MISCHIEVOUS CREATURES

Lively biography of two sisters who made substantial contributions to 19th-century natural history.

Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris were sisters who, writes McNeur, “lived together, hiked together, and debated new scientific theories together.” They were hardly alone in their vocations and avocations. As the author notes, the term scientist came about in 1834 to describe “a woman with a talent for turning complex scientific phenomena into understandable prose for popular audiences.” Some men whom we would now call scientists believed that women were better equipped mentally to ponder the minutiae of classification than men, whose supposed task was to come up with big ideas. Well to do but constrained by their time, Elizabeth and Margaretta turned to botany and entomology. Margaretta, in particular, became well known for her work describing the 17-year cycle of the cicada—and as for big ideas, she corresponded with none other than Charles Darwin, then “an up-and-coming naturalist in England,” on the subject of water beetles. McNeur notes that the sisters may have approved of Darwin’s ideas about speciation and natural selection, even if they also collaborated with the anti-evolutionist Louis Agassiz. The sisters were acknowledged as skilled researchers and observers in their time, although when Margaretta, arguably the more accomplished of the two, passed away, “the Academy of Natural Sciences announced her death…but included no details about her life or accomplishments.” As a result, they were never properly acknowledged nor memorialized, an erasure that may not have been intended, strictly speaking, but that “gradually accumulated until the sisters’ stories faded from view.” Fortunately, in a well-written book that digs deep into the literature, McNeur recovers those stories and places them in the context of a science that, for all its strides forward, took no trouble to include women in the conversation.

A welcome addition to intellectual history that restores two gifted women to the scholarly record.