1. ‘The coming of peace reminded many people of the oldest and most enduring of simple pleasures, the countryside. For the benefit of the countrysiders, so long cut off by barbed wire and defence regulations from their haunts, the list was extended, though for some years it had already been noted for works devoted to natural history, horticulture and ornithology. Now, a very distinguished venture in this field was launched in the form of The New Naturalist Series.
This ambitious collection had gone through the chrysalis stage of planning during a grim period of the war. It was first discussed in 1942 by W.A.R. Collins, Julian Huxley the biologist, James Fisher the ornithologist, and a director of Adprint Ltd. The project they discussed was the present chairman’s own. For a long time he had pondered a new series of illustrated nature books which would be not merely a popular addition to the literature of natural history, but a series of definitive texts judged by the strictest scientific standards. It was therefore resolved to conduct a complete new survey of Britain’s natural history with at least fifty titles, each written by a specialist and all edited by a committee of four – James Fisher, Julian Huxley, John Gilmour the botanist and Dudley Stamp the geologist; Eric Hosking was to be photographic editor.’
From The House of Collins (1952). Fanfare: 1945 and after.
2. The co-option of ‘a botanist and a geologist’ to the editorial board took place in early 1943. The following letter from William Collins to Julian Huxley and James Fisher sets out the responsibilities of the editors and the relatively generous terms they were offered. This could be said to be the letter that launched 100 books!
‘6th January 1943
Dear Professor Huxley and Mr Fisher,
Messrs Wm Collins Sons & Co Ltd, and Messrs Adprint Ltd have jointly decided to ask you, together with a botanist and a geologist, to prepare a survey on Natural History Books on the lines discussed at several meetings.
It is understood that you will give in this survey a very detailed synopsis of the text of every book, even indicating the individual chapters, and that you will also provisionally specify between 32 and 48 pictures per book.
We further understand that you will give us by the end of February 1943 an interim report covering ten of such books which we in our mutual judgement consider the most suitable for launching a series of such variety and extent.
A fee of £1,000, covering all expenses of the four editors in the preparation of these reports has been agreed upon, and the four editors have consented to allow their names to appear in the books of this series in view of the preparatory work, even if any of them is unable to supervise the production of the books in detail.
It was also agreed that, during the preparation of, or after the approval of the report[,] the editors would make themselves responsible for finding authors to undertake the writing of the books in the series at an inclusive royalty for author and editor of:-
6% up to 5,000 copies
71/2% from 5,000 to 10,000
9% thereafter
In the event of any of the editors being unable to continue on the board, the remainder will make themselves responsible for finding an alternative editor of similar standing.
Yours faithfully
[W.A.R. Collins]
Director
Wm. Collins Sons & Co Ltd.’
3. As the above letter makes clear, the editors were originally charged with pairing ten titles and authors. The shortlist would almost certainly have included the first four titles of the series, Butterflies, British Game, London’s Natural History and Britain’s Structure and Scenery. Judging from Collins’ circular from 1946, the others were probably Insect Natural History, Wild Flowers, Mushrooms and Toadstools, Natural History in the Highlands and Islands, The Sea Shore, and either Climate and the British Scene or the never-published Fish. Other titles in preparation by 1946 were Mountains and Moorland, Fishing and Angling (Eric Taverner), A Country Parish and Moths. Each title went on sale for 16 shillings.
4. A lengthy correspondence between Collins & Sons Ltd and Adprint survives in a contemporary box-file. Adprint expressed the wish to retire from the New Naturalist series in 1950, since it was ‘no longer an economic proposition’ for them. An ambiguity over original colour slides had soured relations: Adprint maintained that Collins was under contract to pay £10 for each slide selected by the editorial board, whilst William Collins claimed he was bound to pay only for those actually used. The end of the Collins-Adprint partnership was one reason why books published after 1950 had fewer colour plates; the other was increased production costs. One of the losses was the beautiful maps and diagrams prepared for the books from the author’s sketches by Adprint.
5. A detailed portrait of E.B. Ford and his scientific career by Judith Hooper, an American journalist, was published in 2002 as Of Moths and Men: An evolutionary tale by Fourth Estate, London. In her vivid portrayal of Ford and his Oxford contemporaries, the author was helped by three New Naturalist authors, R.J. Berry, Michael Majerus and Dame Miriam Rothschild. The personalities, rivalries and closet politics behind the science is well-dissected and as readable as a novel. Her underlying thesis that the Oxford evolutionists were a bunch of eccentric amateur naturalists masquerading as world scientists and cooking their results is based on numerous misunderstandings. For a corrective account of Ford and Kettlewell’s work on melanism, see Michael Majerus’s Moths, especially chapter 9.
