THE NATURAL SCIENCES EMERGING in Europe and Britain during the nineteenth century took on a different trajectory to that in the colonies. Settlement and expansion of growing populations had brought massive disruptions and changes to ‘new’ environments. Whereas the old world had centuries of established farming practice and land utilisation to support human needs, the territories of the new world were experiencing a tsunami of change. With this came new problems and new pests, as well as freshly qualified individuals equipped to respond to these problems. They called themselves scientists, as opposed to natural philosophers (a term Darwin and many of his generation preferred). In response to a taunt by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (at a meeting of The British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833) that the term ‘natural philosopher’ needed to go, because philosophers advanced humanity through thoughts rather than actions, William Whewell (1794–1866) coined the phrase ‘scientist’ as an analogy with artist. Whewell was a polymath Cambridge scholar who excelled in both mathematics and poetry. He was also a wordsmith, generating the terms ‘physicist’, ‘linguistics’ and ‘astigmatism’, among others. Spawned from the humanities, the word and work of scientists has come to dominate our lives, whatever we choose to call its practitioners.

Following the American Civil War in the 1860s, agriculture expanded in North America on a huge scale. In 1869, there were just over two million farms in the United States. Forty years later, there were over 575 million farms, and land under cultivation had more than doubled to over 840 million acres. Most of this development was in the Midwest and West where millions of acres of tallgrass prairie land were brought under the plough – often with disastrous ecological consequences.

As agriculture grew in the post-reconstruction economy, productivity at first expanded. The virgin land was so productive that North America's farmers became victims of their own success as produce prices dropped. But land cannot be farmed without replenishing the soil, and poor soil produces poor crops, which in turn are more susceptible to attack from disease and insects. Monocultures (particularly cotton) expanded, and the insects preying on crops also increased in variety and number.

IN THE LILLIPUTIA N WORLD OF INSECTS, the seventeenth century was one of seismic change. They were no longer ignored or seen mainly as symbols for everything from industry to sinfulness; instead they had found their way into starring roles in contexts ranging from display cabinets in the drawing rooms of the wealthy, to learned books and paintings. Like so many of the places seen as newly discovered, insects had always been there; what had changed was the nature of human awareness and perception of them.

In territories across the globe they were still sources of food and medicine and featured in local narratives and art, but the great enterprise of collecting and organising the information being assembled by travellers and explorers was reducing much of that historical relationship to passing references or anecdotal information. The Linnaean system of naming flora and fauna was gaining traction among collectors, and the desire to own new and unidentified specimens was helping to fuel the expansion of private collections. However, it is one thing to start collecting beetles or shells (or indeed anything that catches the eye) but as anybody who has walked on a beach and collected a bag of shells knows, they don't have the same allure once removed from the shore, unless they are displayed or used for some purpose.

Collectors faced a number of problems, not the least of which was what to do with their collections after their death. Having spent years assembling unique collections of exotic material, often at great cost, the thought of everything being disbanded or (worse still) disposed of by disinterested heirs was not to be countenanced.

Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), one of the great collectors of his age, found a profitable and enduring solution by bequeathing his very substantial collection of 71 000 objects to King George II ‘for the nation’ on condition of a payment of £20 000 to his heirs.

Sloane was a medical doctor who had dedicated his book on the natural history of Jamaica to Queen Anne, describing the 11 000km2 island as ‘the largest and most considerable of Her Majesty's plantations in America.’ Implicit in this is a world in which monarchs owned entire countries, and an island was merely a plantation as opposed to a sovereign territory.