Life with Insects

In the British eighteenth century, as now, people obviously coexisted with insects. Their bodies were bitten and stung; their foodstuffs were infested; their household goods were invaded and infiltrated. It would have been impossible to ignore such pernicious insect action. At the same time, insects might have been observed in a more helpful capacity as pollinators in the fields or orchards (though I’ll say more about this later). Certainly, bees were perceived and appreciated for their contributions of wax and honey. Shimmering nonstinging insects like butterflies and dragonflies must have elicited aesthetic joy, as they still do today. To catalog the full range of human–insect interaction in eighteenth-century Britain would easily require another kind of book. Nonetheless, a few examples, some literary, others actual, stand out to remind us that, though insects are invisible with the rise of the realist novel, they must have been all too evident on a constant daily basis. These examples will lead us to an important question: during the eighteenth century, how could natural creatures like insects be both an omnipresent aspect of daily existence, one constantly seen and experienced, and yet be unworthy of representation in the stories humans tell about themselves?

One answer, as we’ll see later in this chapter, lies to some extent in one Enlightenment framework carried over from ancient times – the Great Chain of Being. As a rigorously vertical form of thinking, the Great Chain of Being rendered insects at a considerable distance away from and below human beings on a scale that afforded most importance to those creatures closest to the Creator. The Chain continued to have a considerable impact on philosophic and theological thinking well into the nineteenth century, if not beyond. To be sure, according to the logic of the Chain, insects could still be prized and appreciated as testimony to God’s munificence. Also, according to its logic, the Chain could assign responsibility to humans for insect well-being. Yet, as we’ll see here and in later chapters, vertical thinking prevented people from recognizing the kinds of cross-species dependencies that become apparent under horizontal thinking. Yet these entanglements furnish one bedrock of modern environmental thinking.

But before I provide a fuller exploration of these concepts through a focus on Henry Fielding’s response to ants, here are a few promised examples of human–insect interactions in the eighteenth century. Searching for historical evidence of such a relation, we are most inclined to discover it first in relation to ectoparasites, especially lice, fleas, and bedbugs – all insects that depend upon live, breathing human flesh for their survival. In other words, these are insects that demand human attention, and they cannot be ignored. Ectoparasites warranted considerable coverage at the time, as they still do in scholarly texts today.¹ Lice in particular were everywhere. In the last century, an archaeological dig at Coulter’s Garden, London, uncovered the fossilized remains of both pubic and crab lice.² The omnipresent louse was nicknamed a “little brown gentleman.” Infestation could have dire consequences: in one account, Elizabeth Ham, a lice-infected governess, was dismissed from her job and doused with sulfur.³ It is commonly known that heads were shaved and wigs worn as a means of keeping lice at bay. Even then, the creature permeated the wigs, as pomatum added to greasy wool as a means of attaining greater height only proved to encourage infestation.⁴

During the Enlightenment, lice and fleas were so much a factor of daily existence that they were elevated to the status of mock-heroic characters. Writing under the name Peter Pindar, satiric wit John Walcot begins by explaining the circumstances of his poem Lousiad: “It is necessary to inform thee, that His M---y actually discovered, some time ago, as he sat at table, a Louse on his plate. The emotion occasioned by the unexpected appearance of such a guest can be better imagined than described.”⁵ (Rumor has it that this actually happened.) As creatures to be encountered regardless of rank, lice provide Walcot with a useful imaginative entry into high society. In the end, though, his poem provides little evidence of ectoparasitic activity. Instead, it offers a comic skewering of literary conventions of the day (with special notice to The Rape of the Lock). Jonathan Swift also found the louse a useful poetic trope in his riddle poem “Louisa to Strephon,” in which (as Lynn Festa points out in her brilliant analysis of the poem) a woman functions as an anthropomorphized louse.⁶ Robert Burns enthusiasts will surely offer their poet’s own take in “To a Louse.” Observing a fine lady in church with a louse upon her bonnet, the poet takes his lesson from the “crowlin ferlie” [creeping wonder]: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” [O would some power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us!]⁷ Where Walcot and Swift find the louse useful as a means to inspect human characteristics, Burns appreciates its ability to deflate human pretension.

Not to be outdone, fleas received their own mock-heroic treatment in The Fleaiad by Paul Pindar (who addresses his kinsman Peter Pindar).⁸ Like Walcot, Paul Pindar uses fleas mostly as a satiric device to ridicule social affectation. But fleas can readily perform this role because of their mobility, or their ability to show up wherever living bodies occur. In other words (echoing Clapperton Mavhunga), they observe no boundaries. Further testimony to their ubiquity comes in the form of the actual eighteenth-century flea trap, described by the Whitby Museum in the UK as “something of a popular fashion accessory.” Worn on the body hanging down by a ribbon under a dress, it was a hollow cylindrical tube made of silk or ivory. Inside the tube, the wearer placed a small rod of fabric or fur smeared with blood, fat, and honey in the hopes of attracting and trapping fleas. (No further information on whether the contraption worked.)⁹

