Some little-known bird books from India - M.R.N. Holmer

A fair number of books have been written on the birds of India. Many colonial-era books have been taken out of the clutches of antique book sellers and wealthy hoarders and made available to researchers at large by the Biodiversity Heritage Library but there are still many extremely rare books that few have read or written about. Here is a small sampling of them which I hope to produce as a series of short entries.

One of these is by M.R.N. Homer (Mary Rebekah Norris Holmer - 6 June 1875 - 2 September 1957) - a professor of physiology at Lady Hardinge Medical College who was also the first woman board member in the Senate of Punjab University - a first for a woman in any university in India. Educated at Cambridge and Dublin University she worked in India from 1915 to 1922 and then returned to England. She wrote several bits on the methods of teaching nature study, and seems to have been very particular about these ideas. From a small fragment, it would appear that she emphasized the use of local and easily available plants as teaching aids and she deplored the use of the word "weed". Her sole book on birds was first published in 1923 as Indian Bird Life and then revised in 1926 as Bird Study in India. The second edition includes very neat black-and-white  illustrations by Kay Nixon, a very talented artist who illustrated some Enid Blyton books and apparently designed posters for the Indian Railways.

A rather sparse Wikipedia entry has been created at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.R.N._Holmer - more information is welcome!

A scanned version of her bird book can now be found on the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/Holmer Holmer came from a Christian Sunday School approach to natural history which shows up in places in the book. Her book includes many literary references, several especially to R.L.S. (R.L.Stevenson). In another part of the series we will look at more "evangelical" bird books.

 

John Stephenson, the writer of the preface, was a zoologist and a specialist on the oligochaetes. He wrote the Fauna of British India volume on the oligochaetes and was the series editor for the Fauna of British India from 1927 following the death of the editor A.E. Shipley.

On a germ trail

Hidden away in the little Himalayan town of Mukteshwar is a fascinating bit of science history. Cattle and livestock really mattered a lot in the pre-engine past, especially for transport and power,  on farms and in cities but also and especially for people in power. Hyder Ali and Tipu were famed and feared for their ability to move their guns rapidly, most famously, making use of bullocks, of the Amrut Mahal and Hallikar breeds. The subsequent British conquerors saw the value and maintained large numbers of them, at the Commissariat farm in Hunsur for instance.

The Commissariat Farm, Hunsur
Photo by Wiele & Klein, from: The Queen's Empire. A pictorial and descriptive record. Volume 2.
Cassell and Co. London (1899). [p. 261]
The original photo caption given below, while being racy, was most definitely inaccurate,
these were not maintained for beef :

BEEF   FOR   THE   BRITISH   ARMY.
It is said that the Turkish soldier will live and fight upon a handful of dates and a cup of water, the Greek upon a few olives and a pound of bread—an excellent thing for the commissariats of the two armies concerned, no doubt! But though Turk and Greek will be satisfied with this Spartan fare, the British soldier will not—not if he can help it, that is to say. Sometimes he cannot help it, and then it is only just to him to admit that he bears himself at a pinch as a soldier should, and is satisfied with what he can get. But what the British soldier wants is beef, and plenty of it : and he is a wise and provident commander who will contrive that his men shall get what they want. Here we see that the Indian Government has realised this truth. The picture represents the great Commissariat Farm at Hunsur in Mysore, where the shapely long-horned bullocks are kept for the use of the army.

Report of the cattle plague commission
led by J.H.B. Hallen (1871)

