(^132) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
and leading to the death of fish and invertebrates. Two plants have caused
particularly serious problems. Giant hogweed, a native of Central Asia, was
planted as a curiosity in early nineteenth-century gardens and was being
recorded in the wild at a number of locations by the 1880s. Himalayan
balsam – ‘policemen’s helmet’ – a tall annual herb with distinctive pink-
purple flowers was introduced around 1830 and was first recorded in
the wild in 1855, lining rivers in the West Country. Both plants are now
widespread throughout England, their seeds carried by water, and often
form great thickets beside rivers and streams which suppress the growth of
other plants.
nature studied and collected
In the first half of the eighteenth century interest in natural history increased
among both the landowning elite and the expanding middle class, albeit
focused on the collection, as much as on the study, of the natural world.^103
A steady stream of books and pamphlets catered for this market, such as the
24 published by Richard Bradley alone between 1714 and 1730. The period
was, however, one in which studying nature was an activity carried out by
people on their own, rather than as members of a group or organisation,
and in which there was no agreement over systems of taxonomy – on how,
precisely, the natural world should be ordered and classified.^104 This changed
with the adoption, from the 1750s, of the simple binomial classificatory
system developed by the Swedish scientist Linnaeus, which was lauded by
Sir William Watson in an article in the Gentlemen’s Magazine for 1754, and
adopted by Benjamin Stillingfleet in his Tracts of 1759.^105 This development
seems to have coincided with – and perhaps stimulated – a further increase
of interest in natural history which was reflected in the establishment of the
Society for Promoting Natural History in 1782 and of the Linnean Society
in 1788, the year before the publication of Gilbert White’s seminal work on
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne.^106
These developments formed the foundations upon which a wider
enthusiasm for natural history emerged in the early nineteenth century. The
study of nature was considered an appropriately improving form of leisure
for the growing ranks of manufacturers, merchants and professionals:
several leading naturalists of the age, such as Dawson Turner, Edward
Forster and William Brand, were bankers.^107 The falling cost of books as
printing processes were modernized led to a veritable rash of publications,
many of them guides to identification. Volumes on insects and birds were
especially popular, the latter reflecting the wider interest in matters avian, for
game shooting easily shaded off into the dispatch of rare or unusual birds
which could be stuffed and displayed. Periodicals devoted to the subject
also flourished, most notably John Claudius Loudon’s Magazine of Natural
History, established in 1828.
elle
(Elle)
#1