An old fishing trip

 

Tranquebar, the Danish version of Tharangambadi had long been on my list of places to visit. So many species from India have the scientific epithet of tranquebaricus, all because of the Danish settlement from where specimens were carted off to Europe to be given binomial names. So on a visit to the place in December 2022 I checked out some of the big names including Christoph Samuel John who I had been researching both for his Wikipedia entry and for a little chapter on fishes that has recently been published by McGill University Press (see here). I was rather disappointed to see that C.S. John's grave had either no markings or was possibly damaged a long time ago.

 

 

John collaborated with the German fish specialist Marcus Bloch in Berlin, sending him fishes in spirit by the ship load. His notes on the difficulties with finding containers, arrack, and corks is worth examining! Remarkably many of his specimens are still held at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Bloch named some fishes after John (including the genus Johnius) and it would appear that John had a native artist draw some specimens. Unfortunately there appears to be no trace of any original drawings by Indians in the archives of the museum in Berlin.

The New Jerusalem Church with
the monogram of the Danish King Frederik IV

Another collector who worked in this colonial Danish region was a man with the impressive name of Dagobert Karl de Daldorff. Daldorff died somewhere in Calcutta, I doubt anyone has found much about his life there... Interestingly Fabricius named a dragonfly species collected by Daldorff as Tholymis tillarga - people looking at the etymology of "Tillarga" have apparently drawn a blank - given its abdomen colour I wonder if it is from Thilak - thilaka - somehow Latinized as tillarga. 

Here is a comment from Endersby and Fliedner (2015) :

The genus Tholymis seems to be an amalgam of parts of other genus names. The species name was capitalised and, at the time of its naming, the practice of capitalising proper nouns used as species names was still in vogue, so Tillarga was probably the name of a place or possibly a person. No amount of searching has revealed its origin -

 

Tholymis tillarga - photo by Rison Thumboor

Useful sources

• Endersby, Ian and Heinrich Fliedner (2015) The naming of Australia's Dragonflies. Busybird Publishing. p. 5.
  
• Zworykin, D.D. (2023). Anabas testudineus (Bloch, 1792), climbing perch (Anabantidae), and its discovery in India. Archives of Natural History 50(1):22-34.
  

The pseudonymous shikari

 Early colonial Indian shikar literature is filled with authors hiding behind pseudonyms like "Civilian", "Mountaineer", "Hawkeye", "Silver hackle", "Felix", or "Maori", and I have often wondered whether this was more than just fashion. Perhaps the authors truly wanted to keep their whereabouts private lest their employers or others find fault with them. At least in the case of "Mountaineer", there seems to have been a real need for staying low. I was surprised to find that there are at least two major biographies of "Mountaineer" which I think do not deal sufficiently with his life in the Indian wilderness and are easily missed if one does not make the connection between Frederick "Pahari" Wilson and Shikari Wilson alias Mountaineer. 

James Hume, A. O. Hume's cousin, sketched by the
Calcutta artist and animal rights pioneer
Colesworthey Grant

Frederick Wilson left life in the East India Company army and went AWOL, supposedly with just five rupees and his brown bess, to hide away in the Himalayas, well before the 1857 uprising. It would appear that he made himself useful during 1857 and received a pardon after which he moved back into the company of his own countrymen. Much of the romanticism associated with him is for his having gone native and styling himself the Raja of Harsil. Wilson made money by denuding the Himalayan forests, cutting down old growth forests and floating timber down the rivers, setting up sawmills in the lower valleys and selling them off to feed the voracious appetite of the early railways. He shot wildlife freely and wrote about his exploits under the pen-name "Mountaineer" - the largest output being to the India Sporting Review - now a very hard-to-find periodical. This magazine was edited by James Hume, a magistrate in Calcutta, with whom the young Allan O. Hume stayed when he first arrived in India in 1849. Now the historian S. R. Mehrotra who passed away a few years ago noted that it was with his Calcutta cousin that he saw the first protest of the Europeans against changing laws. And his cousin James was among the few who did not support the Europeans. (I am unable to see the historical context of the so-called white mutiny of 1849 that Mehrotra refers to) Shikari Wilson was clearly a close friend of James Hume and still later Allan as well. Wilson is said to have shot 1000 to 1500 male monals a year for the sale of their plumage during the height of the plume trade. Brooks travelled along the Bhagirathi river valley in 1875 and noted that monal populations could recover now that Wilson had left them alone! Brooks also recorded the price paid for a monal - Rupees 2 and 8 annas.