Imagine the situation when cattle die off in their millions - the estimated deaths of cows and buffaloes in 1870 was 1 million. Around 1871, it rang alarm bells high enough to have a committee examining the situation. Britain had had a major "cattle plague" outbreak in 1865 and so the matter was not unknown to the public. The generic term for the mass deaths was "murrain", a rather old-fashioned word that refers to an epidemic disease in sheep and cattle derived from the French word morine, or "pestilence," with roots in Latin mori "to die." A commission headed by Staff Veterinary Surgeon J.H.B. Hallen went across what would best be called the "cow belt" of India and noted among other things that the cattle in the hills were doing better and that rivers helped isolate the disease. Remarkably there were two little-known Indians members - Mirza Mahomed Ali Jan (a deputy collector) and Hem Chunder Kerr (a magistrate and collector). The report includes 6 maps with spots where the outbreaks occurred in each year from 1860 to 1866 and the spatial approach to epidemiology is dominant. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the work of John Snow would have been fresh in medical minds. One point in the report that caught my eye was "Increasing civilization, which means in India clearing of jungle, making of roads, extended agriculture, more communication with other parts, buying and selling, &c, provides greater facilities for the spread of contagious diseases of stock." The committee identified the largest number of deaths to be caused by rinderpest. Rinderpest has a very long history and the its attacks in Europe are quite well documented. There had been two veterinary congresses in Europe that looked at rinderpest. One of the early researchers was John Burdon Sanderson (a maternal grand-uncle of J.B.S. Haldane) who noted that the blood of infected cattle was capable of infecting others even before the source individual showed any symptoms of the disease. He also examined the relationship to smallpox and cowpox through cross-vaccination and examination for resistance. C.A. Spinage in his brilliant book (but with a European focus) on The Cattle Plague - A History (2003) notes that rinderpest belongs to the Paramyxoviruses, a morbillivirus which probably existed in Pleistocene Bovids and perhaps the first relative that jumped to humans was measles, and was associated with the domestication of cattle. The English believed that the origin of rinderpest lay in Russia. The Russians believed it came from the Mongols.

Gods slaandehand over Nederland, door de pest-siekte onder het rund vee
[God's lashing hand over the Netherlands, due to the plague disease among cattle]
Woodcut by Jan Smits (1745) - cattle epidemics evoked theological explanations

The British government made a grant of £5,000 in 1865 for research into rinderpest which was apparently the biggest ever investment in medical research upto that point of time. This was also a period when there was epidemic cholera epidemic, mainly affecting the working class, and it was noted that hardly any money was spent on it. (Spinage:328) The result of the rewards was that a very wide variety of cures were proffered and Spinage provides an amusing overview. One cure claim came from a Mr. M. Worms of Ceylon and involved garlic, onion, and asafoetida. Worms was somehow related to Baron Rothschild and the cure was apparently tested on some of Rothschild's cattle with some surprising recoveries. Inoculation as in small pox treatments were tried by many and they often resulted in infection and death of the animals.

As for the India scene, it appears that the British government did not do much based on the Hallen committee report. There were attempts to regulate the movement of cattle but it seems that the idea that it could be prevented through inoculation or vaccination had to wait. In the 1865 outbreak in Britain, one of the control measures was the killing and destruction of infected cattle at the point of import. This finally brought an end to outbreaks in 1867. Several physicians in India tried experiments in inoculation. In India natural immunity was noted and animals that overcame the disease were valued by their owners. In India natural immunity was noted and animals that overcame the disease were valued by their owners. In 1890 Robert Koch was called into service in the Cape region on the suggestion of Dr J. Beck. In 1897 Koch announced that bile from infected animals could induce resistance on inoculation. Koch was then sent on to India to examine the plague leaving behind a William Kolle to continue experiments in a disused mine building at Kimberley belonging to the De Beers. Around the same time experiments were conducted by Herbert Watkins-Pitchford and Arnold Theiler who found that serum from cattle that recovered worked as an effective inoculation. They however failed to publish and received little credit. Koch, a German, beating the English researchers was a cause of hurt pride.

