(^134) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
in Scotland but rapidly spread to England, the two earliest probably being
the Tyneside Field Club and the Cotteswold, in the Cotswolds, both founded
in 1846. Rather than assembling in the evening, at some regular venue,
such bodies met in the field, at locations which changed each month. Many
soon began to hold evening meetings as well, a mixture of activities which
appealed to a wide range of members: some, like the Cotteswold, also held
special ‘ladies meetings’ at locations where the terrain was considered to be
not too challenging.^115 Most took an interest in geology, archaeology and
local history, as well as in botany and zoology. By 1873 there were around
170 local scientific societies, of various kinds, in Britain as a whole, of which
104 described themselves as field clubs.^116 Popular enthusiasm in the middle
decades of the century was also reflected in the success of such books as
John’s Flowers of the Field and British Birds in their Haunts; Morris’s British
Birds; and Wood’s Common Objects of the Country, which sold 100,000
copies in a single week.^117
Bird-watching experienced particularly strong growth in part because of
the wider availability of telescopes, and the increasing use of nesting-boxes
and hides. Cheaper optical equipment also benefited the study of insects,
lichen, and fungi, for the price of microscopes fell fivefold in the course
of the 1830s. It should be noted, however, that the emphasis was still, and
perhaps increasingly, on collecting. From the 1840s, entomologists began
to use ‘treacle’, a variety of sugar-based mixtures, to attract insects, and
especially moths; from the 1860s, box-traps were widely employed. New
ways of killing insects, in a manner that both preserved them intact and
spared the feelings of the squeamish, were developed, with chloroform
giving way to Prussic acid, and finally from the 1850s to potassium cyanide.
The Wardian Case – an almost-sealed glass contained invented in 1831 by
Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward – allowed a range of plants, especially ferns, to
flourish even if left unwatered, or kept indoors.^118
As we have seen, people of all classes – contrary to what has sometimes
been suggested or implied – had probably always been interested in the
wildlife around them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these
relationships began to take new forms, in part because the social groups
involved were less directly involved with the natural world than their
predecessors had been, or their more rural neighbours continued to be.
Removed from any intimacy with agricultural production, they could now
regard nature not as threat and competitor, but as exclusively a source of
interest and wonder. Plants were seen as wild flowers rather than as weeds;
insects, birds and mammals were things to be observed in their own right,
not because they threatened crops and livestock. The natural world was to
be observed, but also categorized, and in a manner – using the standardized
Latin forms of the Linnaean system, rather than a plethora of conflicting
local and regional terms – which both facilitated comparison and discussion,
and at the same time marked out the naming group as distinct, not so much
from the working classes, as from the working agrarian population. Yet
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