Wikipedia, social insects and super-organisms

I routinely point out in my outdoor naturalist explorations that one of the great innovations in evolutionary history is indirect communication - communication via the substrate - rather one-to-one communication. What this does is to make the information more permanent and less vulnerable to the death of individual organisms. It is the reason why you cannot destroy an ant colony by stomping on the workers walking on a trail. 

You might see that to some extent this is what internet forums do, or what books do, they pass on information even after the death of the originator. But books are not location specific, I cannot find out who has walked at a specific spot, the way a dog or tiger might find out by sniffing a tree. Books are not sensitive to temporality - the dog or tiger might find out by the scents left on a tree how recent the last passer by was.

Social insects like ants and termites have evolved indirect communication to coordinate the activities of individual organisms without the need for centralized command and control. The terms stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration have been used for this and here is an explanation I found online (slightly edited):

Stigmergy is a word used to describe a particular type of control: the control of the actions of a group of agents via a shared environment. Crucially, the agents do not directly communicate amongst themselves. Instead, each agent is caused (by its environment) to act upon and change the environment. These changes in turn alter the later actions of the agents.

The word stigmergy comes from the Greek stigma, meaning sign/mark, and ergon, meaning work, capturing the notion that the environment is a stimulus that causes particular work (behavior) to occur. It was originally coined by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé,who explained the mound-building behavior of termites by appealing to the stigmergic control of the mound itself.

So if a termite mound is breached - the workers passing by might use a chemical marker saying - there is a breach here - as more and more workers pass the point, the chemical scent becomes stronger and it recruits workers who specialize in fixing breaches to the specific breach location. Workers might also mark trails towards the breach for others to follow. Once the breach is sealed, the trail scents and breach indicators fade away, leaving workers to follow their other activities. Notice that there is no central control and that chemical markers of different kinds may be produced by agents who may not know how to deal with the specific situation. Agents that do know how to deal with the situation are guided to a specific location. 

Insect societies have task specialization - some workers specialize in foraging, some in nest care, some in defense and so on. Task specialization is sometimes based on the age of the insects, with older ones taking up risky activities.

I have tried to explain how this might or should guide construction of software such as the MediaWiki system - but evidently with little success - among some in the Wikipedia community. Agents need to be able to indicate centrally about areas of Wikipedia that are undergoing disturbance. Other agents need to be able to find, act at the areas of disturbance. Currently Wikipedia does this through central bulletin boards where agents explicitly post their notices. Unfortunately this is too taxing for a naive agent. WikiRage was a third party system that could detect increased editing activity and show articles that were currently "hot". There is no real system that shows currently highly visited articles. There is no system for currently highly sought after article - although this might be something for a search engine company like Google to think of. Now look at this also from the point of view of an agent with a specialization - I as an editor might only act if I know that I can help, so overwhelming me with too many stimuli might only push an agent like me into confusion and inaction. If I were a specialist editor working in a particular cluster of articles, I should know if something in my cluster is of interest, or undergoing a great deal of editing activity. I shouldn't have to declare my own interest explicitly. For a while now I have sought a rather simple means to detect traffic spikes in articles that I have on my watchlist. Now some software designers will immediately object that such as system could impinge on user privacy - although much of this information (other than mere reading) is already public in the MediaWiki system. I think many of these security concerns can be reduced by "aging" - the deletion of data over time - to simulate the dispersal of scents in social insects. Further such a system could perhaps be designed as a browser plugin, keeping data entirely off from the center of a system. For instance if I wanted to look at what is hot on my watchlist - all I need for instance is coloring entries on my watchlist with a factor  = yesterday's (or the last available) traffic / (average of the previous N days of traffic) [dealing of course with division by zero etc.] - that might guide me or prompt me to improve articles that I have an interest in. 

A super-organism - the term used for colonies of social insects - needs to have mechanisms for how its agents act as sensors, how those sensations are quantitatively expressed, how those quantitative expressions tip thresholds that drive actions or reaction.

Note: I have been bumbling with these ideas for a while and my knowledge of software development for implementing this particular idea has been rather limiting. I hope some talented software developer feels inspired to create something along these lines. I for one would be grateful for it! 

PS: WikiRage went defunct and there is now a site called WikiShark which gives trending pages globally (for the English Wikipedia) but there is still a role as mentioned above for what is trending in what one can contribute to - ie based on task specialization.