The Brown Institution was destroyed in 1944
by German bombing

Interesting to see how much national pride was involved in all this. The French had established an Imperial Bacteriological Institute at Constantinople with Louis Pasteur as their leading light. This was mostly headed by Pasteur Institute Alumni. Maurice Nicolle and Adil-Bey were involved in rinderpest research. They demonstrated that the causal agent was small enough to pass through bacterial filters. In India, Alfred Lingard was chosen in 1890 to examine the problems of livestock diseases and to find solutions. Lingard had gained his research experience at the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution - whose workers included John Burdon Sanderson. About six years earlier, Robert Koch, a German, had caused more embarrassment to the British establishment by identifying the cholera causing bacteria in Calcutta. Koch had however not demonstrated that his bacteria isolate could cause disease in uninfected animals - thereby failing one of the required tests for causality that now goes by the name of Koch's postulates. There were several critiques by British researchers who had been working for a while on cholera in India - these included David Douglas Cunningham (who was also a keen naturalist and wrote a couple of general natural history books as well) and T.R. Lewis (who had spent some time with German researchers).  The British government (the bureaucrats were especially worried about quarantine measures for cholera and had a preference for old-fashioned miasma theories of disease) felt the need for a committee to examine the conflict between the English and German claims - and they presumably chose someone with a knowledge of German for it -  Emanuel Edward Klein assisted by Heneage Gibbes. Klein was also from the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution and had worked with Burdon Sanderson. Now Klein, the Brown Institution, Burdon Sanderson and many of the British physiologists had come under the attack of the anti-vivisection movement. During the court proceedings that examined claims of cruelty to animals by the anti-vivisectionists, Klein, an east European (of Jewish descent) with his poor knowledge of English had made rather shocking statements that served as fodder for some science fiction written in that period with evil characters bearing a close resemblance to Klein! Even Lingard had been accused of cruelty, feeding chickens with the lungs of tuberculosis patients, to examine if the disease could be transmitted. E.H. Hankin, the man behind the Ganges bacteriophages had also been associated with the vivisection-researchers and the British Indian press had even called him a vivisector who had escaped to India.

Lingard initially worked in Pune but he found the climate unsatisfactory for working on anti-rinderpest sera. In 1893 he moved the laboratory in the then remote mountain town of Mukteshwar (or Muktesar as the British records have it) and his first lab burnt down in a fire. In 1897 Lingard invited Koch and others to visit and Koch's bile method was demonstrated. The institution, then given the grand name of Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory was rebuilt and it continues to exist as a unit of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute. Lingard was able to produce rinderpest serum in this facility - producing 468,853 doses between 1900 and 1905 and the mortality of inoculated cattle was as low as 0.43%. The institute grew to produce 1,388,560 doses by 1914-15. Remarkably, several countries joined hands in 1921 to attack rinderpest and other livestock diseases and it is claimed that rinderpest is now the second virus (after smallpox) to have been eradicated. The Muktesar institution and its surroundings were also greatly modified with dense plantations of deodar and other conifers. Today this quiet little village centered around a temple to Shiva is visited by waves of tourists and all along the route one can see the horrifying effects of land being converted for housing and apartments.

The Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory c. 1912 (rebuilt after the fire)

In 2019, the commemorative column can be seen.

Upper corridor

A large autoclave made by Manlove & Alliott, Nottingham.

Stone marker

A cold storage room built into the hillside

Koch in 1897 at Muktesar
Seated: Lingard, Koch, Pfeiffer, Gaffky

The habitat c. 1910. One of the parasitologists, a Dr Bhalerao,
described parasites from king cobras shot in the area.

The crags behind the Mukteshwar institute, Chauli-ki-Jhali, a hole in a jutting sheet of rock (behind and not visible)
is a local tourist attraction.

Here then are portraits of three scientists who were tainted in the vivisection debate in Britain, but who were able to work in India without much trouble.

E.H. Hankin

Alfred Lingard

Emanuel Edward Klein

The cattle plague period coincides nicely with some of the largest reported numbers of Greater Adjutant storks and perhaps also a period when vultures prospered, feeding on the dead cattle. We have already seen that Hankin was quite interested in vultures. Cunningham notes the decline in adjutants in his Some Indian Friends and Acquaintances (1903). The anti-vivisection movement, like other minority British movements such as the vegetarian movement, found friends among many educated Indians, and we know of the participation of such people as Dr Pranjivan Mehta in it thanks to the work of the late Dr. S. R. Mehrotra. There was also an anti-vaccination movement, and we know it caused (and continues to cause) enough conflict in the case of humans but there appears to be little literature related to opposition to their use on livestock in India.

Further reading

• All the linked Wikipedia entries.
• A history of the anti-vivisection movement - the Brown Dog Riots 
• Besant, Annie (1882) Vivisection.
• Blevins, S. M., & Bronze, M. S. (2010). Robert Koch and the “golden age” of bacteriology. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 14(9), e744–e751. doi:10.1016/j.ijid.2009.12.003
• Chakrabarti, Pratik (2001). Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India. History of Science 48 (2):125-151. doi:10.1177/007327531004800201
• Cunningham, D.D. (1907). Plagues and Pleasures of Life in Bengal.
• Holmes, J.D.E. (1913) A description of the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, Muktesar : its work and products. Calcutta: Government Press.
• Plowright, W. (1968). Rinderpest Virus. Virology Monographs, 25–110. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-39771-8_2
• Richards, S. (1986). Drawing the life-blood of physiology: Vivisection and the Physiologists’ dilemma, 1870–1900. Annals of Science, 43(1), 27–56. doi:10.1080/00033798600200111  
• Spinage, C.A. (2003). Cattle Plague. A History. New York: Springer.  