I asked Michael Majerus to comment on the criticisms of E.B. Ford and Bernard Kettlewell’s work on the Peppered Moth in Judith Hooper’s book. This is his reply.
by Michael Majerus
The rise and fall of the melanic Peppered Moth is one of the most famous examples of Darwinian evolution in action. The black form, carbonaria, first recorded in Manchester in 1848, increased rapidly in industrial areas, becoming the predominant form in just fifty years. It remained at high frequencies in areas affected by industrial pollution until after the Clean Air Acts in the 1950s. Since then, carbonaria has been declining. J.W. Tutt first proposed an explanation of the rise of carbonaria in 1896. He postulated that on trees denuded of lichens by sulphur dioxide and blackened by soot, birds found the black moths harder to find than the pale ones, so more black moths survived to reproduce. In unpolluted regions, where the pale form had the better camouflage, it remained predominant. In the 1950s, Bernard Kettlewell, under the mentorship of E.B. Ford, tested and confined this hypothesis with his classical bird predation and mark-release-recapture experiments, in both polluted and unpolluted woodlands.
Over the next 40 years, other workers studied the finer facets of the case: observing the precise behaviour of the moth, making and testing computer-model predictions of the decline in the frequencies of forms, and refining Kettlewell’s experiments. These studies have added elements to the story, such as the pergeneration dispersal-distance of the moths. Or changed minor details of the story, like the fact that the Peppered Moth rests on lateral branches and twigs in the canopy more commonly than on tree trunks. But the story of the melanic moth remained the example par excellence of Darwinian evolution in action. However, in the last few years the Peppered Moth’s reputation, and with it that of Kettlewell, Ford and others who have worked on the case, have become unfairly tarnished.
In my New Naturalist book Moths, I defended melanism in the Peppered Moth as an example of evolution in action. However, in the same year, Judith Hooper published her book Of Moths and Men, where she attacks Tutt’s hypothesis, undermines Kettlewell’s work on the moth with veiled accusations of bullying by Ford and fraud by Kettlewell, and assassinates the characters of both these two scientists, and British naturalists generally. As a British naturalist, I am grateful to Peter Marren for the opportunity to defend myself, Ford, Kettlewell and other British naturalists.
So, what of Hooper’s book? On the characters of Ford and Kettlewell I have nothing to say. I knew neither of them, so cannot comment on their personalities, although I have long respected the focus, drive and innovation of Ford’s work in the field of ecological genetics, and Kettlewell’s knowledge and abilities as a Lepidopterist and naturalist. Rather, I will comment briefly on the factual accuracy of Hooper’s book, on the accusations of fraud and say a word in defence of British naturalists, new or otherwise.
Hooper’s book is strewn with factual errors, and she demonstrates repeatedly that she understands little of evolution, and even less about the moth that is her subject. Let us take the very first sentence of chapter 1. It reads, “To begin at the beginning, the Lepidoptera are divided into two orders: butterflies (Rhopalocera) and moths (Heterocera)”. But they are not. Moths and butterflies all belong to a single order, the Lepidoptera, with the butterflies comprising a small group of superfamilies within the order. So, fact one is wrong, as are many of the other ‘facts’ in Hooper’s book. But Hooper’s book does not deal only in fact.
Much of Of Moths and Men is conjecture, opinion or interpretation. Let’s consider one of the suggestions of data-fudging. Hooper makes large of the fact that Kettlewell increased the number of marked moths he released during his experiments. She ties the consequent increase in recapture rates to a letter from Ford to Kettlewell dated 1st July, in which Ford wrote: “It is disappointing that the recoveries are not better…However, I do not doubt that the results will be very worthwhile…”. Hooper translates this passage as: “Now I do hope you will get hold of yourself and deliver up some decent numbers”. Yet, if you read the data, it is clear that Kettlewell’s recapture rate increased on the morning of 1st July, as a result of increased releases on 30th June, and that could not possibly have been in response to Ford’s letter. Perhaps Hooper, when she read Kettlewell’s table of results, failed to understand that day follows dawn, and night follows dusk, so moths recaptured on a particular date are not the result of moths released on that date.
