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Archives of natural history 36 (1): 168â187. 2009 # The Society for the History of Natural History Book reviews GARFIELD, B. The Meinertzhagen mystery. The life and legend of a colossal fraud. Potomac Books, Dulles, Virginia: 2007. Pp 353; illustrated. Price US$ 17.95 (softback). ISBN 978-1-59797-160-7. Richard Meinertzhagen, the soldier, spy and ornithologist, has had a bad press in ornithology for 15 years. This book essentially rubbishes his work as a soldier and as a spy as well. The author has worked on the case for many years, starting, he says, from a position of hero-worship, and coming to the point where having been in such state now adds a certain scorn to his account. I found the case persuasive; but I found the book hard going. It jumps all over the place, and perhaps it had to do that, rather than follow a clear chronology since Meinertzhagen was in essence a man living four or more different lives. Garï¬eld has done what needed to be done; he has scoured both the ofï¬cial archives and Meinertzhagenâs own massive collection of diaries, which Garï¬eld ï¬nds to have been edited and re-edited long after the events they describe. This examination of the evidence parallels what many museum staff have to do when re-examining Meinertzhagenâs specimens. In doing this, Garï¬eld has found little or no supporting evidence for the stories that built Meinertzhagenâs reputation and much that actually contradicts them. Indeed Garï¬eld rips off the cloak to expose the fact that even within his own circles in the army and in the social circles in which he moved Meinertzhagen had been rumbled but protected. However, not only does Garï¬eld jump about, he is also tediously repetitive. Given the ´ extent to which this expose destroys the remains of Richard Meinertzhagenâs honour, it seems to me to be much to the credit of the family that it apparently gave such extensive support to the author. There is a job still to be done: to explain what goes on in the mind of such a man; perhaps one day a psychologist will help us to understand. ENDERSBY, J. Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London: 2008. Pp xii, 429; illustrated. Price US$ 35 (hardback). ISBN 9780-226-20791-9. Despite Joseph Hookerâs winning of the 1907 Linnaeus Medal as âthe most illustrious living exponent of botanical scienceâ, he is arguably the most famous ï¬gure in the history of nineteenth-century natural history who did not contribute a major new idea to the progress of knowledge. As a scientist, Hooker was an important practitioner of botanical descriptions and revisions, but only one person, Linnaeus himself, has ever gained universal fame strictly on the basis of taxonomic efforts, and Hookerâs signiï¬cant contributions came more in the direction of support for othersâ ideas (notably Darwinâs) and inï¬uencing the evolution of science as a profession than they did in theorizing. It is therefore not surprising to ï¬nd from a perusal of the bibliographic database OCLC WorldCat that of all the major nineteenth-century ï¬gures in natural history (that is, Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, Haeckel, von Humboldt, Mendel and Hooker), his writings, though originally great in number, have been reprinted the least by far since either 1950 or 1980. Further, in that same database, one ï¬nds that only six of Hookerâs monographs are currently held by as many as one hundred libraries â by comparison, Darwin scores 215, Huxley 69, Wallace 38 and Lyell 20, with even Haeckel, von Humboldt and Mendel making considerably more despite the fact that the database is dominated by institutional holdings from non-German-speaking locations. In turn, there are only a small handful of Hooker biographies. Despite his high position within the intellectual power structure, Hooker was actually a rather unextraordinary ï¬gure as an individual, and beset with his share of human frailties, including a âpeppery temperâ (as Endersby quotes Darwinâs description of him), an apparent indifference to societal scale sufferings, and a rather ï¬tful need to âbe in chargeâ. Even his travels, which brought him to places as far removed as the Kerguelan Islands,
Archives of Natural History – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Apr 1, 2009
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