a system created by God, it is still a hierarchical one. And guess who is at the top?

It is more than wonderful, it is sublime, to view atom after atom of the whole creation unceasingly changing place, that man, the lord of creation, may be abundantly supplied with all his comforts and his luxuries.; to see the lilies of the field, and the insects of the earth and air, living and dying for man, yielding up their lives for man’s sustenance and adornment.

To rework a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All living things are significant, but some are more significant than others.” “The great plan of economy,” is clearly under man’s rule. At least one can find a bit of solace, though, in the fact that women are not entirely forgotten: “I write also for the young ladies,” Jaeger announces midway through his book.

My copy is definitely in “fair” shape. For its considerable age, all I can say about the book’s past is that it was once owned by William Mansell (thank you, Kent, for your correction on my reading of this signature), who dated it August 18?9. (My guess is that the mysterious digit is a 5, as it could not be a 2. Given that the book was published in 1859, it is most likely that Maxwell obtained it then.) Efforts to find information about William Mansell online were unsuccessful. There are plenty of somewhat famous persons with this name, but none of them quite fit this time period.

For Our Entertainment: “Sylvan Secrets in Bird-Songs and Books” by Maurice Thompson, 1887

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History  No Responses »
Sep 042020
 

From all we can gather it appears most probable that in its present form our songbird proper– our bird with a song to sing — is not much older than man; that he found his song just in time to gladden the ears of God’s last and greatest creation; that he struggled through countless ages and awful changes in order to fit himself for our entertainment. Think what the avian race has endured since first Archaeopteryx felt the feathers begin to bud in his arms! What a long, slow, hesitating, faltering current of development, from a scaly amphibian of the paleozoic time, up, up, to the glorious state of the nightingale and the mocking-bird! I never see a brown thrush flashing his brilliant song from the highest spray of a tree without letting a thought go back over the way he has come to us, and I always feel that to protect and defend the song-bird is one of man’s clearest duties.

I REALLY WANT TO FIND SOMETHING TO LIKE ABOUT MAURICE THOMPSON. The closest I can come is the close of this quote, in which Thompson — the same one that two years previously (as documented in my last post) killed one ivory-billed woodpecker and destroyed the nest of another pair — argues that we ought to protect songbirds. Of course, his rationale doing so is pure 19th Century anthropomorphism. Everything was created for us, pure and simple. Add to that the Great Chain of Being, a warped mismash of the Bible and Darwin, and a really bizarre explanation of the driving force behind evolution, and you have Thompson’s outlook on nature. History books celebrate the winners — the ones who get it right, the ones “ahead of their times”. Thompson most assuredly was not one of those. But his writing does offer a window into a long-gone age of American society, one in which the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the ivory-billed woodpecker all were driven rapidly toward extinction. What mindset made that possible? Here is another passage dripping with anthropocentrism and human entitlement:

The inspired record [the Bible] declares that man was given dominion, which would imply that the earth and all things upon it and in it were made for his benefit. Science may profit by this view of creation, and take the serving of man’s physical and mental needs as the end of evolution. In other words, we may assume that if the object of creation was to make a sphere of man’s dominion while in the human state, then all the lines of creature development have been drawn towards a culmination, have been led to their highest point, in the age of man’s creation; that the Creator perfected the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms before he made man.

WHAT EMERGES IS A SEQUENCE OF LIFE, FROM PRIMITIVE AND LACKING MERIT TO HIGHLY EVOLVED AND MERITORIOUS. In this way, tacking the concept of evolution onto the notion of creation by God, Thompson offers a model in which man reigns supreme and can bask in the knowledge that it has been a long evolutionary journey to arrive at the human being:

All the more honor to the man if indeed he has come up from the germ in the old dust of chaos, has wriggled past the worms, swam past the fishes, outstripped the birds, and made himself the lord of all the animals. Indeed, as I sit here in this tropical springtide, with my eyes full of color-visions and my ears full of soothing sounds, I am willing to consider myself a manifestation of nature’s patient work, the end of a labor begun when life first stirred in the most favored spot of the earth.

THINGS GET REALLY CRAZY ONCE THOMPSON PULLS OUT HIS “SCIENTIFIC” EXPLANATION FOR HOW EVOLUTION WORKS. In his model, it is, well, I will let him explain instead:

Evolution is the outcome of natural desire, and natural desire has been generated by a disturbance of natural equilibrium. There is nothing abstruse or occult in this proposition; it is merely a recognition of the development of intelligence and of the controlling power of the brain in animals.

Lest that seem a bit bewildering, Thompson offers the model in much simpler terms a few pages later:

Evolution tinges everything. One grows like what one contemplates….

My elementary school cafeteria got it wrong: you aren’t what you eat. Instead, you are what you think. And your offspring, over many generations, will become more and more of that. For example,

Birds of the polar areas of snow and ice are white, those of the tropics are vari-colored and brilliant-hued. The condition in each instance has been reached by a natural desire to hide by blending with the prevailing tone of Nature.

And here is a different example:

In the case of wading birds, those species which have chosen to live near small streams have shorter legs and neck that species which prefer larger streams, lakes or sea-borders, and, taking the little green heron as an example, as our streams diminish in volume year by year, the bird modifies its habit in accordance with necessity, and in my mind there is no doubt that its legs and neck will be affected, in the course of a comparatively short period, to a noticeable degree.

If animals evolve by the choices they make and the things they desire, then it follows that it is possible to make better or worse choices. Consider the case of the flying frog of Borneo:

Here is a strange, belated effort of nature to urge the scaleless reptiles up to arboreal, aerial, and song-singing life, by the side of their more fortunate avian kinsmen, who early chose a better method of development!

And yes, this model of various levels (orders) of relative quality extends to other human cultures, too, as this passage reveals:

The woodpecker, beating his unique call on a bit of hard, elastic wood, is making an effort, blind and crude enough, but still an effort, to express a musical mood vaguely floating in his nature. We may not laugh at him, so long as from the interior of Africa explorers bring forth the hideous caricatures of musical instruments that some tribes of our own genus delight themselves withal. Among the Southern negroes it was once common to see a dancer going through an intricate terpsichorean score to the music of a “pat,” which was a rhythmical hand-clapping performed by a companion. I mention this in connection with the suggestion that the chief difference between the highest order of bird-music and the lowest order of man-music is expressed by the word rhythm. There is no such an element as the rhythmic beat in any bird-song that I have heard.

WITH WHITE AMERICAN MALE HUMANS AT THE PINNACLE OF CREATION, THEY ARE FREE TO ACT AS THEY SEE FIT TOWARD EVERYTHING ELSE. Thompson certainly allows for the sentiment of care, but in another essay he writes about a day spent in a Southern swamp during which he wasn’t in the mood for shooting anything — as if blasting away at birds was a perfectly reasonable accompaniment to observing them. Try as I will, I cannot appreciate Thompson as a writer — my mind is stuck on the image of him (from his own essay) standing atop a ladder in the deep woods, tearing through the rotten trunk of a tree in order in order to rob a nest of ivory-billed woodpecker eggs “for the sake of knowledge,” only to watch all five of them plummet to the ground by his own klutziness. “The species will probably be extinct within a few years,” he concluded.

AGAIN, I HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT MY COPY OF THOMPSON’S WORK. The cover is quite impressive, certainly compared to his book of nature essays, “Byways and Bird Notes”, from two years earlier. Otherwise, the book again reveals its age through crumbling binding and yellowed pages, but is without any traces of the journey it has taken to reach me.