Let’s not overlook the fact that ectoparasites could also be dangerous: fleas famously transmitted the plague. Lice can carry bacteria, resulting in typhus fever.¹⁰ Bedbugs, though very rarely lethal, also disturbed many would-be sleepers, and the historical record of their widespread nuisance is easily accessed. Samuel Pepys, among many others, recorded his experience with a “lousy” bed in 1668.¹¹ The possibility of their elimination concerned early scientists like John Southall, who dedicated A Treatise of [Bed]Bugs: Shewing How They Were First Brought into England to Hans Sloane, then President of the Royal Society (1730).¹² Household manuals from the time also testify to the extraordinary actions taken to eliminate bedbug infestation. In one recipe provided by Elizabeth Smith, a mixture of rectified spirits of wine or “lamp spirits” [currently identified as ethanol, methanol, or isopropyl], turpentine, camphire [camphor] was to be applied to the bed, the “foldings,” the linings, and the bed curtains, as well as the bed joints and headboard. Two warnings: the mixture will emit an odor lasting two to three days, and the mixture is flammable, so do not use it by candlelight. If this doesn’t work, a second recipe recommends an ounce of quicksilver mixed with the whites of six eggs until “the globules of quicksilver are but just perceptible.” Disassemble the bed and apply the mixture, allowing it to dry. Repeat a second time if necessary.¹³ We could continue with other similarly alarming and noxious recommendations for dealing with bedbugs and other pests in the eighteenth century, but perhaps they signify less a disregard for safety and more the desperation caused by ectoparasites back then. It is easy to shake our heads at such ridiculous remedies until, of course, we acknowledge that we scarcely know how to deal with bedbugs today.

Moreover, in the unscreened and unsprayed world of the eighteenth century, the border between outside and inside space would have been quite open. It would have been very difficult to create the sort of indoor quietude, undisturbed by insect activity, that we commonly enjoy at home today. Having a human body meant constant exposure to a host of insect agitations. Throughout the home, Diptera – including several kinds of flies and mosquitoes – would have circulated freely. Sticky fly strips coated with honey might have attracted some flying insects; others could be kept at bay by covering foodstuffs. Still other insects, like wasps, proved more difficult to evade. Living in America shortly before the American Revolution, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote of his family’s experience with the wasp, an insect he came to respect for its food collection and the architecture of its nest. By leaving a small hole for wasps to enter his house at will, he found them harmless and even useful: “[T]hey live on the flies, which are very troublesome to us throughout the summer; they are constantly busy in catching them, even on the eyelids of my children …. By their assistance, I am but little troubled with flies. All my family are so accustomed to their strong buzzing, that no one takes any notice of them; and though they are fierce and vindictive, yet kindness and hospitality has made them useful and harmless.”¹⁴ In Crèvecoeur’s surprising remarks, we find evidence that insects could also be appreciated and integrated into a domestic setting. Rather than obliterating the wasps, he allows them to consort with his own children!

Crèvecoeur’s account from America also reminds us how colonial expansion introduced British society to new and even more challenging encounters with insects. To begin, scholars have previously paid much attention to the role of the mosquito in Caribbean colonial history.¹⁵ At the same time, James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar Cane (1764) catalogs the destructive potential of insects once monoculture was put into practice in the Caribbean islands.¹⁶ Ants had undoubtedly been an issue in English domestic life, but nothing prepared Henry Smeathman for the work of their relations – termites (also called “white-ants,” though they are of a different order) – in Africa.¹⁷ As we’ll see later, he eventually came to perceive that their astonishing nests might serve some larger purpose, but there is no doubt that his initial encounter with them raised alarm. Smeathman furnishes only one example of a “field collector” sent far beyond domestic shores to collect entomological specimens that then traveled a great distance. His work, among that of others, enabled the British possession of spectacular African butterflies. Yet not all insects were welcome to travel. The recent discovery of a mummified cockroach nicknamed Peri held between the pages of a ledger from an eighteenth-century slave-trading vessel suggests insects were often “stowaways” who managed to travel undetected to new lands.¹⁸ This may well have been the case with the gall midge, a ravenous insect that invaded wheatfields around New York City during the 1770s. Called the “Hessian fly” because it appeared at the same time as the German soldiers, the midge provoked considerable political turmoil, leading to a British ban on the export of North American wheat.¹⁹

This, then, is but a brief glimpse at the scene of the human–insect relationship in eighteenth-century Britain, albeit one that tips toward the more inopportune aspects. Here we recognize a largely still premodern landscape, where (as will be the subject of later chapters) human ingenuity slowly attempts to collect, study, catalog, and – especially in the case of agriculture – to control insects. But we also have to imagine a landscape where insects would have been noisy, persistent, and extraordinarily active. Insect intrusion into daily life would have been unavoidable. Humans lived with insects and insects lived with them: most likely, everyone tolerated insects to a degree that would no longer be accepted in most parts of the developed world.

