This is the second year that I am teaching my module on the history of animals in colonial Asia. For this year’s class, I thought that it would be fun to see what local resources there might be in Leeds on the topic, and so my students and I took a trip to the Leeds…
Category: Insects
Exploding Mosquito Larvae and Jumping Lab Rats
I’m often tempted, when researching the history of science, to focus on experiments that seem, today, to have been odd or unusual. This is not a helpful approach. It can belittle the scientific understandings of the past and reinforce the simplistic story that ideas inexorably improve over time. Despite this, recently I found myself giving…
Getting the Wasp into the Cyanide Jar
In his address to the Bombay Natural History Society in 1893, Colonel Charles Thomas Bingham regaled the audience with stories from his recent trip along the Myawaddy Road that ran between British Burma and Siam collecting rare specimens of bird, butterfly and wasp. Using cliched imagery, he wrote of the region’s “unbroken forests” where “no…
Colonizing Animals 