Aurelians Fireside Companion

The Victorian era saw the arrival of the steam engine, the telephone and the first motorcar. It also saw the birth of that peculiar brand of curiosity that led thousands of ordinary people to examine and question ;the living details of their environment: to examine the plants, animals and insects - indeed, the wonders of nature that surrounded them. With the birth of natural history and this new and absorbing passion came the need to own a cabinet of specimens. It mattered not whether it contained fossils, beetles, shells or butterflies, for with a cabinet of specimens the collector possessed his own personal museum. And such was the passion for natural history that hardly a family home, vicarage or manor house existed without some sort of collection. At the same time, Saturdays were regularly booked by local natural history societies for field trips, and evening lantern lectures on a wide variety of natural history subjects packed village halls up and down the country.

The chosen butterfly hunters are an eclectic bunch. Among their ranks are numerous clergymen, high-ranking soldiers and medical men; most, however, were less exalted. Whatever their calling or mode of address, these butterfly hunters all seemed to speak with the same enthusiastic voice. The authors of this volume comment in their preface on coming 'to the immediate conclusion that these individuals spent much of their working day and doubtless most of their sleeping hours dreaming of the "delightful pastime". Indeed, some would clearly have sacrificed everything to spend most of each day roaming the countryside with net and killing bottle'.

Michael Salmon and Peter Edwards have attempted to capture some of this passion with their collection of over 200 articles, letters and notes gleaned from British entomological journals of the past 200 years. No attempt has been made to make this a scientific text. Instead, it is a celebration of the joys and frustrations experienced by collectors of butterflies and moths. It is an anthology that reflects the work of amateur collectors rather than that of the professional or museum entomologist whose discipline has been largely overtaken by cladistics, taxonomy and the politics of departmental management.

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS IS A VERY LARGE HEAVY VOLUME AT SOME 2 KILOS IN WEIGHT.

Author: Salmon,Edwards,Harmer, illustrated by Bernard
Publisher: Paphia Publishing 2005 FIRST EDITION
Extra Details: Hardback + Jacket 9 x 11 inches tall.428 Pages, Ilustrated with Colour photos and B&W artworks throughout.