Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, ﬁction and Darwin

Home , Adrian Desmond, Cryptostylis, Edward Bagnall Poulton, Federico Delpino, James Moore (biographer), Nora Barlow

BJHS 49(2): 205–229, June 2016. © British Society for the History of Science 2016 doi:10.1017/S0007087416000352 First published online 09 June 2016

Deceived by orchids: sex, science, ﬁction and Darwin

JIM ENDERSBY*

Abstract. Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin’s death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid’s flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower’s pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin’s science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

When orchids attack In the late nineteenth century, no plants were more pampered than orchids. During an ‘orchidmania’ that rivalled the Dutch tulip mania, distant jungles were ransacked for new species, often at the cost of the health – or even the lives – of those who collected them. Enthusiasts spent fortunes on buying the plants and building elaborate green- houses that were kept at tropical temperatures throughout British winters to ensure their delicate inhabitants were comfortable. And yet, unaccountably, the orchids started turning on their owners. The ﬁrst casualty was a Mr Winter-Wedderburn, whose tale was reported in the Pall Mall Budget in 1894. He was a rather shy, middle-aged bachelor for whom an

* School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK. Email: [email protected]. Acknowledgements: Chad Arment, Danielle Clode, Phil Cribb, Martin Evans, Cathy Gere, Yves Le Juen, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Christopher D. Preston, Jonathan Smith, Rebecca Shtasel and Pamela Thurschwell.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 206 Jim Endersby occasional trip to the London orchid sales was almost his only excitement, until one day he returned with the dried tuber of an unknown species. (Orchids were frequently bought as apparently inert root-like tubers that might prove worthless, or a new, valuable exotic; the uncertainty added some excitement to the potentially dull business of purchasing what others had collected.) When Wedderburn’s orchid finally flowered, it produced an intense scent that overpowered him. He passed out and was found by his housekeeper with the orchid’s aerial roots wrapped around his neck; the vampiric plant was sucking his blood and only the housekeeper’s quick-witted intervention saved his life. Mr Wedderburn was, of course, fictitious, created by Herbert George Wells, whose story ‘The flowering of the strange orchid’ described how the hapless collector almost came to grief in the plant’s clutches.1 Wells’s story was republished often over the next few decades and translated into several languages; its success inspired imitators and a minor genre of ‘killer-orchid’ stories emerged, with new examples being added well into the twentieth century. The murderous orchids were part of a wider group of stories about lethal plants that started appearing in the late nineteenth century; inspired by public interest in the way plants such as the Venus flytrap ate insects (a phenomenon that had only been fully understood in the 1870s), the new fictions presented plants as much more mobile and aggressive than ever before. What gave these tales their emotion- al force was that the plants seemed to sense their surroundings, including the presence of animals or humans upon which they might prey, and then were able to react intelligently to outwit and trap their victims. These features of the ‘man-eating-plant’ genre also appear in the orchid tales (despite the fact that there are no insectivorous orchid species2), but when orchids attacked they were often equipped with additional means of seduction, notably an overpowering scent (as in the Wells story) that seemed to drug their (invariably male) victims, making them easier prey. Orchids became femmes fatales – almost irresistibly alluring but best avoided. Why did orchids turn nasty in the late nineteenth century? The answer lies partly in the ways in which Charles Darwin’s botanical researches were transformed as they became part of late Victorian culture. Between them Darwin and his interpreters managed to re- invent plants, including orchids, so as to make them active agents, equipped with strategies and the means to achieve them. This was part of a much wider transformation of botany which, at the beginning of the century, had been popularly considered a feminine science – not least because flowers were the epitome of innocence, a highly suitable (and not too demanding) study for young women, or perfect for engaging their children in nature study.3 By the end of the century, a new, supposedly more manly style of