The India Sporting Review
A work that ought to be digitized for posterity

Attempts to get the Biodiversity Heritage Library to locate a set of the India Sporting Review have all failed. It is however claimed by cricket historian Boria Majumdar that he has a complete set of the India Sporting Review as part of the Fannatic Sports Museum. It would be amazing indeed if this set could be digitized for wider research access. Then perhaps we will all be able to read more of Mountaineer Wilson.

Frederick "Pahadi" Wilson's bungalow in Harsil
which burned down in 1997
The figures in the foreground are Wilson and his brother-in-law
Mungetu Chand.

 

Journalist Robert Hutchinson wrote book on Wilson after hearing about him from Sundarlal Bahuguna and D.C. Kala wrote another book on Hulson Sahib. Jack Gibson of Doon School found Wilson coinage being used for gambling when hiking in the region in 1938. Ruskin Bond knew the last descendant of Wilson. Few however seem to have actually looked at Wilson's environmental impact carefully enough.

Long before Salim Ali - an Indian bird collector 1906-9

Hidden away in the annals of systematic ornithology is the name of P. N. Krishnasamy Naidoo, Merchant on Victoria Street, Mahe, Seychelles around 1907 and living on Rue La Fague, St. Andre, Reunion in 1908. From the Indian diaspora, literate in French, Naidoo probably moved from Mauritius but little is known about his life. It appears that he began to collect bird specimens on the Indian Ocean islands for Lord Walter Rothschild and his assistant Ernst Hartert. Almost nothing is known about him beyond the few letters he wrote that are preserved in the Natural History Museum at London and the bird specimens he collected which are now in the American Museum of Natural History.

Naidoo collected nearly 450 skins of birds all of which are now at the American Museum of Natural History, part of their acquisition from Lord Rothschild, who was forced to make a distress sale of his collections to silence an unknown woman blackmailer. Suprisingly all the Naidoo birds landed in the American part while the letters of Naidoo are at the Natural History Museum in London. Some of the beautifully handwritten letters in French sent by Naidoo to Rothschild and Hartert tell of large payments being made for the bird specimens that he collected. For some of the island parakeets, Rothschild offered 30 pounds per specimen. [Kemp (2017) on Rothschild in the New Scientist calls him a useless banker who spent a mountain of cash to buy nature]

As always, every finding raises more questions, how did Naidoo get to be trained in skinning birds and preparing specimens? What was his own knowledge of the birds of the Indian Ocean Islands? 

A collection of the specimens that Naidoo collected along with the species, dates and locations can be found from the American Museum of Natural History website. Examination of some of his letters at the NHM London archives has not revealed much on his life. 

A chapter remains to be written on this interesting marginal character in ornithological history.

Notes:

• Kemp, Christopher (2017). The financier who bought all of nature. New Scientist 3150:40-41.
  

Thanks are due to a number of people for helping unearth the precious little that we know about Naidoo - Robert Prys-Jones, Alison Harding, Kathryn Rooke, (NHM-London); Pat Matyot (who suggested that Naidoo may have come from a family of indentured labourers that left Mattur in Tamil Nadu to settle in Mauritius with some becoming successful entrepreneurs - like Govindasamy Krishnasamy Thambi Naidoo who financially supported Mahatma Gandhi); and Malavika Vyawahare (via Abhay Thakur, IFS).

An inedible tale

 

Many years ago, I had access to a copy of this peculiarly titled book on the birds of India. It had some beautiful lithographs, possibly hand coloured, and evidently faded into strange and muddy shades of brown. Fortunately, today, there is a nice scan of the book available online via the Biodiversity Heritage Library and safely deposited on the Internet Archive. Some of us had created an entry at Wikipedia for its author J.A. Murray - and around 2006 it had been expanded as James Augustus Murray and at that time the library of the Natural History Museum in London had conflated the two in their catalogue index too. Fortunately it was easy to see that there was no connection to the lexicographer Sir James Augustus Murray and the errors have since been fixed but painfully little was known about James Alexander Murray!