Henry Fielding and the Ants

In Chapter 2, we’ll look more closely at how, despite their presence in everyday life, insects are absented from important realist works that are still enjoyed today, and we’ll take up the stakes of their absence. As we’ll see, such novels belong together for their exploration of human consciousness as well as stylistic features that aim to capture “reality” in their rendering of a recognizably material world – a world that might reasonably be expected to include insects. But Henry Fielding’s comic masterpiece Tom Jones (1749) is a different kind of fiction, one that is less concerned with individual consciousness. Instead, it adheres more closely to the ideas and conventions of neoclassical thinking, as scholars have long pointed out. These conventions mean that Fielding’s “nature” is not meant to be our nature at all. It is meant neither to capture the real immediacy of our complex material world nor to represent embodied animal existence, as novelists might do nowadays. In a statement that removed the burden of naturalist detail from art, Dr. Johnson’s character Imlac famously declared that the poet “does not number the streaks of the tulip.”²⁰ Instead, the artist should capture some essential – and universal – truth about the flower. For Fielding, this meant dedicating himself to the representation of an idealized human experience where humans mostly operate outside of nature, oblivious to certain realities of terrestrial life. For example, the various beds in which Tom will find himself, including that into which he falls with Mrs. Water in Chapter Five of Book Nine, are bug-free. Western’s rural estate, overrun with dogs and game, is untroubled by fleas. Bridget Allworthy never complains about flies, wasps, or ants. In some ways, readers are not surprised by this, as Fielding observes the neoclassical aesthetic that informs the novel: you can’t highlight the universal by focusing on tiny particulars. For Fielding to highlight insects would be a lot more egregious than noticing tulip streaks.

Yet one understanding of a kind of “nature” does appear in Tom Jones. Furthermore, the Fielding archive suggests that he did think about the “nature of nature” in general – and about insects in particular. To get access to the first, consider Fielding’s introduction to Mr. Allworthy in Book I, Chapter Four. From a bird’s-eye position above and beyond the estate, our genial narrator surveys the vast expanse of the patriarch’s lands, beginning with a plentiful spring, “gushing out of a rock covered with firs,” which becomes a cascade and eventually a pebbly channel that runs into a lake. A river then issues out of the lake that meanders until it empties into the sea. The view switches to the right of the valley, in which a village is situated. To the left lies Allworthy’s estate, a “very fine park, composed of unequal ground and agreeably varied with all the diversity that hills, lawn, wood, and water, laid out with admirable taste, but owing less to art than nature, could give.” Situated within the park, Allworthy’s house is “as commodious within as venerable without.” In this introduction, Fielding reserves the best for last:

Thus, Allworthy appears as the single most important element of a natural scene that already shows signs of his improving hand. Here, he is not only a terrestrial focal point but the object of solar recognition as well: there he stands in the brilliant sunlight, ready to do God’s work. Perfectly imperfect (he will, after all, fail to recognize Tom’s paternity until the end of the novel), he embodies all that a patriarch must strive to be. But what assures Allworthy’s terrestrial centrality? And, to the contrary, what might contradict not only his centrality but his apparent exceptionalism as well?

To answer such questions, first consider how Fielding refers obliquely to an older Horatian poetic tradition seen in the country house poem and elsewhere. This tradition had linked lord to land, human excellence to a view of cultivated nature.²² Fielding also expects us to recognize Allworthy as occupying his rightful place on the Great Chain of Being, a concept derived from Aristotle and Plato and other classical thinkers that took further shape during the Middle Ages. During the Enlightenment, neoclassical aesthetics further refined the Chain as a God-ordained, imagined hierarchy (sometimes an actual chain) of all living things, from God himself down to mute, insensate matter.²³ Man himself occupied a middle place on the Chain. During Fielding’s lifetime, the concept of the Chain was fleshed out by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man (1734):

Pope’s poetic rendering is both onto-theological and prescriptive. Everything has its place, and God’s purpose is best accomplished, he insists, when, regardless of ranking, one does one’s best to strive for excellence and to aim for perfection within one’s prescribed place. (So, for example, a woman should never strive to be a man but to be the best version of a woman possible.) Man’s ascendency over other terrestrial creatures was absolute, as Keith Thomas has decisively shown: while conceding that anthropocentrism was not peculiar to Western Europe, he provides innumerable examples of how Christian theology was deployed to assert human ascendency over animals.²⁵

However, though “ascendency” could entail stewardship (as we will see later), it was in considerable tension with the idea of what we now recognize as “kinship.” This naturally determined affiliation acknowledges alignment among creatures who unknowingly work side by side, oftentimes cooperating to a mutually beneficial end. For example, farmers and worms occupy very different places on the Chain of Being, but earthworms aerate and loosen soil, creating microbially rich soils without which farmers would struggle to grow food. In this way, their kinship becomes evident and mitigates the sense that the worms are somehow “unworthy.” In contrast, for an Enlightenment poet like Pope, worms – by virtue of their very lowly place on the Chain – can only be objects of disdain, as well as a useful trope for caustic derision. “All this dread Order break – for whom?” Pope snarls at his reader, “for thee?/ Vile worm! – oh Madness, Pride, Impiety!”²⁶

