The Worst of Girault

Though most researchers have accepted the legitimacy of A. A. Girault's private publications, there are at least two taxa described therein that will almost certainly never see formal use.

The conflict between Girault and his then-manager Johann Illingworth (Illingworth was yet another person accused by Girault of placing economic considerations ahead of pure research and of crushing Girault's attempts to do otherwise) lead to Girault's 'publication' of the taxon Shillingsworthia shillingsworthi. Girault's description of this unusual micro-wasp¹ reads:

SHILLINGSWORTHIA
Like Polynema but petiole, head, abdomen, mandibles absent. S. shillingsworthi, blank, vacant, inaneness perfect. Nulliebiety remarkable, visible only from certain points of view. Shadowless. An airy species whose flight cannot be followed except by the winged mind. From a naked chasm on Jupiter, August 5th, 1919.

This so thin genus is consecrated to Doctor Johann Francis Illingworth, in these days remarkable for his selfless devotion to entomology, not only sacrificing all of the comforts of life, but as well his health and reputation to the uncompromising search for truth and for love of "those filmy people of the air." Honour him!

More sinister than the description of fictional insects was Girault's naming of a new species of human - "New or Business Woman"². Sadly, the 'proper role' of women was a prominent topic in many of Girault's later publications (one of its more unusual incarnations was the reference to Elizabeth I as the "madman Queen"^{3, 4}). This was Girault's formal description of Homo perniciosus:

Abnormal female (loveless, without offspring); heart functionless; mammae aborted; psychology novel (as supposed) but artificial; gay, high-coloured, feral, brass-cheeked, shape lovely like Woman but nature hard (selfless, thoughtless, proud, unsympathetic, irresponsible, aggressive, irritant, insensible, luxurious, pugnacious, over-active, inquisitive, mischievous, voracious and even carnivorous; antagonistic, ungentle, immodest, critical, competitive, poisonous); conduct unstable (even inclined to treachery), the lips compressed, body strong. Everywhere but rare in natural habitat.
From young adults, these commonest, 1923, Australia.

¹Some insects never before seen by Mankind. 1920.
²Homo perniciosus and new Hymenoptera. 1924.
³Some Insecta and a new All Highness. (Notes compiled in fear and sorrow). 1928.
⁴Description of a case of lunacy in Homo and of new six-legged articulates. 1929.

REFERENCES

Alexandre Girault: A Man Against the World

Alexandre Girault at age 20, as he appeared in Gordh et al. (1979).

Having recently discussed the availability of privately published taxonomic works, it is appropriate that I recently received a copy of Gordh et al.'s (1979) reprinting of the privately published pamphlets of Alexandre Arsene Girault. A. A. Girault (1884-1941) is one of entomology's most controversial figures, an incredibly prolific worker possessed of a character that could charitably be described as difficult, uncharitably as barking mad. Girault named more than 3000 taxa over the course of his career (possibly more than any other taxonomist*), often under extremely difficult circumstances. As well as his monographic publications through more traditional venues, about 1000 of these taxa were published in privately produced pamphlets between 1917 and 1937.

*Update: Gunnar has reminded me in the comments of an even more prolific taxonomist, the crane-fly researcher Charles P. Alexander who published more than 11000 taxa. That represents a little less than one new species for every day of his working life.

Born and raised in Maryland in the United States, Girault worked for the U. S. Department of Agriculture from 1904-1911 until a request from the Queensland government for a capable entomologist sent him to Australia with glowing recommendations. Girault worked on pests in sugar plantations until 1914 when he decided to return to the States and focus entirely on purely taxonomic entomology. However, he was frustrated in that design and returned to Australia in 1917. After his return, his employment was irregular, including extended periods of unemployment and periods when he held day jobs as shopkeeper or quarry worker. His behaviour on a personal level became increasingly difficult and he was eventually admitted to a mental asylum in 1939 suffering from paraphrenia two years before his death.

Girault was obsessed with the importance of pure research for its own sake without recourse to low economic considerations ("The fear was, these things would no longer be studied was it thought they helped man's agriculture no more than the sunshine does. But who can doubt its greater use when love is the inspiration; man's soul is helped so"¹). In between the basic taxonomic descriptions, his privately published papers are littered with poetry and commentaries on this subject including numerous invections against those of his colleagues whom Girault felt had betrayed this ideal ("Are we coming to be a nation of lilliputs, the socalled entomologists reduced to farmer's clercks and others accordingly? Is there a scientist here who dares to speak out what he sees or ought or who can e'en think freely, without his thought be limited by mandate to some "problem"? Find him" ¹). Some of these inserts can be a little jarring, to say the least; one list of synonymies reads, "Hemiptarsenoideus is Hemiptarsenus. Baocharis marlatti is Aphelinus subapterus. Liberty is Soul. Rhopalicus americanus is Spintherus pulchripennis"¹. They are also often disproportionately vituperative; a particularly bitter paragraph, complaining of "An outrage, I should think, robbing the poet as Tarquineus raped Lucrece; worse insulting the heavens"², was written in response to an editor publishing a paper of Girault's as "New chalcid parasites from Malaya" when Girault had intended it to be called "New chalcid-flies from Malaya".