1 Herbert George Wells, The Short Stories, London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1927, pp. 231–240; ﬁrst published in the Pall Mall Budget, 2 August 1894. 2 Only one orchid species, Aracamunia liesneri (Carnevali & Ramírez), is strongly suspected of carnivory, but it was only discovered in the late twentieth century. See Julian A. Steyermark and Bruce K. Holst, ‘Flora of the Venezuelan Guayana–VII contributions to the Flora of the Cerro Aracamuni, Venezuela’, Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden (1989) 76(4), pp. 962–964. 3 Londa Schiebinger, ‘Gender and natural history’, in Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 163–177; Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women

Sham nectar producers Darwin’s orchid book On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (1862, hence- forth Various Contrivances) was his first major publication after the Origin of Species. Darwin complained that he had been ‘seduced’ into writing it.4 Despite blaming the orchids for leading him astray (which, as we shall see, would become a familiar trope), the book was the first part of a long-term project intended, as its author would later note, ‘to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings’.5 Various Contrivances was a successful start to that campaign, yet Darwin was unable to solve three puzzles: why did some orchids lack nectar, why did some mimic insects, and why should a bee ‘attack’ the flowers of one particular British orchid species? Orchid species without nectar had first been discussed by the German naturalist Christian Konrad Sprengel.6 Darwin found that when many orchid flowers were exam- ined, he

could not ﬁnd under the microscope the smallest bead of nectar. Sprengel calls these ﬂowers ‘Scheinsaftblumen,’ or sham-nectar-producers; that is, he believes, for he well knew that the

Embrace the Living World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998; Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. 4 C.R. Darwin to Alphonse de Candolle, 17 June [1862]. Darwin Correspondence Database, at www. darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3608. 5 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (ed. Nora Barlow), London: Collins, 1958, p. 135. 6 Christian Konrad Sprengel, Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen (The Secret of Nature in the Form and Fertilization of Flowers Discovered), 1793. Charles Darwin, Autobiographies (ed. Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger), Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003; ﬁrst published 1887/1903, p. 77; Richard Bellon, ‘Charles Darwin solves the “riddle of the ﬂower”; or, why don’t historians of biology know about the birds and the bees?’, History of Science (2009) 47, pp. 373–406, 376.

However, Darwin felt that anyone who accepted Sprengel’s explanation ‘must rank very low the instinctive knowledge’ of insects.7 Although he managed to detect nectar in some species where Sprengel had not, many orchids clearly lacked it, so Darwin wondered how they persuaded insects to keep pollinating them. The second puzzle was that most of the nectarless flowers Darwin identified were species of the genus Ophrys, many of which resemble insects sufficiently to have been given common names such as the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) and the fly orchid (Ophrys insectifera). These mysterious resemblances between orchids and insects had been noted centuries before Darwin, but were still unexplained. Darwin’s botanical mentor, Robert Brown, had proposed that bee orchids ‘resembled bees in order to deter insects from visiting them’, but Darwin commented that ‘I cannot think this probable’. Not only was there no apparent reason to ‘deter’ bees, but the fly orchid looked as much like an insect as the bee orchid did (or more so), yet it was regularly pollinated by insects.8 Yet Darwin had to admit that although the flowers were clearly adapted to enable insect fertilization, ‘I have never seen any insect visit these flowers’. In a footnote added to this sentence he mentioned one final puzzle: ‘Mr. Price has frequently witnessed attacks made upon the Bee Orchis by a bee’, adding, ‘What this sentence means I cannot conjecture’.9 It would be over half a century before the significance of those ‘attacks’ was explained almost simultaneously by three naturalists: Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne (an Algerian-born French judge), Masters John Godfery (a British military officer) and Edith Coleman (a British-born Australian schoolteacher). Understanding why it took so long requires examining how Darwin’s work was interpreted in the intervening decades. Darwin’s botanical work had three main aspects. He used flowers as models with which to analyse the effects of self-fertilization on animals, including human ones.10 He argued that breeding between close relatives was harmful to their offspring; the orchid book (subtitled on the Good Effects of Intercrossing) was the first of several to explore this topic, which also had a wider importance for evolutionary theory, especially for the origins of variation.11 Darwin found clear evidence that cross-fertilized plants were more vigorous than those which were self-fertilized.