Ramblings on iron and steel

In the last few weeks I have stumbled on various little bits during Wikipedia edits that I thought were worthy of airing! One of them was a re-realization of the boon and the curse of iron and steel. It starts with something I heard a few years ago by economist Sashi Sivramkrishna and others who were following the trail of Buchanan Hamilton in Mysore (listen to the talk here) and they were apparently impressed by the impact of iron production particularly on the destruction of forests in southern India. And last week I found a Wikipedia entry that someone from Parangipettai had written as a draft and which had been left languishing. I went and ensured that it got moved from a draft version to a mainspace entry - it was on the Porto Novo Iron Works, one of the first large-scale iron smelting enterprises in India. The venture, started by a J.M. Heath, did not last long, one of the big factors being the lack of coal for smelting, and he had to make do with charcoal. In a few years, he ran out of charcoal, after depleting the forests of several districts nearby, and the factory had to move to the west coast near Calicut (Beypore). The first director general of forests Dietrich Brandis also noted the role of iron smelting in deforestation. 

Now to Josiah Heath, who is a real character and it is quite a surprise to see that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not even have an entry for him, and there appears to be no available photograph of him (at least online). Heath sent out skins of various animals to the Zoological Society of London and there is a species of bat named after him. More interestingly it seem the fishing cat was described based on a specimen that he sent from India - which it would appear from all likelihood to have come from the Parangipettai region - more likely Pichavaram (wonder if the species still exists there). He also collected a specimen of a Eurasian Griffon Vulture from the same region. Heath apparently was impressed by traditional ukku (better known as Wootz steel) steel-making near Salem where he was initially posted and he seems to have discovered an important factor which he patented. It involved the use of carbon and manganese and he made money initially by distributing packets of his mixture - and later made the mistake of giving its composition. The steel makers of Sheffield, England quickly started using his technique and decided not to pay him any royalty - and he died in poverty. Of course today we could ask whether he actually stole the idea from traditional Indian blacksmiths and whether it could have been patented at all in the first place or of the numerous other injustices involved in all of this. 

Herr Meves

In another Wikipedia-related iron-connection, I found a little-known ornithologist who now has a Wikipedia entry (Wilhelm Meves). Meves was a German pharmacist turned ornithologist - and he decided to treat the brown feathers of lammergeiers with hydrochloric acid and tested them for iron and found that the colour was largely due to iron oxide. He found that this coating was on the outer surface and that the inside of the feathers was largely iron free. He suggested that the birds were bathing in iron-rich waters. Meves worked in Stockholm and mostly wrote in German but some of his findings made their way into the Ibis in English - thanks to John Wolley. And it seems both T.C. Jerdon and A.O. Hume were careful readers of Meves' works. Jerdon was aware of the bleating sound of snipes being produced by air-flow induced vibrations of the outermost tail feather. And Hume even repeated Meves' chemical analysis on his lammergeier specimens from Shimla and confirmed the presence of iron. Hume however noted that neither he nor any of his "intelligent native sportsmen" had ever seen a lammergeier bathe in water and suggested that the red staining may be derived from the blood of dead animals. Hume's original text (emphasis mine):

In the Ibis for 1862, it is mentioned that Herr Meves had, by a simple chemical test, ascertained the red colouring in this bird’s feathers, as also the rustiness observable at times in the feathers of the common Crane, (Grus Cinerea) to be due to a superficial deposit of oxide of iron ; as also, that the colouring matter on the eggs, arose from the same cause. Herr Meves suggested, that the stain on the feathers might be owing to the birds bathing in water containing iron in solution; but my belief is, that the Lammergeyer is a very dirty bird, (it swarms with vermin to such a degree, that cats and the like will seldom touch it when dead,) and never washes! I have been watching this bird, off and on, for the last twenty years, and I have never yet seen it bathe ; nor have I ever yet met with any one, amongst the numerous intelligent native sportsmen whom I have had to do with in the Himalayahs, who has witnessed such an operation. Certainly iron does enter into the composition of the colouring matter of the feathers, (I have tested it myself) as also into the red colouring on Neophron’s and kite’s eggs, but my idea is, that in both cases the iron is derived from the blood, and not from any ferruginous streams. Many birds, notably the grey goose and the common teal, very often have the feathers of the lower parts strongly tinged with rusty, and here too an oxide of iron enters into the composition of the colouring matter. How it gets there, is a question well worthy of investigation.

Anyway, it seems that India's large iron-deposits have a habit of lying in regions rich in biodiversity and ethnic diversity often on ancient tribal lands. It is little wonder that the steel industry barons are involved in disempowering tribal peoples or paying governments to water down environmental laws. I was truly surprised by the amount of work from around the world on related topics.