Girault in 1924 with his wife Elizabeth and three of their children. Elizabeth Girault (whom Girault described as a "faithful friend and true-hearted wife"⁴) became seriously ill with tuberculosis in 1923 and remained so until her death in 1931. His wife's health and the strain of raising five children on his irregular income added to Girault's difficulties. Photo from here.

It was primarily Girault's insistence on including these discourses that required him to publish privately. His acerbic nature lead a number of editors to make blanket refusals to handle any of his manuscripts. However, it is also true that research without direct economic application was not viewed favourably in a country passing through the fiscally straitened aftermath of the Great War. While he was working for the Queensland Department of Agriculture in the early 1930s, successive directors attempted to curtail his taxonomic work, presumably because the time he was devoting to it was intefering with his work on economic entomology. Also, economic restrictions after 1915 meant that Girault was no longer able to publish extensive manuscripts in the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum as he had done previously.

Setting aside their eccentric presentation, the descriptions of new taxa themselves vary in their usefulness. Some are dreadful, others were (at least by the standards of their time) very good. Often more problematic for succeeding researchers has been the exceedingly poor condition of many of Girault's type specimens. With no access to supplies other than what he could beg from more fortunate associates, Girault resorted to measures such as mounting multiple specimens under fragments of coverslip on a single slide. He also often mounted body parts such as heads on a separate slide from the remainder of the specimen. Girault also expressed disdain for such niceties as labelling ("We do not desire specimens any more per se. It is the label we want now"¹), orthography ("A crooked line, a blot causes no worry; they are bodies, not souls"¹) and detailed descriptions ("Longer descriptions are not needed, are even confusing"⁴).

The legitimacy of Girault's private publications for nomenclatural purposes was long disputed but over time a consensus has developed that they are acceptable (even if only because the usage of names from those publications by later authors has made it potentially more problematic to dismiss them than accept them). If there is one object lesson to be derived from Girault's failings, it is the value of type specimens. While there is no denying that the sheer volume of Girault's publications has represented a significant hurdle for later researchers, the continued availability of Girault's types (mostly in the Queensland Museum) has allowed progress where it would have otherwise been impossible. For instance, of the hundreds of Giraultian taxa referred to by Bouček (1988), only one was regarded as completely unidentifiable. For many others, the currently available information is inadequate but may be enough that further investigation has a reasonable chance of resolving matters.

¹Descriptiones hymenopterorum chalcidoidicarum variorum cum observationibus. V. 1917.
²New animals of Australia and old men of the earth. 1921.
³Some gem-like or marvellous inhabitants of the woodlands heretofore unknown and by most never seen nor dreamt of. 1925.
⁴New pests from Australia, VIII. 1930.

REFERENCES (Girault's publications in the footnotes above)

Bouček, Z. 1988. Australasian Chalcidoidea (Hymenoptera): A biosystematic revision of genera of fourteen families, with a reclassification of species. CAB International: Wallingford (UK).

Gordh, G., A. S. Menke, E. C. Dahms & J. C. Hall. 1979. The privately printed papers of A. A. Girault. Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute 28: 1-400 (including biography of Girault by E. C. Dahms).

The Parrot of King Charles I

Yesterday, I asked people to identify this:



This specimen was originally illustrated in Frank Buckland's 1875 Log-book of a Fisherman and Zoologist. According to Buckland's account, he was presented with it by his servant while stationed at Windsor as an army surgeon, and told that the specimen had been found behind a chimney of the castle by some construction workers. One of the palace servants had then identified the skeleton as belonging to a favourite parrot of King Charles I.

Buckland confessed that, for a brief moment, the overall appearance of the specimen had him taken in. But it didn't take long for him to recognise it for what it was - the skeleton of a rabbit, cut in half with most of the thoracic skeleton removed, the neck and top part of the spine attached directly to the pelvis, and arranged in a position reminiscent of a bird. The construction workers and palace servants were themselves a complete fabrication. "King Charles I's parrot" became a favourite addition to Buckland's own collection.