Finally, what of Hooper’s opinion of British naturalists, who are described on the flysheet as “eccentric”? In her first chapter, Hooper assassinates the character of ‘moth men’, who, she says, have the “stunted social skills of the more monomaniacal computer hackers, going about with misbuttoned shirts and uncombed hair, spouting taxonomic Latin”. She cites Ted Sargeant, one of Kettlewell’s strongest critics, who considers moth collectors to be weirder than butterfly collectors. According to Hooper, Sargeant is awed by moth enthusiasts who “can go up to a streetlight and start naming these things ..... It’s an extraordinary talent”. But it isn’t extraordinary. Countless children across the world can recognize hundreds of different Pokemon characters, and provide details of their characteristics, their evolutionary potential and their powers in contest. How is this different to a 12-year-old who can recognize several hundred species of moth, knows when they fly, and what their larvae feed on? Calling out names to a group around a moth trap, the names I use are in English, not Latin, for I learnt them, out of interest and fascination, when I was a child, and the English names were easier.
As a child, I learnt much about moths and butterflies, their behaviour, ecology, hereditary patterns and evolution from Ford’s two New Naturalists books, Butterflies and Moths. I was flattered when HarperCollins asked me to write a new book for the series on Moths, but I knew that our knowledge and understanding had advanced sufficiently in the forty-plus years since Ford’s Moths to make the project worthwhile.
Biology advances unevenly. A novel insight, or new technique, can lead to a great leap forward in understanding, followed by smaller advances as hypotheses are examined and refined, added to or amended, and empirical evidence is gathered in support. The additions and amendments to detail do not invalidate previous work: they simply improve it. Thus, while Albert Einstein’s view of the universe was more correct than Sir Isaac Newton’s, we still revere the former, as we do Einstein, despite the refinements to his ideas made by Stephen Hawking. This is as it should be. No doubt our current understanding of the processes of biological evolution will be amended and added to in the future. But this does not mean that our current perceptions are wholly wrong; they are just, as yet, incomplete.
Similarly, increased understanding of the natural history of the Peppered Moth since the 1950s does not refute Kettlewell’s work, it validates it. One or two details have changed, but the tale is still largely the same. The rise and fall of the melanic Peppered Moth still stands as one of the best examples of Darwinian evolution in action.
6. Contemporary reviews of Butterflies:
‘I have read nearly every book published about British butterflies from 1720 onwards, and I declare without hesitation that Dr Ford’s brilliant treatise at once steps into the position of an indispensable and classic work’ – Compton MacKenzie.
‘[The colour plates] are almost beyond praise for beauty and accuracy’ – Arthur Tansley.
At least one elderly entomologist was less impressed. ‘…Having twice looked over and tried to read the vol. – I had to give it up. It is to me a mixy-maxy-queer hochpoch. It jumps over all ‘obstacles’ and keeps one turning over the pages to see where you are at – ? – It leads to nowhere –…You have been ‘Had’ – It is a catch penny for the younger generation and at 16/-?? no Sir.
– Alexander M. Stewart. Letter to a young friend, quoted in Butterflies of Scotland (1980) by George Thomson.
7. An internal minute preserved among the early New Naturalist papers reveals that ‘the original idea was to have 6 or 8 good selling monographs’. The Fulmar, The Wren and Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos were referred to as ‘super-monographs’ because of their larger size. It was calculated that Collins would need to sell five to six thousand copies of The Fulmar before it went into profit.
8. The series came closer to ending in 1984 than I had realised when writing The New Naturalists. Both Michael Walter, who returned as natural-history editor for a few years after the death of Billy Collins in 1977, and Adrian House, who deputised for Collins at New Naturalist meetings, were convinced by falling sales that the New Naturalists had had their day. An internal minute by Adrian House dated 27 September 1984 and marked ‘strictly confidential’ addressed the future of the series. ‘The series is the foundation stone of our serious Natural History publishing,’ he wrote. In its early years, the books won prestige and exceptional sales because of their quality both of the contents and of their production (‘especially the jackets and colour plates’). The reputation of the series remained high, but sales had plummeted while costs, in the inflationary Seventies, had soared. The colour plates had been thrown overboard to reduce costs ‘and furthermore the original design has come to look distinctly dated’. Other causes for falling sales were competition, ‘the general hard-back recession’, increased specialisation of the natural sciences and lack of funds for promotion.