• Goucher, C.L. (1981). Iron is iron ’til it is rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting. The Journal of African History. 22(2):179-189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019393 
• Siran Liu, Thilo Rehren, Dashu Qin, Jianli Chen, Wenli Zhou, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Xin Huang, Wei Qian (2019). Coal-fuelled crucible lead-silver smelting in 12th-13th century China: A technological innovation in the age of deforestation. Journal of Archaeological Science 104:75-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.01.004
• The impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on the landscape balance on Elba Island, Tuscan Archipelago, Italy - Fabian Becker, Raphael A. Eser, Philipp Hoelzmann, Brigitta Schütt (2019). The environmental impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on Elba Island, Italy – A geochemical soil survey of the Magazzini site. Journal of Geochemical Exploration 205 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2019.04.009
  
• Iles, L. (2016). The Role of Metallurgy in Transforming Global Forests.. J Archaeol Method Theory 23:1219–1241 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9266-7

Someday I ought to visit Parangipettai and Pichavaram!  

PS (June 2024): Apparently the idea of sustainable forestry is associated with a German term  Nachhaltigkeit - a concept introduced by a mine inspector named Hans Carl von Carlowitz who wrote a book called Sylvicultura oeconomica in 1713. It was based on fears that deforestation for agriculture would destroy the mining industry! And he was likely influenced by John Evelyn who wrote Sylva in 1662.

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.
  

A little-known naturalist from Chikkaballapur

Bangalore has historically, being an administrative centre with a mild climate, had a fair share of colonial natural history collectors and naturalists. We know a fair bit about the botanists who walked this region and a bit about hunters of larger game but rather little about those who studied insects. A few years ago I became aware of the Campbell brothers from Ireland (but of Scottish origin). It took some time to put together the Wikipedia entries on them which is where more straightforward biographical details may be found.

After a trip to the Nandi Hills [to examine a large number of heritage Eucalyptus trees (nearly 200 years old) that the Horticulture Department had decided to cut down to the stump, supposedly because falling branches were seen by the Archaeological Survey of India as a threat to heritage buildings nearby], some of us decided to visit Chikballapur to examine the place of work of  Dr Thomas Vincent Campbell (1863-16 December 1930) - "T.V." as he was known to his friends was a missionary doctor with the London Missionary Society and had worked briefly at Jammalamadugu where his older brother William Howard Campbell (20 September 1859 - 18 February 1910) had worked as a missionary. Another brother back in Derry, David Callender Campbell (1860-1926) was also a keen observer of moths and a botanist. In their younger days in Derry, they and their siblings had put together a "family" museum of natural history that was said to be among the best in the region! William was the oldest of nine siblings and appears to have been the sturdiest considering that he was a champion rugby player at Edinburgh University. He moved to Cuddapah in 1884 and he may well have been the first person to see Jerdon's courser in life - Jerdon, Hume, and others appear to have dealt only with specimens obtained from local hunters. William collected moths and many of them appear to have gone to Lord Rothschild and nearly 60 taxa were described on their basis by Hampson. In 1909, he was to become director United Theological College Bangalore but ill health (sprue) forced him to return to Europe and he died in 1910 in Italy. His Cuddapah-born son Sir David Callender Campbell (1891 – 1963) became a prominent Northern Ireland politician. William's life is covered in some detail by Alan Knox while examining the only known egg of Jerdon's courser. A biography (a bit hagiographic though) of William in Telugu also exists.

T.V.'s life on the other hand was hard to find information on, we knew of his insect specimens. He was in contact with E.A. Butler who specialized in the life histories of insects and T.V. seems to have taken off after him and not only colllected bugs (ie Hemiptera) but made notes on them which were used by Distant in the Fauna of British India. Several insects that T.V. collected have never been seen again. T.V. moved to Chikaballapur and worked at the Ralph Wardlaw Thompson Memorial Hospital which is now just known as the CSI Hospital and largely in disrepair. The hospital in its heyday was among the few in the region and treated a large number of patients. After suffering from tuberculosis, he also established a TB sanatorium at Madanapalli. Campbell treated nearly a thousand cases of cataract and was awarded a Kaisar-i-Hind medal for work in 1908. Campbell appears to have made a very large collection of insects from Cuddapah, Chikballapur, and from the Ooty area (where he would have spent summers). Many of these are now in the Natural History Museum in London and a good number are type specimens (ie, the specimens on the basis of which new species were described). Professor C.A. Viraktamath, entomologist and specialist on the leafhoppers, has for many years searched for a supposedly wingless Gunhilda noctua which was collected from the Nilgiris. Based on T.V.'s connections, I believe the place to look for them would be somewhere in the vicinity of the church in Ketti. Considering the massive alteration in habitats, there is a slight chance that the species has gone extinct but it is doubtful that it was so narrow in its distribution.