The Asiatic Society of Mumbai has done an excellent job of digitizing its collections and making them available at a very reasonable subscription price. The search engine and the OCR also work rather well and after running some searches on GranthSanjeevani I stumbled on the rather sordid tale of our Murray. It turns out that he founded a Victoria Natural History Institute which aimed to make natural history specimens available for sale and he was rapidly trying to expand this organization across India. Rather too rapidly and ambitiously it would appear. He had people across the country paying him to become heads of branches and then went into severe debt. This finally led to his being charged with cheating and some of the court hearings appear in the newspaper reports of the time. They reveal that Murray was once a librarian at the Kurrachee Municipal Library from where he was discharged dishonourably after it was discovered that he was trying to sell off duplicates of old books. Moving back to Mumbai where he was born, possibly of mixed British Indian parentage (described as "Eurasian"), he tried to set up an organization to make use of his taxidermic skills and knowledge of natural history. A report from the Bangalore Museum notes with hope that they might obtain new exhibits through the newly opened branches of the Victoria Natural History Institute in Mysore and Bangalore. Phipson of the BNHS, it would appear, had been kind enough to lend money to Murray and perhaps even provided housing to him until he failed to pay his rents. Phipson was called to court as a witness. The court with L.H. Bayley presiding finally sentenced Murray to five years of rigorous imprisonment whereupon he appears to have been broken and the man was lost forever to history.

 

 

The Bombay Gazette, 17 April 1893 p. 4

 

Some American links to Indian ornithology

One of the joys of being in India is the complete lack of access to a good library, and that makes one keep a list of books to find so that you know how to make the best of limited time when one get an opportunity to visit a well-stocked library. It took me nearly ten years before I finally managed to browse through Max Nicholson's Art of Birdwatching (1931) on a brief visit to the library of the Zoological Society of London. I had been looking for the context in which he had talked about how a so-called "open mind" was absolutely useless for scientific enquiry [a belief that starkly contradicts the argumentative Indian].

"One cannot observe without a theory, and what seems the simplest of ornithological tasks - to go out of doors and look out for something worth recording - is in reality one of the hardest… It is a mistake to imagine that complete impartiality and freedom from preconceived ideas is the qualification for the perfect observer. The cow has a remarkably open mind, yet it has never been found to reach a high degree of civilisation."

Nicholson also inspired another writer across the Atlantic. This was Joseph Hickey, a student of literature who moved to ornithology. I had heard of his work through a rather tenuous series of connections.

From The Auk

One of the leading lights of bird study and popularization in India, Dr Joseph George, a major influence on the Bangalore bird-enthusiasts circle, had undertaken several of his earliest and pioneering studies on bird populations in Dehra Dun. In 1948, a Mrs M.D. Wright conducted a census of birds in Dehra Dun and wrote out her observations in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. One of her inspirations was the book by Joseph Hickey, A Guide to Birdwatching (1943). It is unclear if Dr George actually took part in her census but she influenced his own studies in Dehra Dun (since he cites her work) and they doubtless met and I strongly believe that Dr George actually read this book too given his own censuses of birds in Dehra Dun. It was not until a few weeks ago that I got my hands on Hickey's book thanks to the Internet Archive and their emergency pandemic-response library which allows in-copyright books to be borrowed and read online. Now Hickey was influenced by many giants including Ernst Mayr and Aldo Leopold. He recounted among his ornithological mantras, the one from Ernst Mayr about having a long term line of enquiry while watching birds - in Mayr's words "everybody's got to have a problem". On the first person Hickey met on the field watching birds, he writes:

The pleasures of meeting a kindred spirit are much more subjective but they are nonetheless real and they often ripen into lifelong friendships. In grade school it never occurred to my chums or to me that bird books were written for anyone other than boys, and that grown men and women liked to watch flickers and killdeers just the way we did. Our beloved scoutmaster, the Reverend Basil Hall, had given some of us a helping hand, but bird study still seemed like a boys' game. It was an almost stupefying shock when Richard A. Herbert and I, aged 14, quite by accident found an elegantly dressed gentleman watching a chickadee one February day in New York City's Bronx Park. Charles Johnston, who looked not unlike Charles Evans Hughes to us, had been a distinguished member of the British Civil Service in India. He was kindly and apparently ready to answer questions. He answered them for two full hours, probably with no little amusement. The decades between us seemed to vanish and from that point on, our bird study took on dignity and purpose. He helped us many times more in the years that followed.