Another ‘possible factor’ was the Editorial Board whose average age was now 68: ‘No member has the distinction of Julian Huxley, the gift for communication of James Fisher, or the pictorial energy of the young Eric Hosking’. Some of the recent and forward titles ‘may be too specialised’. And whereas in the past authors could write on small advances, relying on royalties from healthy sales to follow, that consideration no longer applied. ‘It is unlikely that the most articulate, distinguished, energetic, promising or ambitious authors will devote time to writing for the series’. Finally, diminishing sales produced diminishing expectations. And titles were not receiving as much individual attention as in the past.
‘The inherited policy was to retain the series for its prestige,’ House went on, ‘but to soft pedal its activities (sic) as being of doubtful commercial success.’ ‘We now think we should only continue it if we can produce books which are both commercially sound and important to learning.’ Future books should have either popular potential ‘with an allowance for promotion expenditure and deserving full-blooded selling’. Or ‘specialist value’ ‘economically produced as trade paperbacks’. Titles which are too specialist to be commercial or too long overdue ‘should be dropped from the programme’.
An alternative course of action would be to close down the series altogether. This ‘would not necessarily be ignoble, as it would be equivalent of dropping in 1960 a series which had originated in 1920’. However, ‘the principal argument against (it) is that it might give the impression that we had lost our fundamental concern with Natural History publishing’.
This last consideration seems to have been the clincher. The future titles were neither more nor less specialised than before, but House may have underestimated the conservatism of book-buyers, as well as the distaste among the literate for ‘dumbing down’. After a series wobble in the mid-eighties the series carried on much as before, that is, with an elderly Board, little or no promotion, and derisory levels of advance. Perhaps we new naturalists are a peculiarly stubborn breed.
9. The refinding of Aspicilia
by Oliver Gilbert
This essay was one of twelve ‘interludes’ intended to follow each chapter in NN Lichens, to lighten the text and give a better sense of the experience of lichen-hunting. Sadly, the editors rejected them. See what you think. Here we go:
‘Setting off into low cloud and driving rain to search for a remote lochan that may, or may not, contain a rare lichen, is not much incentive when the alternative is to hog the fire in one of Scotland’s best hotels. However, the weather front that was to bring these conditions was still 3 hours away so we headed up the stalkers’ path into the hills. Soon we were fording streams and tussling with peat hags as the short, well-drained, turf of the Durness limestone gave way to Cambrian quartzite bog. The day’s objective was to refind Aspicilia melanospis, the first and only British record of which had been made by Peter James and Dougal Swinscow in 1958. I knew the name of the tiny lochan where it had been found, but the grid reference was for an adjacent square and there was reputedly limestone in the catchment, which was not the case with the lochan that was our goal. A phone call to London requesting more information had been met with an answer phone message. It might have been prudent to delay setting out, but for sometime this ‘lost lichen’ had been shining like a lamp in my mind drawing me northwards.
Eventually we breasted a rise and in front of us lay a pool of brown peaty water. It was still in the grip of winter and, surrounded by snow patches, it looked like a thousand other water bodies in the Highlands – hardly worth a second glance. The only stones projecting from the water were at the outflow. I knelt to examine these, and each was completely covered with a thick crust of the Aspicilia. This beautiful, silvery-grey species is to strongly lobate that it has recently been transferred to a new genus Lobothallia. As I triumphantly raised my face from near water level it was hit by a blast of icy rain, the sky grew dark, and I realised my world had been reduced to a few feet by thick cloud. Waves started to break over the rocks; it was as if the Gods of the mountain were angry that their secret had been discovered. The next twenty minutes were desperate as, in the gathering storm, I wrote notes with frozen fingers, back turned to the wind, and hopelessly tried to observe lichens through five layers of water, one on the specimen, others on both sides of my handlens and spectacles. The Aspicilia was growing in a semi-inundated zone with Dermatocarpon luridum. Local eutrophication was indicated by the presence of Physcia caesia, though whether this was associated with red deer, sheep or birds was not clear.
A cursory inspection of the rest of the lochan, and others in the vicinity, failed to find any more of the lichen but by now white horses were breaking on the shore and conditions were becoming impossible. The objective achieved, we started the return journey, but far from being at peace, my mind was active with a question that would not go away “What had drawn that pair to such a remote and seemingly unpromising spot 37 years ago?” I was determined to find out.’