Blossom Hosts and Insect Guests (Paperback)

Paperback. Five years after William Hamilton Gibson's death in 1896, his publishers gathered his magazine essays on flower fertilization into a single posthumous volume. The result, issued by Newson & Company in 1901, is the founding popular literature of pollination ecology in English. Gibson - illustrator for Harper's, Scribner's, and Century, and a friend of John Burroughs - was among the first Americans to translate the discoveries of Sprengel, Darwin, and Hermann Mueller into prose a general reader could follow into the field. Twenty-five wildflower portraits trace the choreography by which the heaths, bluets, figworts, milkweeds, irises, lilies, and orchids enlist bees, wasps, flies, and moths in their reproductive work. Gibson drew every figure himself. This Frontier Model Bibliophile facsimile reprint preserves the 1901 Newson edition without alteration; the apparatus added at front and back situates Gibson's text in the live conversation of late-Victorian botany and traces its forward influence into the modern academic literature on pollination. Blossom Hosts and Insect Guests is a popular natural-history exposition of how flowering plants are cross-pollinated by insects. It is organized around twenty-five concrete wildflower portraits - the barberry, the honeyed clover, the evening primrose, the bluets, the mountain laurel, the andromeda, the figwort, the wood-betony, the sage and horse-balm, the milkweed, the arum and skunk-cabbage, the iris, the blazing-star, the Canada lily, the dog-tooth violet, the showy orchid, the purple-fringed and ragged orchids, the great green orchis, the rattlesnake-plantain, the arethusa and pogonia, and the moccasin-flower - each treated as a case study in floral mechanism. Anchoring the case studies is an opening historical chapter that traces the discovery of cross-fertilization from Nehemiah Grew's 1682 announcement, through Linnaeus, Christian Konrad Sprengel, and Charles Darwin, into the popular American present of the 1890s. The book is generously illustrated with the author's own drawings: a frontispiece portrait, eleven full-page plates, decorative head- and tail-pieces for every chapter, and dozens of analytical figures dissecting the working parts of each flower. The illustrations are not ornaments. They are the argument. Gibson's drawings of stamen positions, pollen masses, anther rings, and the column structures of the orchids are doing the same explanatory work the modern field guide reserves for photographs and exploded diagrams. A tabular supplement at the back of the volume catalogues some two hundred and sixty additional flowers by family, common and botanical name, recorded insect visitors, and observed mechanism for limiting self-fertilization, extending the book's reach well past its twenty-five worked examples. The world the book came from was a confident, eclectic one. American natural-history publishing in the 1880s and 1890s ran as a kind of public conversation among magazine essayists, illustrators, and Sunday botanizers. Gibson, a regular contributor to Harper's Monthly, Scribner's, and Century, was one of its central figures. The pieces collected here were drawn from his magazine articles of the previous two decades, all originally copyrighted by Harper & Brothers between 1880 and 1897 and reassembled in book form by his editor Eleanor E. Davie after his death in 1896. Gibson's stance throughout is that of an enthusiast who has done the dissecting himself, the field walking himself, the drawing himself. He treats the European discovery tradition - Sprengel, Darwin, Hermann Mueller - as a relay he has been handed. The American contribution, in his telling, is to take that relay into the local woods and meadows of New England and the Hudson Valley and report back in prose intelligible to a reader who would never open a monograph. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…