An illustration of Edith’s pseudocopulation work by Blanche Ames
‘The closing paragraph has tickled many an erudite fancy,’ noted Ames. It is a tongue-in-cheek conclusion, worth repeating.
‘It may be that those who would reject the evolutionary approach to an understanding of life and who prefer to regard the world as the product of Special Creation will lean a little more lightly on human weakness when they discover moral turpitude among the insects. And it may be that entomologists, who see for insect societies parallels in human institutions, will become Freudian in their outlook when discussing the sexual vagaries revealed by symbiotic phenomena and introduce such terms as Lissopimplan behaviour or Ophrydean complex. Perhaps even the poet will have to reconsider whether “Only man is vile”.’
Edith is often credited with the discovery of pseudocopulation, and equally often discredited with a mere parallel discovery, pre-empted by those accounts of Pouyanne and Godfery. But this is not really how science works. Precedence is interesting, but it is the accumulation of knowledge – replication, verification, extension and clarification, not mere ‘discovery’ – that truly drives science. Edith replicated and extended Pouyanne’s work. She provided the empirical evidence: images and diagrams, data and dates. One oddly behaving insect in Algeria is an anomaly, but a pattern of behaviour consistent across multiple pairs of species, across continents, is a phenomenon worthy of investigation, of explanation, of a sub-discipline. It was Edith’s work that established the phenomenon of ‘pseudocopulation’ as a field of research that continues today all over the world.
On 2 October 1932, Rogers presented the Presidential Address to the Science Congress.
‘Perhaps I lingered longer over your discovery than on the other papers,’ he confessed to Edith later, ‘as it brought so prominently before the world one of the strangest and most weird devices in the history of pollination and has added a mass of confirmatory evidence, which must dissipate unbelief in the incredulous, unless their minds are incapable of assimilating scientific truths.’
The ‘gently tolerant’ expert had become one of Edith’s many admirers. In his letters he never failed to express that admiration.
‘I am delighted with your paper. It is very satisfactory to have these matters settled beyond possibility of doubt. You have now cleared up quite a number of pollination problems, and for this all orchidologists will thank you most heartily. For investigations of this kind, one might think leisure is necessary, but this you cannot have for you have many calls on your time.’
In September 1933, Rogers wrote that all of Edith’s papers displayed ‘good work and conscientious observation.’ He suggested that a book on the topic might suit the more ‘serious-minded’ of the public and would ‘prove a worthy supplement to Darwin’s classic study on the same subject’.
This was not the first comparison to Darwin that had been made.
‘Thanks for the reprint of another extraordinarily fascinating paper,’ wrote Rupp. ‘Your name ought to be Darwin.’
‘It is one of the most important scientific articles we have had,’ enthused Herbert B. Williamson, from the Herbarium at the University of Melbourne.
Even Godfery was convinced of Edith’s work.
‘I am pleased that you like my book, because you know so much about orchids and their habits and therefore your opinion is of special value.’
And finally, from Oakes Ames of Harvard.
‘Nothing I have done in reviewing the literature of pseudocopulation would take even a breath of wind out of your sails. So far as I am concerned you are to windward of me, and my little orchido-logical boat is becalmed by your magnificent biological canvas. I say this in all sincerity, because you have made a substantial contribution to the world’s store of knowledge.’
I have a sudden doubt about this windfall of eulogistic praise. Many of the letters come from Kate Baker’s manuscript biography. I don’t think she is quoting directly from the original letters.
There is a document in John Thomson’s archives, written in Edith’s hand, that neatly transcribes and annotates all of the quotes from letters that Baker uses in her biography. It seems that it was Edith herself who selected the material that Baker might use.
‘Mrs Coleman has, too, delightful letters from the late Lord Rothschild,’ relates Baker, ‘and from Lord Dunsany, from which she would not let me quote.’
Edith, it seems, curated her legacy carefully. I feel vaguely outmanoeuvred, but am left with nothing but admiration for the swift persuasive skill of her stratagem.
Edith’s writing exhibits none of the prevarication that characterised some of her colleagues’ writing on sexual matters.
‘Please do not think that I regard them seriously as insect-perverts,’ Edith wrote. ‘I think it is absurd in the extreme to apply to insects the rules that govern our own lives. In the majority of cases they act, I feel sure, mechanically.’
She was not prevented from describing what she saw by squeamishness or prudery or tradition. Observation trumps convention.
‘Until comparatively recently we were taught that animals differ from plants in their power of movement,’ Edith wrote. ‘We know now that plants do not lack this power when movement is useful to them.’
It is all about scale, both physical and temporal. Look under a microscope or speed up time and plants become incredibly active. But aside from ordinary growth, Edith argued that other movements ‘seem almost purposive, in view of the benefits secured by them’.
For Edith, plants are not passive recipients of environmental whims but active agents in their environment, opening and closing to suit particular pollinators, flinging their seeds afar, wilting at a touch, or pushing stones off a wall in their quest for growth.
‘One of the best forms of gardening, surely, is to know plants as living, moving, acting individuals, rather than patches of colour – to know what plants do, how they live, rather than their relationships.’
Edith always said she was a botanist – a taxonomist even. But she was much more than that. She was an ecologist. She was too aware of the interconnections between species, of their