7 Charles Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, London: John Murray, 1862, p. 45. 8 Darwin, op. cit. (7), pp. 68–9; Nicholas J. Vereecken and Ana Francisco, ‘Ophrys pollination: from Darwin to the present day’, in Retha Edens-Meier and Peter Bernhardt (eds.), Darwin’s Orchids: Then and Now, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 48–50. 9 Darwin, op. cit. (7), p. 68. 10 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, London: Jonathan Cape, 2002, pp. 276–282; Jonathan Smith, ‘Une ﬂeur du mal? Swinburne’s ‘the sundew’ and Darwin’s insectivorous plants’, Victorian Poetry (2003) 41, pp. 131–150, 150. 11 M.J.S. Hodge, ‘Darwin as a lifelong generation theorist’, in David Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 207–243, 223; Jim Endersby, ‘Darwin on generation, pangenesis and sexual selection’, in M.J.S. Hodge and G. Radick (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 69–91.

12 This central goal of Darwin’s botany has been noted by most of those who have studied it, e.g. Hunter Dupree, introduction, in Asa Gray (ed.), Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. ix–xxxiii, xix; Mea Allan, Darwin and His Flowers: The Key to Natural Selection, London: Faber and Faber, 1977; David Kohn, ‘Darwin’s botanical research’, in Solene Morris, Louise Wilson and David Kohn (eds.), Charles Darwin at Down House, Swindon: English Heritage, 2003, pp. 50–59; Peter Ayres, The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins at the Dawn of Plant Science, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008; Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 140–141; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, ‘Darwin’s botany in the Origin of Species’, in Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 216–236; Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham, Darwin’s Sciences: How Charles Darwin Voyaged from Rocks to Worms in His Search for Facts to Explain How the Earth, Its Geological Features, and Its Inhabitants Evolved, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015, pp. 93–151. 13 Darwin was the ﬁrst to fully understand insectivorous plants, proving that they did indeed digest the dead insects that had often been observed adhering to or inside these plants. Tina Gianquitto, ‘Criminal botany: progress, degeneration, and Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants’, in Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (eds.), America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014, pp. 235–264; Porter and Graham, op. cit. (12), p. 136. 14 Charles Darwin, On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865. 15 Charles Darwin, The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, London: John Murray, 1875, p. 138, emphasis added. 16 Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants, London: John Murray, 1880, p. 573. For a fuller discussion of some of these topics see Endersby, op. cit. (11); Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig’s History of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 210 Jim Endersby Of all the plants’ abilities, it was evidence that they possessed a rudimentary form of thought that particularly delighted Darwin. While working on climbing plants, he wrote to his son William, ‘My hobby-horse at present is Tendrils; they are more sensitive to a touch than your finger; & wonderfully crafty & sagacious’.17 And he told his friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray that his ‘beloved Drosera [sundew] is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal’.18 The claim that plants were sagacious, exhibiting some evidence of the mental powers that had always been assumed to be an exclusive property of animals, was what was most distinctive about Darwin’s botany. And, as we shall see, it was this ‘zoomorphizing’ of plants that caught the attention of the wider public, thanks to a few writers who produced popular works that interpreted Darwin’s ideas for a non- specialist public. The goal of raising the plants up ‘the scale of organised beings’ helps explain a confu- sion that has arisen over the third use to which Darwin put his plants: providing examples to illustrate and test aspects of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Orchids were particularly important to the rhetorical aspect of Darwin’s botany because he used them to provide detailed, adaptive explanations for key features of flowers, which under- mined established views. The best-known example of this was the mutual interdepend- ence of flowers and insects, which had traditionally been offered by natural theologians as evidence of the perfection and benevolence of God’s design. By contrast, Darwin claimed to show that orchid flowers had been shaped by natural selection, an argument that began with the fact that cross-fertilized plants were more vigorous than self-fertilized ones. As a result, any chance variation that promoted cross-fertilization would become more common in each succeeding generation, gradually leading to a closer and closer ‘fit’ between flower and insect.19 His research explained Sprengel’s earlier claim that ‘Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen’.20 These plant-pollinator studies provided a rich new topic for botanists to study, or – as Darwin had politely put it –‘the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to sec- ondary laws, as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator’.21