Thanks are due to Dr Muthuchelvan and his colleague for an impromptu guided tour of IVRI, Mukteshwar.

Postscripts:
The Imperial Bacteriologist - Alfred Lingard in this case in 1906 - was apparently made "Conservator" for the "Muktesar Reserve Forest" and the 10 members of the "Muktesar Shikar Club" were given exemption from fees to shoot carnivores on their land in 1928. See National Archives of India document.
Klein, Gibbes and D.D. Cunningham were also joined by H.V. Carter (who contributed illustrations to Gray's Anatomy - more here).

28-1-2024: The Hebbal Serum Institute (another institution built during Leslie Coleman's tenure) was established in Bangalore around 1927 and produced two million doses of serum from 1927 to 1939.

Lost to development - Coromandel critters

I recently visited Puducherry (or Pondicherry), an area I had never been to. I chose to go in summer, an unpopular time for tourism, given the heat. A reason was to speculate and imagine what the place might have looked like in the past in the light of some enigmatic species known from the region.

Apteroessa grossa (Fabricius, 1781)
Lost to ignorance and
probably driven to extinction
by non-violent means

And the reason for that is an enigmatic little beetle that has not been seen for more than 200 years. Given that there is a major ecology school, numerous naturalists, and the French Institute, one would imagine that whatever I had to learn was well-known. On a visit to the Natural History Museum in London in 2014, I had happened to meet a brilliant curator of beetles and in the course of casual conversation he mentioned how he had been interviewed for his job. He had been asked what he would do if there was a fire in the museum and he had declared that he would grab one of the oldest beetle specimens in the collection,  a species of which only three specimens exist in the entire world, a species that has never been seen again where it had been collected - somewhere on the Coromandel Coast. This large (more than an inch long) flightless tiger beetle, Apteroessa grossa, had been collected by the Danish colonialists, from the region of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) and had been described and given a binomial name by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1781. Nobody quite knows exactly where the specimens came from, that is, there is no information on the habitat.

Here is what Fabio Cassola (died 2016) wrote on this beetle:

"... the enigmatic nocturnal Apteroessa grossa, described long ago by Fabricius (1781) from the Coromandel coast (Tranquebar), present-day Tamil Nadu state. A second locality (Mayanayakanur, Ammayanayakanur Madura) is also known in the entomological literature (Wiesner 1992). The species was isolated, in modern taxonomy, because of its aberrant characters, in a special subtribe of its own (Apteroessina) (Rivalier 1971). My late friend and colleague Karl Werner, who visited India and the type locality several times, tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to collect it. He related (pers. comm.) that the environment is probably much changed, that the area is presently overcrowded and that he feared that the species could well have disappeared in the wild. "

Having very little knowledge of the Coromandel region, my interest was in understanding what kinds of habitats might have existed in Pondicherry and the Coromandel region that could have been greatly altered.

A 1919 map overlaid on Google Earth to examine change. The original map can be found on Wikimedia Commons, click here for an interactive overlay or a downloadable kml file.

It is clear that development and the pressure on land has gone up enormously. Many of the alterations of the land are thanks to engineered solutions. One of the first victims, it would seem are small water bodies. These are filled in and pipes drawn from long distances from larger waterbodies, which are often deepened and the streams and canals are straightened out and made to flow in concrete channels. I found that Rue Petit Canal in Pondicherry was once an actual unlined stream course.

The old canal in 1716. Also note the sand spits. Image can be found here and the overlay can be explored here.
This shows Fort St. Louis which was destroyed by the English in 1761.