Buckland himself was something of a character, a trait inherited from his equally eccentric father William Buckland (known as describer of one of the first known non-avian dinosaurs, Megalosaurus, and for his determination to eat a representative of every species of the animal kingdom). For more Bucklandery, you could start at his Wikipedia entry, while the Log-book is freely available from the Internet Archive at the link above.

Maison Verreaux - Animal Specimens of All Varieties

Jules Verreaux. Photo from here.

Last week, I mentioned that I was attempting to research details of the lives of the 19th Century naturalists Jules and Édouard Verreaux, and indicated that I would share what I had been able to find. This is that post. I warn you, it's going to be a trifle incoherent. I'm no Brian Switek, and the problem is that despite the significant presence of Maison Verreaux in mid-1800s European zoology, none of the Verreauxs (Verreauxes?) seem to have left much in the way of personal accounts of their activities. As a result, one is forced to try and cobble together details from secondary sources and other writer's allusions, and when one does find more than one description of a certain event, the descriptions often conflict. (There are also a few significant references that I don't have access to.)

Jules Pierre* (born 1807), Jean-Baptiste Édouard (1810) and Joseph Alexis (the youngest) were the three sons of Pierre Jacques Verreaux, the founder in 1800 (or shortly afterwards) of the firm Maison E. Verreaux in Paris. Their mother Joséphine was the sister of Pierre Antoine Delalande, another well-known French naturalist. Maison Verreaux was a commercial taxidermy and natural history firm, bringing in specimens from all other the world and reselling them to interested parties, including a number of museums (the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle seems to have been a big customer). In 1818, at the age of eleven, Jules accompanied his uncle Delalande to South Africa, and was there until 1820. He was to return to the Cape in 1825, after his uncle's death, and became a curator of the South African Museum in 1829.

*Not even his name is unequivocable - a couple of sources give it as "Pierre Jules".

In 1828, Jules Verreaux was sued for marriage by the family of Elisabeth Greef, a young woman who had borne an illegitimate child to Jules earlier that year (McKenzie, 2005). Jules had previously proposed marriage to Elisabeth, only to revoke the proposal later. Jules defended himself in the court with the claims that he was ignorant of having made such a proposal due to his not speaking Dutch, that he was a minor and so not empowered to make such a proposal without parental consent, and that it was all Elisabeth's fault anyway for being a slut (he even went to the extent of engineering for Elisabeth to mistakenly embrace a old boyfriend of hers while being watched by hidden witnesses). The court was not impressed by Jules' "artful, malicious and diabolical" behaviour - his claim of ignorance was obviously an outright lie, and Elisabeth was no more improprietous than any other young woman of the time. Unfortunately, Jules' minor status was an impassable legal hurdle, and the marriage suit had to be turned down. The judge did suggest to Elisabeth that she renew the suit once Jules reached his majority, but this never happened - as McKenzie (2005) suggests, perhaps the emotional trauma of being publicly scrutinised for slatternry was more than Elisabeth was willing to put herself through again.


The controversial "El Negro" while still on display in Spain in 2000. The exaggerated blackness of the skin was due to its being overly blackened with boot polish (chemicals such as arsenic probably used in preparing the mount would have bleached his skin). Widespread protest lead to the BaTswana man's repatriation and proper burial in Botswana shortly after this photo was taken. Photo from Univiersity of Botswana History Department, via South Pacific Taxidermy.

In 1829 or 1830, Édouard joined his brother in the Cape, taking custody of a large collection of South African specimens collected by Jules and returning with them to Paris in 1830 or 1831. One of these specimens, though it attracted relatively little attention at the time, was to become the subject of much controversy in the 1990s - the stuffed body of a young BaTswana man. See Parsons (2002) and Molina (2002) for the history of "El Negre", as this figure became known. Jules claimed in a letter to Georges Cuvier to have stolen the body from a graveyard the night after its burial, at no small risk to himself from its guards (though to be honest, I can't help wondering if he had jazzed up the story a little in order to increase the apparent value of the specimen - if so, the pitch failed. Cuvier didn't buy the body). The collection of human remains was not entirely uncommon at the time - the specimens from Delalande's earlier expedition to the Cape included nearly two dozen skeletons and a number of skulls, while the remains of Tasmanian aborigines were to be among material later collected by Jules in Australia. Only a few years earlier, in 1816, Cuvier himself had conducted his dissection of Sara Baartman, who had been patronisingly eroticised as the "Hottentot Venus" (despite not being a Hottentot). While Maison Verreaux never handled a huge number of human specimens (the unfortunate BaTswana notwithstanding), this was probably a matter of commercial interests rather than due to any ethical considerations (Molina, 2002).