In An Essay on Man, Pope returns to the important features that isolate men from other creatures on the Chain and that announce their privileged relationship to God; once again, an insect furnishes the benchmark:

Even if the last, often-cited couplet acknowledges that flies do indeed have distinct and unique visual powers, Pope’s point is that it would be a mistake to envy that power or to desire it for oneself. After all, humans and flies are very, very different kinds of beings. God made them that way, and there is no obvious connection between them. An Essay on Man is not the only poem where Pope uses insects to check inappropriate human yearning and to set his readers back on the right course. In An Epistle to Burlington, for example, he uses the image of “puny insect, shiv’ring in the breeze” to convey how completely out of whack he finds the experience of being in the landscaped gardens at Timon’s Villa.²⁷ (And indeed, given his mobility issues, the poet may have been speaking from a personal experience of struggling with the unwelcoming proportions of the gardens.)

Though Pope gives bees and spiders favorable passing mention (the former for its collective activity, the latter for its art), one of his most effective, if coruscating, insults relies on insect imagery.²⁸ Here, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he attacks his literary nemesis, Lord Hervey:

Clearly, it is not enough to assign Lord Hervey the characteristic of a wasp. The very insect itself is heaped with distasteful characteristics – it stinks, buzzes, and annoys. Though its gilded wings may bedazzle, they also convey an ornamental decadence that, when applied to Lord Hervey, also intimates the poet’s homophobia.³⁰

In sum, reflected in Pope’s treatment of insects is an explanation for why Fielding would exclude insects from Allworthy’s estate. According to a scheme that had placed them, from the time of Aristotle, below shellfish, they were quite far down, compromised in design, and thus at a significant remove from human preoccupation. Again, in the poet’s words, “Beast, bird, fish, insect!”³¹ Or as Hugh Raffles states, “Aristotle’s insects (with the exception of the highly regarded bees) are as far from perfection as is possible for animal beings.”³² In Charles Bonnet’s influential Traité d’Insectologie (1745), insects were moved below snakes but above polyps – still a very long way away from higher life-forms. It is worth noting, too, that the Chain further assigned each subspecies its respective rank on the Chain – bees above flies, for instance, or ants above fleas. Later, as taxonomists invented new ways of sorting biological life, some of the older rankings from the Chain carried over, leaving insects in a decidedly inferior place. For Linnaeus, for example, insects were fifth in the kingdom of animals – above worms (vermes), but below fish (pisces). To be sure, even before modern taxonomy, rankings shifted, and the Aristotelian chain was never intended as a precise or comprehensive scientific tool, as those who have studied its relationship to later scientific schema have argued.

Nonetheless, throughout the Enlightenment, the Chain worked effectively to keep insects far below human ken – with a notable exception. That exception brings us back to my earlier question about possible challenges to a neoclassical view of nature. Throughout the eighteenth century, there were those inclined to linger a bit longer than the poet would have done among the ranks of lower creatures. Not exactly a “school” or even a movement, but rather an affiliation of similarly inclined natural theologists, the physico-theologists made it their goal to observe, study, and explore how all living things were part of God’s providential plan.³³ Such a philosophy moved the emphasis from passively reading the stuff of the material world as “signs” of divine providence to actively investigating natural phenomena to uncover their utility.³⁴ Insects in particular stood to gain from physico-theology, since its practitioners defended them against the charge that their degraded – if not sometimes downright disgusting – nature made them unworthy of study.³⁵ In the later words of William Kirby and William Spence, who are often credited with founding modern entomology,

Thus physico-theologists enjoyed the challenge of finding divine purpose everywhere, even among the lowliest of things. This means, according to Joanna Picciotto, that physico-theology “opened up possibilities for the recognition of nonhuman subjects.” Writing about the physico-theological project in the age of Milton, she further claims that it “trained its audience to approach reading the book of nature as an exercise in sympathetic identification.”³⁷ That is, while a strict adherence to the Chain may have impeded focus on the lower orders, physico-theologists were more inclined to discover importance and value on all levels of the Chain, especially when human characteristics seemed to appear. No doubt they could not help but see through anthropocentric eyes. Yet their willingness to look closely at a world of natural beings often brought them to recognize signs of terrestrial intent, design, and aptitude. While not negating a Christian theology that assured human uniqueness, their observations had the potential to suggest that planetary life might not have been organized to privilege humans uniquely: other creatures might also possess the inclination toward purposeful life. Other creatures might, in other words, occasionally find themselves in a planetary spotlight.

Like many of the physico-theologists, William Gould, author of An Account of English Ants (1747), was a clergyman. Henry Fielding – Gould’s cousin, as it turns out – not only read Gould’s account but apparently took a few years to think about it before publishing a satiric attack on it in The Convent Garden Journal in 1752. As Simon Schaffer reminds us, “debates about the contents of nature are simultaneously debates about the standing of rival representatives. Decisions about the natural world hinge on judgments of moral and social worth.”³⁸ In the case of Gould’s treatise and the response of his literary cousin, these judgments are evident. As we’ll see, in satirizing the work of his cousin, in rendering ridiculous and utterly absurd both the very idea and the content of this early myrmecological study, Fielding positions himself as a firm defender of all things exclusively human. He makes moral and social judgments in the process. These in turn owe a great deal to what his biographers call “a frame of cosmic and social order conceived in the then still compatible terms of Christian humanism and Newtonian science.”³⁹ But first, what exactly had Gould written? And what made Fielding so antsy about ants?