I tell this story to illustrate how an interest in ornithology can span any barrier, and how people of widely diverse cultures can rapidly find a common bond of understanding. There are several ways to get in touch with other bird students. One is to attend meetings.

Now an Indian Civil Servant interested in birds had to be examined and I searched the internet for Charles Johnston and found one that was interested in theosophy (but the Wikipedia entry then had no mention of any interest in natural history). I found also that a Johnston had been active in New York birding circles but was not sure if the two were the same until I found an entry on the Theosophy Wiki. The other major Theosophist (at least briefly) and ornithologist was Hume and I had to check for encounters between the two. It seems that the two could not have been in great contact. Johnston  married the niece of Madame Blavatsky (with whom Hume had fallen out) and entered the Indian Civil Service only in 1888, well after Hume's exit from government service. Johnston worked only for two years before suffering from malaria led to his resignation and he moved to the United States in 1896 after treatment in Austria. His close friends in New York included fellow theosophists W. Q. Judge and Clement Acton Griscom, Jr. (1868-1918) who was the father of the ornithologist Ludlow Griscom. It would appear (esp. from the absence of any mention in the Bombay Natural History Society journal) that Johnston began his serious bird studies only in the United States and may well have been an important influence in Griscom's life. Allan Cruickshank's Birds around New York city (1942) includes many notes by Johnston, who is described as an "experienced and meticulous observer" (p. 289).

Recommended reading

• Hickey, Joseph (1975). A guide to bird watching. New York:Dover. [This Internet Archive copy (which can be borrowed) is signed by Hickey. This book was his master's work, under the supervision of Aldo Leopold!]

• Wright, M.D. (1949). A bird count in Dehra Dun. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 48(3):570-572.
• Birding by sight and sound
  

Postscript

Dr Joseph George  (1st October 1921 – 9th July 2012) was educated at St Joseph's College, Trichy and at St. John's College, Agra, He researched polymer chemistry under Herman Francis Marks  at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Research Institute between 1946 and 1948, returning to the Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun. He worked for a while at the CBRI, Roorkee and at IPIRI, Bangalore.

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.

Your Soundings Green Ooze

When ornithologists plumbed the depths of the seas

There is nothing very Remarkable between these places, saving the high ridge of land that comes from the Quoining Land, seen on the back of Mangalore, that receives Basallore hill, and trenches northward far into the Country; the Coast is bold all the Way, and your Soundings green Ooze. Pidgeon Island is six Leagues off the Main, and may be seen as far Northward or Southward; the Channel made between is unquestionably good. There is a small naked rock adjoining to this island, where multitudes of Pidgeons breed; I have taken a great many fine Oysters from thence at low Water, but you must carry Scrapers and long spikes to strike them off. The Latitude of Pidgeon Island is in fourteen Degrees five minutes North.

On the French national library, there is a fragment of a book The port and prospect in and near the river of Mangalore ; A prospect of the Mulkey rocks ; A prospect of Pidgeon Island published somewhere in the 1700s it is part of a collection belonging to the cartographer d'Anville. Pigeon Island is what is today called Nethrani Island, known to be one of the best and most bio-diverse coral reefs close to mainland India and one that has hardly been carefully examined - mainly because the island is used for target practice by the Indian Navy who bomb it periodically with torpedoes. It is also said to have the world's highest density of nesting White-bellied Sea-eagles. 

Sounding Leads

What caught my attention was the information given to navigators - "your Soundings green Ooze." Trying to make sense of this phrase led to an examination of navigation practices in the period. Sounding is a word for finding the depth of the sea-floor and it comes from ancient times, well before sounding actually was done using sound - with sonar, reflecting sounds off the sea floor and calculating the distance based on the time taken for echoes. 