The canal as modified by engineers. 2019

I never quite managed to explore the actual Tranquebar region but it would seem that this was an extensive delta zone with a lot of sand deposits. Perhaps Apteroessa lived on sandy dunes, as some flightless African Dromica species live. Sandy beaches have been destroyed along the coast by engineers or contractors with what can only be called "commonplace thinking" - which could be defined as knowledge claims that could be easily (and incorrectly) explained to the masses and the people in power - trying to explain sea dynamics and geology is perhaps considered too hard - for some contrast see how this is taught in California. The typical engineering solution is to produce hard boundaries with rocks or concrete and these are well known to cause sand deposition to shift.

Coromandel region with Tranquebar c. 1758 (the vegetation marked is not characterized)
Image can be found here / here and the overlay can be found here

The Coromandel zone is remarkable perhaps for the number of species that have gone quietly extinct or out of common knowledge. There is a near endangered Pondicherry shark (Carcharhinus hemiodon), an enigmatic species of shrew that has never actually been seen - Sonnerat's shrew - and there is a thorny Acacia-like plant, Vachellia bolei, from further south that was described in 1985, that has been declared extinct recently. And these are just a few species that we know about.

Sonnerat's shrew - original reconstruction courtesy of Tatiana Petrova (Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

Coming back to our tiger beetle, there is a suggestion that flightlessness is associated with stable habitats, where there is no need for dispersing out of. What could these be, mangroves, coastal sands? I did not manage to examine the Pichavaram mangroves, perhaps these need to be carefully watched. One wonders if perhaps the beetles lived further inland of Tranquebar amid the galleries of the boulder strewn hills in that area. A second locality has been suggested from near Sirumalai which is not entirely certain but that area has some patches under protection, so who knows, they may still exist somewhere! Perhaps interested people living in this zone should keep an eye.

Further reading

• Kamoun, Sophien; Hogenhout, Saskia A. (1996). "Flightlessness and Rapid Terrestrial Locomotion in Tiger Beetles of the Cicindela L. Subgenus Rivacindela van Nidek from Saline Habitats of Australia (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae)". The Coleopterists Bulletin. 50 (3): 221–230. JSTOR 4009161. 
• Why beaches lose their sand – and then suddenly reappear
• "Beachapedia" - a must read for engineers and contractors 

From the Biligiris to the Bahamas

ESSENTIAL YOU ACCOMPANY FIRST SCIENTIFIC VISIT SINCE 1916 TO FLAMINGO COLONY MARCH FIFTEEN STOP PARTY CONSISTS ARTHUR VERNAY PRESIDENT BAHAMAS FLAMINGO PROTECTION SOCIETY COMMA ROBERT MURPHY OF AMERICAN NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM AND SELF STOP FAIL NOT BRYCE

The text of a telegram in 1956 sent by OSS operative Ivar Felix Bryce to his friend Ian Fleming. Fleming joined Arthur Vernay to the remote island of Inagua where the silence of the vast sea would inspire Crab Key, the base of his villain Dr No and Fleming used Bryce's middle-name Felix for his CIA operative. Photographs of the group by the ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy survive in archives. James Bond, of course, was named after the ornithologist who wrote the Birds of the West Indies.

From Raymond Benson (2012). The James Bond Bedside Companion. Crossroad Press. [ Fair Use ]

Arthur Vernay had then retired to Nassau and was involved in flamingo conservation in the Bahamas in 1956. Surprisingly, he had never been interested in birds or wildlife until 1921. He had moved from England to New York, and starting as an elevator operator, began an antique store and rose to wealth and power - an unbelievable rags to riches story. His interest in the wild was, rather surprisingly, sparked off by a visit to the Biligirirangan Hills, to the estate of R.C. Morris in 1921.

Vernay with J.C. Faunthorpe of UP (the United Provinces) in 1923

Morris, in an obituary, notes that Vernay had never seen wild animals in their habitat before and that he left very impressed. Impressed enough to begin a series of expeditions the next year into India which was followed by more. It appears that Vernay got in touch with Morris via  J.C. Faunthorpe, a BNHS member (like Morris) and big-game hunter who worked briefly with the British mission in the United States. When Vernay made his first trip to India with Faunthorpe, he visited the Biligirirangans with Morris as host. They shot elephants - later exhibited in the Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall of the AMNH.