Biology: The Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life, London: William Heinemann, 2007; and Endersby, Orchid: A Cultural History (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 17 C.R. Darwin to W.E. Darwin [25 July 1863], at www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-4199. 18 C.R. Darwin to Asa Gray, 4 August [1863], at www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-4262. 19 In addition to the orchid book see Charles R. Darwin, ‘On the three remarkable sexual forms of Catasetum Tridentatum, an orchid in the possession of the Linnean Society’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (Botany) (1862) 6, pp. 151–157; Darwin, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, London: John Murray, 1877; Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, London: John Murray, 1876. 20 Quoted in Lawrence J. King, ‘Christian Konrad Sprengel’, in C.C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientiﬁc Biography (1975) 12, p. 588. 21 Darwin, op. cit. (7), 2. See also Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, pp. 134–137, 53–54; Richard Bellon, ‘Inspiration in the harness of daily labor: Darwin, botany, and the triumph of evolution, 1859–1868’, Isis (2011) 102, pp. 393–420; James G. Lennox, ‘Darwin and teleology’, in Michael Ruse (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 152–157.

Queer ﬂowers Although Darwin’s botanical books were moderately successful, they were too technical to reach a wide readership. However, we can trace the ways in which Darwinian ideas became widespread by looking at some popular accounts of his work. For example, in 1884, Britain’s Cornhill Magazine published ‘Queer ﬂowers’, an article that described

22 Asa Gray to Darwin, 2 July 1862, Darwin Correspondence Database, at www.darwinproject.ac.uk/ entry-3637. 23 Darwin to Asa Gray, 23[–4] July [1862], Darwin Correspondence Database, at www.darwinproject.ac. uk/entry-3662. For the continuing contemporary debate over whether (or in what sense) Darwin can be seen as endorsing either teleology or theology, or both, see Ghiselin, op. cit. (21); James G. Lennox, ‘Darwin was a teleologist’, Biology and Philosophy (1993) 8(4), pp. 409–421; John Angus Campbell, ‘Of orchids, insects, and natural theology: timing, tactics, and cultural critique in Darwin’s post-“Origin” strategy’, Argumentation (1994) 8, pp. 63–80; Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; John Beatty, ‘Chance variation: Darwin on orchids’, Philosophy of Science (2006) 73(5), pp. 629–641; and Thierry Hoquet, ‘Darwin teleologist? Design in the orchids’, Comptes rendus biologies (2010) 33, pp. 119–128. 24 Darwin, op. cit. (7), p. 2. 25 Darwin, op. cit. (7), p. 285.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 212 Jim Endersby various flowers as ‘deceptive and alluring’ because they fool their pollinators with ‘in- genious mimicry’, fake nectar or appetizing smells, while others imprison insects, keeping them trapped ‘until they have duly performed the penal servitude of fertilization enjoined upon them by the inexorable blossom’. The author then turned to carnivorous plants, commenting that ‘there is something too awful and appalling in this contest of the unconscious and insentient with the living and feeling, of a lower vegetative form of life with a higher animated form, that it always makes me shudder slightly to think of it’.26 The writer was the popular novelist and writer on science Grant Allen (1848–1899), who, as Jonathan Smith and Bernie Lightman have discussed, wrote regularly and elo- quently on the implications of Darwinism.27 Carnivorous plants were just one of the examples Allen used to dramatize Darwin’s ideas. For example, Allen described Darwin’s ‘beloved Drosera’ or sundew (the plant described to Gray as ‘a most sagacious animal’) as possessing ‘a sort of fiendish imper- sonal cruelty’, because the hair-like spikes on its leaves are surmounted by glistening tips that attract insects, who land to feed on what look like drops of nectar only to find themselves trapped in the sticky droplets. Gradually, the sundew envelops the insect in its ten- tacle-like leaves and digests it. In conscious contrast to the earlier tradition of natural theology, Allen argued that plants like the sundew had caught the eyes of poets and artists, as well as Darwin, ‘not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and deliberately wicked’. If, as Darwin implied, plants were sufficiently ‘sagacious’ to be considered honorary members of the animal kingdom, should they be held to account for their actions? The vivid adjectives Allen used certainly suggest culpability: ‘murderous propensities’ were embodied in each ‘cruel crawling leaf’, which secreted a digestive juice over the insect that ‘dissolves him alive piecemeal in its hundred clutching suckers’. And if sundews were bad, pitcher plants were worse, ‘abandoned ruf- fians’ who thrive ‘in virtue of their exceptional ruthlessness’. They were, Allen noted, ‘not flowers, but highly modified and altered leaves, though in many instances they are quite as beautifully colored as the largest and handsomest exotic orchids’.28 And he used orchids themselves to explain how the mutual dependence of plant on insect created the flowers’ fantastic shapes, ‘apparently out of pure wantonness, but really in order to ensure fertilisation by the oddest and most improbable methods’.29