Sounding in the old days were done using "sounding leads" - special blocks made of lead or other heavy metals (incidentally the plumb in plumb line - comes from plumbum, Latin for lead). The block was lowered down the side of the ship and had a cavity at the bottom that could be lined with tallow, bees-wax, soap or other sticky material or a small saucer at the end that collected a sample of the sea floor. The sample that came up would tell something about the nature of the sea floor, it could be sandy, rocky or, it could come up with foraminifera ooze - and in which case it would go into the log books as sticky green ooze. Navigation on rivers was perhaps a bit easier and made use of a sounding pole with graduations. They too had a cup at the end that allowed sampling of the floor. (The call of "Mark Twain" was made by Mississippi river pilots who found the water depth to be two fathoms.)

Nautical charts routinely indicate seabed types and this tradition was mainly to examine spots for anchorage and not so much for scientific analysis although they were used as indicators for good fishing and for identifying the nature of currents based on the distribution of silt deposits at the mouths of rivers. With the establishment of marine surveys, a more systematic sampling of sediments was undertaken with a view to find larger scale patterns. Drilled cores of the sea bed in the Arabian Sea allow for examination of the deposition of the ooze over time. One of the patterns is that the ooze deposit is correlated with the Southwest Monsoon. It may be related to the flow of nutrients with rainwater runoff and the resultant growth. The data from these cores have been used as proxies to understand long-term patterns in the monsoon and its strength. For an example of the modern techniques available and what they can reveal - see Schmiedl, G., and D. C. Leuschner (2005). But let's get back to an earlier age.

A history of the Indian marine surveys has been written by Clements Markham (but it is worth remembering that he can be unreliable at times - as in his Cinchona history). The first surveys by the navy of the East India Company focused on ports and navigation.  The trend was continued until the ending of the "Indian Navy" (not to be confused with the post-Independence organization) in 1862. In 1873, a Marine Survey Department was established. The Department was headed by Commander A Dundas Taylor and included Staff Commander J.H. Ellis, RN as deputy superintendent. It also included Dr J. Armstrong as surgeon and naturalist. The marine surveys included as part of their study, the mapping of depths, and the examination of marine organisms as well.

One of the early survey assignments for Commander Ellis was aboard the Clyde. In the General Report of the Operations of the Marine Survey of India from the Commencement in 1874, to the end of the official year 1875-76 by Dundas Taylor we read on page 7 that they had an unlikely passenger on board in 1875.

The whole thing about measuring a meridian distance between Pigeon Island and the Laccadives (Lakshadweep) and remaining there for a fortnight seems like a clever ploy initiated by Hume, the Secretary to the Government of India, to hijack the government machinery for his ornithology.

Hume's own note published in his Stray Feathers is a good read:

Reading through Hume, it is clear that he has all the background needed to do his job of identifying locations for lighthouses. He knows for instance the location of the wrecking of the Chaldea in the previous year. He takes an unusual interest in the plant life on the islands during this trip. Strangely he does not mention much about the bird-life of Pigeon Island. He notes the numbers of sea-eagles nesting on the Vengurla rocks that they encounter earlier off Goa. Hume writes:

One object that I had in view in making this trip was to ascertain whether or not the Laccadives were separated by a deep trough from India—a matter which up to this time had remained uncertain.

I had, therefore, indented on the Bombay dockyard for deep sea line, and they supplied some five or six thousand fathoms of splendid looking line. Our Captain, an old Porcupine man, entered most cordially unto my views, and soon after we left Bombay, took the line in hand and began testing and marking it. To our dismay it soon appeared that the line was in many places rotten. Whilst we lay at Pigeon Island, the Captain had a lot of it carefully picked over, all bad pieces picked out and   the  good  carefully  spliced  together.