 

W.H. Campbell

 

Dr T.V. Campbell

T.V.'s former home in Chikaballapur

Dr TV attending to patients in Chikaballapur, c. 1912

A lane inside the hospital premises named after T.V.

Foundation stone of the hospital

The Wardlaw Thompson Hospital c. 1914

Gunhilda noctua - a monotypic genus never seen
since T.V. found them for W.L. Distant to describe in 1918
from The Fauna of British India. Rhynchota Vol.II

The Wikipedia entries can be found at T.V. Campbell and W.H. Campbell. Many people helped in the development of these articles. Roy Vickery kindly obtained a hard to find obituary of T.V., Alan Knox sent me some additional sources on W.H.C. and Susan Daniel, librarian at the United Theological College was extremely helpful. Arun Nandvar drove and S. Subramanya joined our little adventure in Chikaballapur. Dr Eric Lott made enquiries with the SOAS and LMS archives but found little. My entomologist friends and mentors, Prashanth Mohanraj and Yeshwanth H.M. shared their enthusiasm in discovering more about T.V. 

POSTSCRIPT - April 2022: S. Subramanya and I visited Jammalamadugu (and nearby places including Buchupalli where WHC had found a large pelicanry). It seems that the hospital that TVC began continues to prosper. It seems to have gained the favour of the political class thanks to the association of the former Chief Minister Dr Y S R Reddy who was not only born in the Campbell Hospital but worked there too. Apparently very little is known of the work of W.H. Campbell who seems to have largely been active as a missionary. The village of Buchupalli where he had described a large pelicanry seems to have no signs of any large water birds and absolutely no memory among its current day residents (who might be three or four generations down from those that lived in the 1890s).

The CSI Campbell Hospital

The entrance

Inscription below the statue with a gratuitous knighthood!

Dr TV holds a disarticulated stethoscope!

Ornithologists in cartoons

From: The Graphic. 25 April 1874.

It is said that the modern version of badminton evolved from a game played in Poona (some sources name the game itself as Poona). When I saw this picture from 1874 about five years ago, I gave little thought to it. Revisiting it after five years after some research on one of A.O. Hume's ornithological collaborators, I have a strong hunch that one of the people depicted in the picture is recognizable although it is not going to be easy to confirm this.

I recently created a Wikipedia entry for a British administrator who worked in the Bombay Presidency, G.W. Vidal, when I came across a genealogy website (whose maintainer unfortunately was uncontactable by email) with notes on his life that included a photograph in profile and a cartoon. The photograph was apparently taken by Vidal himself, a keen amateur photographer apart from being a snake and bird enthusiast. Like naturalists of that epoch, many of his specimens were shot, skinned or pickled and sent off to museums or specialists. He was an active collaborator of Hume and contributed a long note in Stray Feathers on the birds of Ratnagiri District, where he was a senior ICS official. He continued to contribute notes after the ornithological exit of Hume, to the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. This gives further support for an idea I have suggested before that a key stimulus for the formation of the BNHS was the end of Stray Feathers. Vidal's mother has the claim for being the first women novelist of Australia. Interestingly one of his daughters, Norah, married Major Robert Mitchell Betham (2 May 1864 – 14 March 1940), another keen amateur ornithologist born in Dapoli, who is well-known in Bangalore birding circles for being the first to note Lesser Floricans in the region. Now Vidal was involved in popularizing badminton in India, apparently creating some of the rules that allowed matches to be played. The man at the left in the sketch in the 1874 edition of The Graphic looks quite like Vidal, but who knows! What do you think?

PS: Vidal sent bird specimens to Hume, and at least two subspecies have been named from his specimens after him - Perdicula asiatica vidali and Todiramphus chloris vidali.

For more information on Vidal, do take a look at the Wikipedia entry. More information from readers is welcome as usual.

PS: 26-July-2020: It would appear that an old Fives court (Fives was something like squash played with the bare hand) near Sholapur was also of some ornithological interest [on lesser florican]:

I think I can safely say that there is only one place in India where this bird has been shot, and where I have shot it during every month in the year, and that is Sholapur. There was a grass and baubul jungle near the old Fives court on the Bijapur Road which always contained florican. - "Felix" (1906). Recollections of a Bison & Tiger Hunter. London:J.M. Dent & Co. p. 183.

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.

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.