Angels and Insects Read Free Page A

with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man.
    The journals had changed when he began collecting. He had taken to long walks in the countryside—the part of Yorkshire where he lived consisted of foul black places amongst fields and rough land of great beauty—and he had at first walked in a state of religious anxiety, combined with a reverence for Wordsworth’s poetry, looking for signs of Divine Love and order in the meanest flowers that blew, in bubbling brooks and changing cloud formations. And then he had begun to take a collecting-box, bring things home, press them, categorise them, with the aid of Loudon’s
Encyclopaedia of Plants
. He discovered the Crucifers, the Umbellifers, the Labiates, the Rosaceae, the Leguminosae, the Compositae, and with them the furious variety of forms which turned out to mask, to enhance the underlying and rigorous order of branching families, changing with site and climate. He wrote for a time in his journal of the wonders of divine Design, and his self-examination gave way insensibly to the recording of petals observed, leaf forms noted, marshes, hedges and tangled banks. His journal was for the first time alive with a purposeful happiness. He began also to collect insects, and was amazed to discover how many hundreds of species of beetle existed in a few square miles of rough moorland. He haunted the slaughterhouse, making notes on where the blowflies preferred to lay their eggs, how the maggots moved and chewed, the swarming, the pullulation, a mass of mess moved by an ordering principle. The world looked different, and larger, and brighter, not water-colour washes of green and blue and grey, but a dazzling pattern of fine lines and dizzying pinpoints, jet-black, striped and spotted crimson, iridescent emerald, sloppy caramel, slime-silver.
    And then he discovered his ruling passion, the social insects. He peered into the regular cells of beehives, he observed trails of ants passing messages to each other with fine feelers, working together to shift butterfly-wings and slivers of strawberry-flesh. He stood like a stupid giant and saw incomprehensible, purposefully intelligent beings building and destroying in cracks of his own paving stones. Here was the clue to the world. His journal became the journal of an ant-watcher. This was in 1847, when he was twenty-two. In that year, in the Mechanics’ Institute at Rotherham, he met a fellow amateur entomologist who showed him the reports of Henry Walter Bates in the
Zoologist
, on Coleoptera and other matters. He wrote to Bates, including some of his own observations about ant societies, and received a kind reply, encouraging his work, and adding that Bates himself ‘with my friend and co-worker in the field, Alfred Wallace’ was planning an expedition to the Amazons in search of undiscovered creatures. William had already read Humboldt and W. H. Edwards’ highly coloured account of the wild luxuriance, the frolicking and joyous coatis, agoutis and sloths, the gaudy trogons, motmots, woodpeckers, chiming thrushes, parrots, manakins and butterflies ‘the bigness of a hand and of the richest metallic blue’. There were millions of miles of unexplored forest—it could lose in its brilliant virgin depths another English entomologist beside Wallace and Bates. There would be new species of ants, to be named perhaps adamsonii, there would be space for a butcher’s son to achieve greatness.
    The journals began to intermingle a rapt, visionary note with detailed practical sums for outfitting, for specimen boxes, with names of ships, with useful addresses. William set out in 1849, one year later than Wallace and Bates, and returned in 1859. Bates had given him the address of his agent, Samuel Stevens, who had handled and sold the specimens