From the beginning, Gould’s enthusiasm for the humble insect is palpable, as his dedication declares the ant “exceedingly wise.”⁴⁰ He references Richard Steele, who, in two essays, in issues 157 and 158 of The Guardian in 1713, had previously written about ants. In a kind of experiment, Steele had spent some time observing an ant colony in a window box at his home. Noticing a pattern to their actions, he quickly deduced a kind of ant intelligence or cunning. For example, he decided that the ants must be bringing their corn (or grain) out to the surface only at night to protect it from the pigeons who were active during the day. Later, he reasoned that ants bite off the buds of their corn to keep it dry as it is stored below. He spends some time observing their strategies for avoiding rain. Finally, in an attempt to create an ant colony in a new place, he used powder and brimstone to blow up the old nest. (He counsels that mercury would work as well.) Despite this explosive action, throughout the two essays Steele conveys considerable respect for ant industriousness, especially for their persistence during adversity. He genders the ants as female, declaring them “lovers of peace” who work for their society. Steele closed his two-part study with the comment that “experiments may be easily made by any one that has patience enough. They do not require so great a patience as that of ants, but few people are capable of it.”⁴¹

Gould’s work considerably expands upon Steele’s experiment and gives the ant intense and extended scrutiny. He begins with a description of the parts of the ant, and their various types (hill, or “horse,” jet, red, common yellow, small black), claiming their differences can be observed even without a magnifying glass (p. 2). A description of their “architecture,” or their ingenious manner of building colonies, cells, and subterraneous channels, follows. Gould pauses to marvel at the great “celerity” (or swiftness) with which they work their unique body parts – their “double saw” (mandibles) and the “hooks” placed at their extremities (p. 16). Throughout, he is keen to observe a possible rationale for their building practices. For example, in case of extreme precipitation, lower cells retain the moisture “like so many little cisterns” while the ants inhabit the drier spaces above (p. 13). Chapter Three becomes more anthropocentric, as Gould finds ant solicitude for the young, as well as their protective efforts toward their queen, not only instructive for humans but also representative of divine wisdom: “[S]o exact are the wonders of Providence in nothing superfluous or deficient” (p. 30).

Middle chapters of Gould’s account discuss the laying of eggs and their transition to “vermicles” (larva) and then “nymphs” (pupa), as well as their final transformation into ants of both the winged and non-winged type (p. 40). Additional topics include the lifespan of ants and their labor. Ant “industry” is considered against the backdrop of those who had written on the topic before, including Horace, Pliny, Virgil, Swammerdam, and Steele. Like others, Gould finds a message in ant society: “A colony is now indeed a small but glorious example of public care” (p. 67). Yet he differs on the issue of whether ants store provisions for the winter, as other classical writers had claimed. This turns out to be an important question, since ants in their foresight, according to the Book of Proverbs, were meant to teach humans an important lesson: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise; which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, provideth her bread in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”⁴² To claim that no evidence exists for ant provisioning (except, Gould supposes, perhaps in a different climate from that of England – say, that of the East) is to contradict biblical authority based on a scientific perception – not exactly a good strategy for a clergyman (p. 84).

Where a modern biologist like Lynn Margulis might bemoan the human tendency to identify exclusively with animals that are “big like us” and to seek our own image only in them, Gould is quick to claim limited cross-species kinship with the minuscule. He maintains the purpose of black ants in particular deserves admiration and strongly intends to show “that man is not the only partaker of wisdom” (p. 86). The final chapter reflects upon “the final cause or use of ants.” Realistically admitting to what lies beyond human ken, Gould nonetheless assures his reader that “infinite wisdom has ordered nothing in vain, nor formed any circumstance without a proper use … in the wonderful curiosities of nature, if reason cannot unfold, yet it is sufficient to convince us that all have their purposes allotted them by the supreme architect” (p. 95).

Though An Account of English Ants belongs under the banner of physico-theology, it is also worth noting a few tendencies that, while not exactly leaving anthropocentrism behind, nonetheless suggest a tendency to engage with natural life on its own terms. To marvel at the intricacies of ant architecture, for example, or to puzzle over the social behavior of ant colonies, may begin as the search for useful lessons for the human, but it may also bespeak a willingness to afford natural life a rationale and purpose of its own. This willingness would eventually be recognized and valued by other scientists: the notable Harvard entomologist William Morton Wheeler, who coined the term “myrmecology” in the early twentieth century, cited Gould as a founding figure of the field. As Wheeler wrote in 1926, “Whether we know it or not, we are still following in the footsteps of the leading entomologists of the past.”⁴³ Quick to praise Gould’s accomplishments, Wheeler placed him in the company of René Ferchault de Réaumur, who he believed had “anticipated” many of Gould’s accomplishments in a manuscript entitled “The Natural History of Ants.” (Since that document remained untranslated and unpublished until Wheeler himself took up the task in the 1920s, Gould could not have read it.) Though Réaumur’s accomplishments admittedly exceeded that of Gould, nonetheless Wheeler assured Fielding’s clergyman cousin his place in the history of science.