One really wonders why a marine survey vessel did not have the necessary equipment for sounding already on board. ["Porcupine man" apparently refers to the fact that Ellis worked on the HMSS Porcupine - see this which puts him aboard the Porcupine around 1873 and has nothing to do with the skin disease]

Wallace's 1863 map

Hume's copy of Darwin's Origin of Species
(first edition).
Courtesy: SLBI

Anyway, what this does make clear is that Hume would have read the work of Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace's 1863 paper was communicated to the Royal Geographical Society by Clements Markham and Markham would have been closely associated with Hume during the course of the cinchona work under the aegis of his Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce. Huxley had named it the "Wallace Line" in 1868. Wallace shared some of Hume's interests in the occult and Theosophy. (Hume had of course read Darwin and Hume's copy of a first edition of The Origin of Species is at the South London Botanical Institute) Hume was also in touch with the geologists of the Geological Survey of India from the time of Stoliczka. Richard Lydekker had joined the GSI in 1874 and in 1879 Hume got him to write about the skeletal structures of birds based on his training in paleontology. Interestingly Lydekker found another now eponymous biogeographic delineation of Australia in 1895. At the end of the Laccadives trip report, Hume includes three bathymetric charts in this issue of Stray Feathers - of the Laccadives, Cherbaniani Reef and Kiltan Island. It is rather interesting considering that printing illustrations was so much of a problem in those times. He also spends considerable space in exploring the origin and geological structure of Betra-par - whether it has a rocky core or if it is entirely formed out of coral reefs. He had samples of the soil tested by the GSI. He collected molluscs that were identified by Nevill of the Indian Museum. Plant specimens were also collected and these were examined by David Prain.

Hume's Laccadive soundings published in Stray Feathers

The engine on the Clyde broke down on February 21 and attempts were made to get it to sail but tacking was not possible as it lacked a keel. With great difficulty they reached Thoothukudi where Hume exited to make his way to Madras but with some travels on the way. Incidentally, the Gunboat Clyde was manufactured by the famous Wadia family (which produced the geologist D N Wadia). The builder was Rustomjee Ardaseer, son of Ardaseer Cursetjee, the first Indian Fellow of the Royal Society. Commander Ellis' report includes the rest of the saga. (The Clyde 1857 was a 300 ton steam gunboat capable of carrying 18 guns and had a 60 HP engine - see )

Hume writes:

At last we made Tuticorin, and I had had enough of the old "Clyde," to which I here bade farewell, devoting the rest of my leave to Southern India, the Pulneys, and Neilgherries, of which I need say nothing here.

I fancy that he would have visited his good collaborators S.B. Fairbank in the Palnis, Margaret Cockburn in Kotagiri, his collector W R Davison in Ootacamund, and his cousin Edward Balfour (who left India in 1876) in Madras before taking the train back towards Calcutta or Shimla.

We tend to think of most of the colonial ornithologists as mere collectors, making use of their presence in a particular location to supply others with specimens, but these and other examples from Hume's work clearly indicate that he had underlying theories and sought to find evidence either in support or against them. This is especially useful as a lesson for beginner birdwatchers - Max Nicholson wrote in his Art of Birdwatching - "One cannot observe without a theory, and what seems the simplest of ornithological tasks - to go out of doors and look out for something worth recording- is in reality one of the hardest ... It is a mistake to imagine that complete impartiality and freedom from preconceived ideas is the qualification for the perfect observer. The cow has a remarkably open mind, yet it has never been found to reach a high degree of civilization." Ernst Mayr is supposed to have expressed a similar idea which Joseph Hickey recalled as "everybody's got to have a problem." Mayr expected even ordinary bird enthusiasts to have big biological questions at the backs of their mind so that they might make more critical observations.

The idea of soundings and sea depth measurement to examine continental boundaries and thereby bio-geographical boundaries did not stop with Hume. He seems to have influenced his collector W R Davison as well. When Davison went on to take up a position at the Raffles Museum in Singapore (the Straits Settlement in those times), he decided on delineating his area of specimen collecting, which included numerous islands, using a cutoff at a distance where the sea floor depth exceeded 50 fathoms (Professor Kevin Tan of Singapore in his history of the Singapore museum has many biographical details on Davison including his tragic death - see Tan, 2015).

Postscript - a Bangalore connection

(Actually posted as a message on the list - bngbirds on 30 Sept 2013) Hickey mentioned above was himself inspired by Nicholson and wrote a book called the Guide to Bird Watching as part  of his Master's degree! This book inspired a Mrs M.D. Wright, wife of a forest officer in India at Dehra Dun. She counted birds and wrote a remarkable piece in the Journal of the BNHS in 1949. She also influenced Dr Joseph George who conducted studies on drongo numbers and published many notes in the Indian Forester. Dr George went on to establish a lively group of bird-watchers in Bangalore.