During the period of 1832-1838, things get confusing (which is annoying, because this is one of the periods I most need to find out about). What is certain is that Édouard returned to the Cape in 1832 in the company of the youngest brother, Alexis, who was to remain in South Africa until his death in 1868 (Gunn & Codd, 1981). Édouard then took ship to east Asia in 1832 or 1833. In Jules' 1874 obituary in the Ibis, it states that Jules also travelled to east Asia, and implies that the two brothers both remained there until 1837. However, other sources (Stresemann, 1975; Gunn & Codd, 1981) state that Édouard returned to Paris in 1833 or 1834 to take over the running of Maison Verreaux's home office. Meanwhile, Stresemann (1975) implies and Dubow (2006) states that Jules remained as curator of the South African Museum until 1838! I have little idea how to decide between these accounts*, but it is certain that Jules returned to Paris in 1837 or 1838 and became established at Maison Verreaux. Also certain is that the wreck of the ship "Lucullus" in 1838 resulted in the destruction of a large number of specimens collected by Jules Verreaux on their way back to Paris from abroad (despite one source referring to Jules himself only narrowly surviving the wreck, in this regard at least I am inclined to trust the obituary, which states that Jules had returned on a separate ship from his specimens).

*Normally, I would trust the obituary as having been written closer to the time, but the obituary has a slipshod composition and 'boy's own story' tone that, to be honest, undermines its credibility for me. In cases where it disagrees with other sources, it also tends to form the minority.


Jules Verreaux's "Arab Courier attacked by Lions". This mount remains on display at the Carnegie Institute. Photo, again, from here.

For the next few years, Jules remained in Paris, but in 1842 (we're back on firmer dates now) he travelled to Australia with the backing of the Muséum national, where he was to remain until 1847. No detailed account of Jules' movements in Australia exists, but he seems to have mostly travelled in New South Wales and Tasmania. He may have also travelled to New Zealand about this time. After his return to Paris, he concentrated most of his attention on bird specimens, though continuing to handle a number of other taxa. His taxidermic diorama 'Arab Courier attacked by Lions', featuring a man mounted on a camel being (as the label said) attacked by two lions (the lions and the camel were all stuffed specimens; the man in this case was a mannequin*) was highly awarded in 1867 (dioramas were a great source of public entertainment before the invention of film). Offhand, the lions featured in the diorama were the Barbary subspecies, Panthera leo leo, which was to become extinct not long afterwards.

*Molina (2002) implies that it could have originally been a real human and later replaced by a mannequin, but other than the previous case of the BaTswana there seems little reason to entertain this suggestion.

Édouard Verreaux died in 1868. Jules Verreaux fled Paris at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, and was received enthusiastically in England by the young ornithologist Richard Bowdler Sharpe. He remained in England until his death in 1873.

While Jules Verreaux was highly praised by his associates during his lifetime, the affair with Elisabeth Greef was symptomatic of a certain, shall we say, economical attitude to the truth. This attitude has, unfortunately, clouded Jules Verreaux's legacy in zoology. Maison Verreaux specimens became notorious for poor locality data (usually with little more detail than 'Madagascar' or 'Australia'), and what little data there was has often proven unreliable. In at least a few cases, specimens were attributed to completely inaccurate localities (Olson et al., 2005). These misattributions may even have been deliberate, in order to give a specimen a more valuable provenance (Olson et al. mention, among others, a Virginia rail originally labelled 'Martinique' for which the original locality had been crossed out and 'Nlle Zelande' [New Zealand] written instead). As a result, many Verreaux specimens simply cannot be trusted as far as you can throw them. So the answer to my original question that sparked this search, whether a supposedly Australian Verreaux specimen held at Paris actually came from Australia, or whether it could perhaps have come from south-east Asia instead, can't be pinned down to anything more definite than "Who knows?"

REFERENCES

Dubow, S. 2006. A Commonwealth of Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

Gunn, M. & L. E. W. Codd. 1981. Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa: An Illustrated History of Early Botanical Literature on the Cape Flora. CRC Press.

McKenzie, K. 2005. Scandal in the Colonies. Melbourne University Publishing.

Molina, M. 2002. More notes on the Verreaux brothers. Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies 16 (1): 30-36.

Olson, S. L., R. C. Fleischer, C. T. Fisher & E. Bermingham. 2005. Expunging the ‘Mascarene starling’ Necropsar leguati: archives, morphology and molecules topple a myth. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 125 (1): 31-42.

Parsons, N. 2002. One body playing many parts- le Betjouana, el Negro, and il Bosquimano. Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies 16 (1): 19-29.

Stresemann, E. 1975. Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present. Harvard University Press.