To be sure, we have now learned to admire ants for capacities that Gould had only begun to perceive: today ants are studied for their eusociality; for their unique division of labor; for their communication; and their ability to solve complex problems. In the words of the experts, “they appraise their environment and communicate by chemical signals. They perform simple and repetitive tasks with efficiency. Individually they are no more intelligent than other insects, yet without orders from leadership (queen ants are simply brood mares), they form a self-regulating colony capable of constructing sophisticated tunnels and nests and solving comparatively complex problems.”⁴⁴ In other words, they possess a “swarm intelligence” – “a collective intelligence constructed out of a multitude of simple minds.”⁴⁵ This is something in particular that Gould, with a predisposition to recognize a monarchical social organization, would not have been able to recognize.

Still, Gould would today find himself in good company today among those similarly eager to investigate ant power. In an op-ed for the New York Times, for example, Farhad Manjoo has recently proposed that ants “are an example for humanity to emulate.” They are, he points out, “far more consequential to life on Earth than [humans] are.” Citing E. O. Wilson, he describes how “if people were to disappear, little about the world would change for the worse; if ants and other invertebrates did, nearly everything would suffer.” Ants are “among the most sophisticated and successful life-forms ever to crawl the earth.” In other words, modern science has come to reject an anthropocentric vision of human as the focal point of the solar universe in favor of a far more complicated ecological view. From this perspective, ants are “the true inventors of what we think of as quintessentially human endeavors” – they have been “farming” for at least sixty million years, have “domesticated” crops of fungus, and have maintained herds of aphids whom they then “milk.” They are (as Gould also surmised) “master architects” and “formidable warriors” who can engage in compromise as well as a kind of democracy.⁴⁶

In short, from a modern perspective, Gould’s myrmecological project was not only defensible but perspicacious. This, however, is clearly not what his cousin the novelist thought. To begin, it helps to put Fielding’s satire in the context of a larger discussion concerning his attitude to science more generally. Like others involved in the battle of the “ancients” against the “moderns,” Fielding tended to lean toward the former. Perhaps, as Bertrand Goldgar has argued, Fielding was not so much against science itself as against any project that redirected human effort away from an engagement with divinity. For Fielding, writes Goldgar, “speculating on the nature of the soul, prying into the secrets of nature to determine ultimate causes, providing naturalistic interpretations of scriptural passages – all these are the stuff of irreligious pride and seek to exceed the limits of human intellect.”⁴⁷ As Goldgar points out, this would scarcely have been an unusual position for the time.

Indeed, Fielding begins his satire with an epigram from Horace – “our folly would look into Heaven” – and he concludes with the assertion that “there are some subjects on which a wit and a blockhead, a man and an ant, will exert themselves with the like success.”⁴⁸ In other words, the impulse to uncover divine purpose in nature appears to have been, for Fielding, a misplaced activity. Fielding begins his satire, then, by mocking Gould and his accomplishments as “a gentleman, a scholar, and a master of arts, [who] is not yet famous in the republic of letters,” adding “this excellent work hath hitherto, I apprehend, been suffered to sleep among the rubbish of the times” (p. 236). The narrator concedes that ants “may possess many of our sciences which we never can discover, as we do their skill in architecture, from their effect,” and he mentions “the astonishing instances of sagacity, prudence, and art” exemplified in any economy (p. 237). Yet he quickly suggests we shouldn’t bother to investigate their activities, given that “those sciences among the ants, as indeed among us, do end in nothing, and produce no effect at all” (p. 237). In short, there is nothing important to be learned from ants, and looking more broadly to nature for meaningful human lessons is a total waste of time.

A bit later, Fielding’s satiric narrator exposes the falsity of the analogy that places insect behavior alongside that of the human, proposing instead that human behavior as it exists, if studied closely from an outside perspective, would itself reveal nothing: “I am apt to think, that if a superior being was to examine into the ways of man, with the same curiosity with which my author hath searched those of ants, he would not be able to make anything of this philosopher, nor to discover what he was about when he was employed in his lucubrations” (p. 237). This is, perhaps, the broadest swipe at Gould’s entomological work: what, after all, was he “about” in his “lucubrations,” or his overly pedantic writings? For all the illumination that Gould hopes to cast (the root of “lucubration” being “light”), he reveals nothing through his labors. Instead, he works in the dark, revealing nothing of significance in the end.