Taxidermic mount in the Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall at the AMNH
Jonas, Louis. 1930. The mounting of an elephant group. Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, New Series, no. 11, Washington, DC.
A (not recommended for the sensitive) video showing the preparation of it can be found here

Vernay would later fund in entirety, a survey of the Eastern Ghats. In those days a survey meant making collections of plants, and animals along the way, shooting, skinning, bottling, and otherwise preserving specimens that would then be examined by experts (often even decades later). The team that went into the field consisted of trained collectors armed with guns, and the ability to prepare specimens with labels. In the Eastern Ghats, the collectors were N.A. Baptista (a Goan skinner in the BNHS) and V.S. LaPersonne (15 July 1897 - ?, an assistant curator at the BNHS) about whom little is known.

The Goan skinner in this is not N.A. Baptista but a certain Fernandez (right)
with Charles McCann during the Vernay Hopwood Expedition

R.C. Morris also accompanied the group - see BNHS note

 

 

Panchan, Vernay's skinner, had come from the Terai, and is described as a Tharu
in the employ of J.C. Faunthorpe

Vernay became a trustee at the American Museum of Natural History in 1935 and a Vice Patron of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1928. Through his travels, he sent specimens, mostly to the former but some to the latter too. Morris joined the Vernay-Hopwood Upper Chindwin Expedition of 1935. There are pictures of him in the archives of H.C. Raven.

Major Guy Rowley, Arthur S.
Vernay, and Colonel Randolph C. Morris. “Singkaling Hkamti
to Hahti, Mar. 1935.” Photograph by H. C. Raven. Image
VHC-M16, American Museum of Natural History Library

 

Here is a view of Morris' home in the Biligiris, Attikan from 2019.

Attikan, the lawn was being worked.
The vast front yard was once used by the Maharaja of Mysore on a hunting visit.

 

And a view from Honnematti rock beside the hill on which their estate stands.

View from Honnametti, the Honnametti kallu (rock) is at the left edge

A diorama in the Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall of the American Museum of Natural History
probably inspired by a scene from the Biligirirangans.

Vernay went on several other expeditions, one with another wealthy explorer Charles Suydam Cutting. The Vernay-Cutting expedition was aided by British intelligence officer and amateur botanist F.M. Bailey. In Africa, he was joined by another ornithologist who also worked as an OSS operative - Rudyerd Boulton. Cutting was apparently part of what was called "The Room" an espionage ring organized by wealthy Americans including Roosevelt and Vincent Astor.

 

Vernay, unknown Tibetan and Suydam Cutting in Tibet from Cutting's The Fire Ox and Other Years (1940)
Another photo in the Smithsonian Archives shows them in Lhasa with a Lhasa Apso at their feet.
Cutting would introduce Lhasa Apsos into the United States. He gifted dachshunds to the Dalai Lama in return.

While all these images capture the age of expeditions and unknown frontiers, one wonders if modern field biologists sometimes, and in vain, try and relive the same. Worse still, are conservation projects, funded by wealthy corporates, utilized to post so-called experts into wilderness areas where the local people themselves are treated the way the so-called "natives" were treated in colonial times. Wildlife movies often dwell on the romance of travel - showing how the wildernesses were reached by helicopters, 4-wheel drives or by hacking their way through jungle while glossing over the fact that local people live right near those locations without much ado.

With government funding drying up in many science fields, will biologists go to the billionaires again?

Notes 
As usual the writing of this note is a byproduct of improving Wikipedia entries - in this case - for references and more details do look up

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Faunthorpe
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stannard_Vernay

PS Sept-2021:  The new biography - The Real James Bond by Jim Wright is a great read.

A buggy history

—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.

—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

A collection of biographies
with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)

The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these (cover picture on right) is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation is by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 

 

One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

A more meaningful overview of entomology may be gained by reading and synthesizing a large number of historical bits, and there are a growing number of such pieces. A 1973 book published by the Annual Reviews Inc. should be of some interest. I have appended a selection of sources that are useful in piecing together a historic view of entomology in India. It helps however to have a broad skeleton on which to attach these bits and minutiae. Here, there are truly verbose and terminology-filled systems developed by historians of science (for example, see ANT). I prefer an approach that is free of a jargon overload or the need to cite French intellectuals. The growth of entomology can be examined along three lines - cataloguing - the collection of artefacts and the assignment of names, communication and vocabulary-building - social actions involving the formation of groups of interested people who work together building common structure with the aid of fixing records in journals often managed beyond individual lifetimes by scholarly societies, and pattern-finding a stage when hypotheses are made, and predictions tested. I like to think that anyone learning entomology also goes through these activities, often in this sequence. Professionalization makes it easier for people to get to the later stages. This process is aided by having comprehensive texts, keys, identification guides and manuals, systems of collections and curators. The skills involved in the production - ways to prepare specimens, observe, illustrate, or describe are often not captured by the books themselves and that is where institutions play (or ought to play) an important role.