Interestingly, Salim Ali seems to have glorified the idea of the "unbiased observer". The debate around having paradigms or frameworks for observation has obviously taken place before and I would subscribe to the view of Goodin (2006) that allowing for a multiplicity of biases is more helpful that claiming to be unbiased, which really is a state that is unachievable. A truly unbiased person would be taking a random walk, never reaching any specific destination!

• George, J. (1957). Birds of New Forest. Indian Forester, 83(11):674-687.
• George, J. (1957). Birds of New forest. Indian Forester, 83(12):724-737.
• George, J. (1962). Birds of New Forest: 1957-1962. Indian Forester, 88(6):442-444
• George, J. (1958). Bamboo Nestboxes. Indian Forester, 84(11):687-692.
• George, J. (1958). A Young Dark Grey Cuckoo-shrike. Indian Forester, 84(5):286-287.
• George, J. (1960). Tolerance of Birds to Ascu - and Creosote - Treated Nesting Sites. Indian Forester, 86(12):753-754.
• George, J. (1961). Bird Counting. Indian Forester, 87(9):572-575. [reprinted in 1961 NLBW 2(12)]
• Goodin, Robert E. (2006) The Epistemic Benefits of Multiple Biased Observers. Episteme 3(3):166-174.
• Wright, M.D. (1949) A bird count in Dehra Dun. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 48(3):570-571.

Postscript 12 August 2020: In Hume's notes on the birds of Manipur (1888) he discusses his understanding of evolution. He clearly seems to know about competition, niches, and the process of speciation and appears limited only due to his use of morphology for comparing evolutionary closeness.

Hume puzzles over Garrulax moniliger and G. pectoralis which he thinks are closely related:

...differing only in size, ... are almost always found in the same localities..

There are many other pairs differing similarly only in size, but then they belong to different localities, and where their distribution areas interlace or overlap we do get intermediate forms.
How is the existence of these two forms to be explained on our modern principles of evolution? They breed in the same localities at the same time. They are not like some of the small waders said to have a smaller and larger form, some bred in temperate and some in high arctic regions.
They must have had a common ancestor; their food is the same (I have compared the contents of the stomachs of three of each ...

To me this is a mystery, and indicates that our present evolution hypothesis itself requires further evolution.

Further reading

• Chapman, F. (1894). On some Foraminifera obtained by the Royal Indian Marine Surveys S.S. ‘Investigator,’ from the Arabian Sea, near the Laccadive Islands. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 63(1), 4-55. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1895.tb07878.x [This gives some idea of what the green ooze is made up of]
• Cushman, Joseph A. (1928) Foraminifera; their classification and economic use.
• Markham, Clements R. (1878) A Memoir on the Indian Surveys. London: W.H. Allen and Co.
• Schmiedl, G., and D. C. Leuschner (2005), Oxygenation changes in the deep western Arabian Sea during the last 190,000 years: Productivity versus deepwater circulation, Paleoceanography, 20, PA2008, doi:10.1029/2004PA001044. 
• Tan, Kevin Y.L. (2015) Of Whales and Dinosaurs: The Story of Singapore's Natural History Museum. Singapore: NUS Press. pp. 31, 40–48. 
• Thomson, C. Wyville (1873) The Depths of the Sea. London: Macmillan and Co.
• Wadia, Ruttonjee Ardeshir (1955) The Bombay Dockyard and the Wadia Master Builders. p. 302. 

Postscript 

1-June-2022 - Hume seems to have had some reservations about Darwin's theory of evolution - the word "evolution" occurs about three times in the context of species in the volumes of Stray Feathers. He clearly does accept an ancient earth and species colonization - in fact he considers several biogeographical questions. See for example. And after his Manipur expedition he talks about the possibility of two species of different sizes with identical food habits occupying a common niche (my words) - "...is a mystery, and indicates that our present evolution hypothesis itself requires further evolution." (S.F. 11: p.161-161)
Compare also some of the recent works on "plumage mimicry" - Leighton, G. M., Lees, A. C., & Miller, E. T. (2018). The hairy–downy game revisited: an empirical test of the interspecific social dominance mimicry hypothesis. Animal Behaviour, 137, 141–148. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.01.012