Furthermore, the satire calls out the mistaken impulse to pry “into the secrets of nature, and lying in wait as it were to peep into her dressing-room to view her naked, and before she is drest in any kind of form” (p. 237). In short, it would appear that nature deserves her “privacy,” and the very act of “peering” into her secrets betrays her. Humans are not meant to “see” into the world of nature. Aside from the obvious gendering of the natural world, the statement equates scientific scrutiny with voyeurism – in other words, perversion. To say that Fielding’s satire here runs contrary to modern epistemology would be an understatement. Yet what is really at stake here? What judgments can be said to underlie this way of thinking about a scientific approach to the natural world?

A partial answer reveals itself in the final part of the satire, where Fielding creates personified ant-philosophers gifted with speech, whom he claims to have encountered in a dream. These thinking ants cannot comprehend the cause “of a violent and sudden deluge” that has nearly wiped away their anthill. The narrator, however, quickly perceives the deluge as no other than a stream of piss from a nearby cow. One elevated ant philosopher – invoking Dr. Hook – absurdly claims to have observed “a compression of the earth into a prolate spheroid, so as thereby to squeeze out the waters of the abyss” (p. 239). Or, he queries, in a swipe at either astronomer Haley or perhaps at the astrologer John Partridge, whom Alexander Pope also mocked, might a comet be to blame? (p. 239). Where earlier parts of the satire appeared to take aim at physico-theology, the later part reduces experimental scientists to minuscule, insignificant creatures whose perceptions are distorted and whose entire point of view is clearly ridiculous. Pretentious scientists and speaking ants are dealt one final blow in a scathingly ironic comment: “Now by what can we hope to effect this so certainly, as by that investigation of nature, that search into the first causes of things, which, as it is the noblest and most useful of all studies, so is it the most fitly accommodated to the dignity of an ant, the noblest insect which this world ever saw” (p. 238).

In several ways, Fielding’s satire echoes Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, with its equally ludicrous scientific experiments and its equally risible scientific discourse. Like Swift, Fielding evinces a deep skepticism about scientific method, witnessed when one ant philosopher describes “some hydrostatic experiments, that water, though it hath not all the energetic powers of an animated insect, yet hath the power of motion” (p. 240). Further ant explanation of the scientific principle of water reveals not only the obvious (that it may be “divided into drops”) and the completely ridiculous (that united bodies of drops of water are male and female), but also a verbose account of the fact that “it rained” (p. 240). Like Swift’s Laputian scientists, Fielding’s ant-philosophers are clearly absurd, even more so in that, unlike human beings, insects are presumably without the ability to speak, to reason, or to make sense of their world. Their imagined sentience can only be captured in the narrator’s dream, which renders the entire idea of insect intelligence both slightly surreal and silly. Otherwise, the ants would be mute, insensate, lacking any interesting purpose or inclination. They would just be pesky bugs.

Returning once more to Mr. Allworthy’s introduction, we can see once again why the sun shines its laser beam on him and not on the myriad of other creatures populating his estate: if indeed humans are uniquely privileged with brain power far eclipsing that of all other terrestrial creatures, if they are indeed the supreme masters of a voiceless and insentient material world, then it makes sense for Allworthy (as well as his nephew protagonist, of course) to be singled out. Furthermore, if speech is a gift that God affords to humans only, then it is foolish to listen for messages in nature. The power of articulation lies uniquely with human beings, and physico-theologists go astray when they commit themselves to seeking other forms of communication in the natural world.

However, returning to this satire with a modern awareness of everything ants in fact do accomplish for the planet, we come to another possibility – namely that an anthropocentric focus like that in Fielding’s satire impedes other ways of comprehending terrestrial beings, and it in fact militates against other ways of exploring telluric intelligence. In the twenty-first century, biosemiotics in particular takes exception to the idea that only the human “articulates” in a meaningful way or that human speech alone is worth investigating. Biosemioticians like Wendy Wheeler have argued that we need to recognize human articulation as a part of a much wider sphere of planetary articulation. Or, “human language is a small semiotic subset of the biosemiosis that constitutes the whole biosphere.”⁴⁹ Wheeler draws her conclusion from a line of modern philosophers including Charles Sanders Peirce, Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and others – but she also looks backward to the Medieval scholasticism of writers like Duns Scotus. In other words, she finds ancient roots for a modern philosophy that only now resurfaces to consider planetary existence as a series of nested and interconnected, voluble life-forms. Wheeler further explains that “biosemiotics is also a biology of becoming, learning and growth. It observes that this is the condition of all living organisms, from single cells to complex multicellular life-forms. All are made of, and live within, an ontology of sign relations: body and mind without division. All have a sense of aboutness, of a being and a getting about in the world, a feeling for life, and something like mind.” She adds, “And mind does not require a brain.”⁵⁰ The cornerstone of her observation is the understanding that nature is “self-organizing; self-reproducing; a transformer of thermodynamic energy; systemic and cybernetic; semiotic.”⁵¹