Cataloguing

The cataloguing phase of knowledge gathering, especially of the (larger and more conspicuous) insect species of India grew rapidly thanks to the craze for natural history cabinets of the wealthy (made socially meritorious by the idea that appreciating the works of the Creator was as good as attending church)  in Britain and Europe and their ability to tap into networks of collectors working within the colonial enterprise. The cataloguing phase can be divided into the non-scientific cabinet-of-curiosity style especially followed before Darwin and the more scientific forms. The idea that insects could be preserved by drying and kept for reference by pinning, [See Barnard 2018] the system of binomial names, the idea of designating type specimens that could be inspected by anyone describing new species, the system of priority in assigning names were some of the innovations and cultural rules created to aid cataloguing. These rules were enforced by scholarly societies, their members (which would later lead to such things as codes of nomenclature suggested by rule makers like Strickland, now dealt with by committees that oversee the  ICZN Code) and their journals. It would be wrong to assume that the cataloguing phase is purely historic and no longer needed. It is a phase that is constantly involved in the creation of new knowledge. Labels, catalogues, and referencing whether in science or librarianship are essential for all subsequent work to be discovered and are essential to science based on building on the work of others, climbing the shoulders of giants to see further. Cataloguing was probably what the physicists derided as "stamp-collecting".

Communication and vocabulary building

The other phase involves social activities, the creation of specialist language, groups, and "culture". The methods and tools adopted by specialists also helps in producing associations and the identification of boundaries that could spawn new associations. The formation of groups of people based on interests is something that ethnographers and sociologists have examined in the context of science. Textbooks, taxonomic monographs, and major syntheses also help in building community - they make it possible for new entrants to rapidly move on to joining the earlier formed groups of experts. Whereas some of the early learned societies were spawned by people with wealth and leisure, some of the later societies have had other economic forces in their support.

Like species, interest groups too specialize and split to cover more specific niches, such as those that deal with applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, veterinary science and forensics. There can also be interest in behaviour, and evolution which, though having applications, are often do not find economic support.

Pattern finding

Eleanor Ormerod, an unexpected influence
in the rise of economic entomology in India

The pattern finding phase when reached allows a field to become professional - with paid services offered by practitioners. It is the phase in which science flexes its muscle, specialists gain social status, and are able to make livelihoods out of their interest. Lefroy (1904) cites economic entomology in India as beginning with E.C. Cotes [Cotes' career in entomology was cut short by his marriage to the famous Canadian journalist Sara Duncan in 1889 and he shifted to writing] in the Indian Museum in 1888. But he surprisingly does not mention any earlier attempts, and one finds that Edward Balfour, that encyclopaedic-surgeon of Madras collated a list of insect pests in 1887 and drew inspiration from Eleanor Ormerod who hints at the idea of getting government support, noting that it would cost very little given that she herself worked with no remuneration to provide a service for agriculture in England. Her letters were also forwarded to the Secretary of State for India and it is quite possible that Cotes' appointment was a direct result.

As can be imagined, economics, society, and the way science is supported - royal patronage, family, state, "free markets", crowd-sourcing, or mixes of these - impact the way an individual or a field progresses. Entomology was among the first fields of zoology that managed to gain economic value with the possibility of paid employment. David Lack, who later became an influential ornithologist, was wisely guided by his father to pursue entomology as it was the only field of zoology with jobs. Lack however found his apprenticeship (in Germany, 1929!) involving pinning specimens "extremely boring".

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :

In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]

He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:

Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.

This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.