But what does all this mean for ants, Henry Fielding, and his cousin William Gould? Does it even make sense to place Fielding’s satire in relation to twenty-first-century thinking in general – and to entomological knowledge in particular? I believe it does. First of all, it does much to recontextualize Gould and the related work of other physico-theologists, despite their evident anthropomorphism. After all, they might indeed be said to have recognized the fact that (citing Wheeler) “All [creatures] have a sense of aboutness, of a being and a getting about in the world, a feeling for life, and something like mind.” Moreover, Wheeler’s investigation suggests that early modern natural philosophy provided “paths not taken.” Her survey allows us to see that Fielding’s decisive turn away from work like Gould’s physico-theology resulted from following one path at the expense of another. Indeed, Fielding’s satire is written with such a keen sense of the issues, with such careful attention to the structure of scientific thinking, and such knowledge of the observations of early entomology in particular, that it seems fair to say that he knew what he was doing when he decisively chose to attack this body of knowledge five years after its publication. Reading Fielding’s satire against Wheeler’s account, we see that, when Fielding turns away from physico-theology, indeed when he goes further in demolishing work like Gould’s, he has a very specific agenda in mind. Excoriating its very premise that natural life might have intelligence and purpose, he participates in what Wheeler calls “the story of semiotic disenchantment.”⁵² Whereas among certain medieval thinkers it had been possible to find an “understanding of all nature (including humans) as material and immaterial beings understood as meaningfully joined together by immaterial sign-relations,” writes Wheeler, emergent Protestantism focused “on original sin, and on all of nature as fallen, obscure, and unreliable as a source of knowledge following Adam’s fatal defection.”⁵³ Furthermore, “the idea that all of living nature, including humans, might be made of semiosis would henceforth lie more or less unregarded for more than 300 years.”⁵⁴ Thus Fielding’s small satire, embedded as it was within a Protestant tradition, was designed to do significant cultural work – namely to promote one value-laden account of the human condition at the expense of another. Yet it is the latter that has resurfaced in environmental thinking today.

The presence of Gould’s text and Fielding’s response to it remind us that much was at stake in early entomology: the question of whether ants have significance may strike us as quaint or even silly now, but it was an inquiry that resonated during the Enlightenment and it preoccupied novelists like Fielding. Where should the light of anyone’s lucubrations be properly focused? Does celestial light shine on the human alone? What if it also shines on ants? What follows from placing Man at the center of planetary existence? And what is lost in the moment when other earthly creatures, small and seemingly inconsequential, are denied their importance? How might several centuries of western European history have unfolded differently in a world where a (mostly) forgotten clergyman scientist had not been mocked and derided?

Fielding wrote nothing further on insects, though he did produce another satiric piece on science: “Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R---L Society Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, GOLDEN-FOOT or GUINEAS: and Insect or Vegetable resembling the POLYPUS.”⁵⁵ The living creature in question is not, of course, an insect at all, and the satire is once again an attack on the workings of the Royal Society. But clearly the very idea of certain strains of naturalist thinking continued to irk Fielding. Writing the preface to A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon not long before his death, he put Pliny at the head of a group of writers who “ly [sic] for lying sake.” In what amounts to a screed (and one that is, indeed, very hard to parse) he elaborates how certain writers – unlike Homer – tell falsehoods

Given that Fielding had two editions of Pliny in his library, the caustic statement surprises.⁵⁷ Certainly some of what Pliny said had been proven blatantly untrue and might seem, to someone religiously inclined, to run contrary to “the visible order of creation.”⁵⁸ Yet it seems a bit extreme to align the conveyance of such misinformation with “weakness as wickedness” and to suggest that Pliny is an extremely untrustworthy writer. Moreover, as one commentator remarks, Pliny’s influence “has changed in accordance with the shifting cultural emphases of successive ages.” While, with exception, scholars in natural science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to focus on Pliny’s mistakes, today his Historia Naturalis has largely regained its place, especially as a “tour de force” of collection, cataloging, and arranging. Its universal system has been said to foreshadow the great classificatory systems of the eighteenth century and to have ushered in the age of the museum.⁵⁹

According to Aude Doody, Pliny saw “nature as a body of discrete facts, all knowable and related, but divisible and countable. The narrative of his historia is structured to preserve this tension between the object’s correct place in the order of the world, and its availability as a discrete marvel in its own right.”⁶⁰ For modern writers like Doody, Pliny deserves recognition for his attention to the depth and intricacy of terrestrial life. Moreover, in a scientific lineage that leads us to figures like E. O. Wilson, Pliny is forefather both to Réaumur and to Gould himself. And all of these figures dedicated significant attention to insects. Thus, for Fielding to call Pliny out as a “liar” is to reject that attention and focus and to dismiss his project as inconsequential. It is, once again, to take umbrage with the idea that, though humans may be central to planetary life, terrestrial complexity, even when it comes in the form of an ant, articulates itself to those willing to learn from its tutelage. This is why, for Fielding, Pliny is among those who “assert facts contrary to the honour of God, to the visible order of creation, to the known laws of nature, to the histories of former ages, and to the experience of our own.” Writing at the end of his life, Fielding makes his position on insects clear. His sun remains focused where he believed it should. Ants don’t warrant the sunbeam.