It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

Kunhikannan may be among the few Indian scientists who dabbled in cultural history, and political theorizing. He wrote two rather interesting books The West (1927) and A Civilization at Bay (1931, posthumously published) which defended Indian cultural norms while also suggesting areas for reform. While reading these works one has to remind oneself that he was working under Europeans and may not have been able to discuss such topics with many Indians. An anonymous writer who penned a  prefatory memoir of his life in his posthumously published book notes that he was reserved and had only a small number of people to talk to outside of his professional work. Kunhikannan came from the Thiyya community which initially preferred English rule to that of natives but changed their mind in later times. Kunhikannan's beliefs also appear to follow the same trend.

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919
Third row: C.C. Ghosh (assistant entomologist), Ram Saran ("field man"), Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq
Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt (Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen
First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Bentley, Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, Andrews, H.L.Dutt

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1923

Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh

Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar (a malariologist), R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma, Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi

Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen

Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton

First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das (veterinary department Orissa), B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)

 

Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, are largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)

Further reading

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Clark, J.F.M. (2001). Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920.  Agricultural History 75(1):83-114.
• Dave, K.N. (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Dover, Cedric (1922) Entomology in India. The Calcutta Review 3(2):336-349. [Dover makes a plea for greater funding for entomology: Like Magda, Queen of Sheba, whose devotion to Learning made her set out for Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Solomon, they have entered the domain of Science not with the object of any financial benefit to themselves but for their love of Knowledge. They have worked in the interests of Science alone, yet certain branches of their work has saved India millions of rupees, while other, have added large sums to her coffers. Is it not then up to the Government to improve the status of entomology in this country and to make it a more lucrative profession?  ]
  
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons ofwar, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Moses, S.T. (1925). Insect pests and some south Indian beliefs. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society. 26(1):15-19.
  
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article1: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.
• Sorensen, Conner (1988). The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870. Agricultural History 62(2):98-115. 
• Sutter, P. S. (2007). Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Isis, 98(4):724–754.

An index to entomologists who worked in India or described a significant number of species from India - with links to Wikipedia (where possible - the gap in coverage of entomologists in general is large)
(woefully incomplete - feel free to let me know of additional candidates)

Carl Linnaeus - Johan Christian Fabricius - Edward Donovan - John Gerard Koenig - John Obadiah Westwood - Frederick William Hope - George Alexander James Rothney - Thomas de Grey Walsingham - Henry John Elwes - Victor Motschulsky - Charles Swinhoe - John William Yerbury - Edward Yerbury Watson - Peter Cameron - Charles George Nurse - H.C. Tytler - Arthur Henry Eyre Mosse - W.H. Evans - Frederic Moore - John Henry Leech - Charles Augustus de Niceville - Thomas Nelson Annandale - R.C. Wroughton -  T.R.D. Bell - Francis Buchanan-Hamilton - James Wood-Mason - Frederic Charles Fraser  - R.W. Hingston - Auguste Forel - James Davidson - E.H. Aitken -  O.C. Ollenbach - Frank Hannyngton - Martin Ephraim Mosley - Hamilton J. Druce  - Thomas Vincent Campbell - Gilbert Edward James Nixon - Malcolm Cameron - G.F. Hampson - Martin Jacoby - W.F. Kirby - W.L. Distant -  C.T. Bingham - G.J. Arrow - Claude Morley - Malcolm Burr - Samarendra Maulik - Guy Marshall

 

Edward Percy Stebbing - T.B. Fletcher - Edward Ernest Green - E.C. Cotes - Harold Maxwell Lefroy - Frank Milburn Howlett - S.R. Christophers - Leslie C. Coleman - T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar - Yelsetti Ramachandra Rao - Magadi Puttarudriah - Hem Singh Pruthi - Shyam Sunder Lal Pradhan - James Molesworth Gardner - Vakittur Prabhakar Rao - D.N. Raychoudhary - C.F.W. Muesebeck  - Mithan Lal Roonwal - Ennapadam Sundara Narayanan - M.S. Mani - T.N. Ananthakrishnan - Muhammad Afzal Husain

Not included by Rao -   F.H. Gravely - P.V. Isaac - M. Afzal Husain - A.D. Imms - C.F.C. Beeson

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan - Cedric Dover

PS: Thanks to Prof C.A. Viraktamath, I became aware of a new book-  Gunathilagaraj, K.; Chitra, N.; Kuttalam, S.; Ramaraju, K. (2018). Dr. T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar: The Entomologist. Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. - this suggests that TVRA went to Stanford at the suggestion of Kunhikannan.