26 The article originally appeared unsigned (Cornhill Magazine, 3 October 1884, pp. 397–409), but was republished in the USA under Allen’s name; page references are to the US reprint: Grant Allen, ‘Queer ﬂowers’, Popular Science Monthly (1884) 26(10), pp. 177–187, 177, 80, 82. 27 Jonathan Smith, ‘Grant Allen, physiological aesthetics, and the dissemination of Darwin’s botany’,in Sally Shuttleworth and Geoffrey N. Cantor (eds.), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004; Smith, op. cit. (10); William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers (eds.), Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 266–269; and Smith, op. cit. (12). See also Grant Allen, Charles Darwin, New York: D. Appleton, 1885. 28 Allen, op. cit. (26), pp. 182–185. 29 Grant Allen, Colin Clout’s Calendar: The Record of a Summer, April–October, London: Chatto & Windus, 1883, pp. 97–98.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 Deceived by orchids 213 By describing and dramatizing the carnivorous plants alongside the orchids, the two groups of plants became associated in some readers’ minds, not least because Allen stressed that both groups possessed something akin to intelligence. Orchids were among ‘the most advanced families’ of plants, and such advanced groups ‘really appear to be cleverer and shiftier than all others’.30 The revelation that plants could outwit or eat animals was made even more surprising by Allen’s vivid prose. Darwin himself wrote to congratulate Allen on one of his books, noting that ‘I quite envy you your power of writing’. By contrast, Darwin had acknowledged that his readers would need ‘a strong taste for Natural History’ to read Various Contrivances, and that ‘the necessary details [would] be too minute and complex’ for most.31 Making such information accessible necessarily involved a degree of reinterpretation: ‘Some of your statements seemed to me rather too bold’, Darwin wrote to Allen, but added that this might ‘perhaps be an advantage’. In response, Allen acknowledged that he ‘was quite aware that the papers were a little bold’, but justified his style by noting that ‘in writing for a daily paper one is obliged to adapt oneself to a very different audience’.32 Intriguingly, Darwin also commented that some of Allen’s views in The Evolutionist at Large (1881) were ‘quite new to me & seem extremely probable’.33 Frustratingly, he did not enlarge on which views he had in mind, but the comment raises the possibility that the very process of adapting scientific ideas – even making them ‘rather too bold’–could inspire new ways of thinking about evolution. An analysis of Allen’s botanical writings makes it clear that he (like other writers I discuss below) was doing much more than simply popularizing Darwin’s ideas; as Allen and others appropriated Darwin’s ideas for their own ends, they helped to create a new language with which to describe plants. There is no doubt that plants became more exciting (and potentially more popular) subjects to write about when seen through evolutionary eyes. Grant Allen was not the only writer to seize on the remarkable new qualities that Darwin had discovered in them. As Tina Gianquitto has shown, many writers in the USA produced popular works inspired by Darwin’s work on carnivorous plants.34 While in Britain, John Ellor Taylor, editor of the widely read magazine Hardiwicke’s Science Gossip,was inspired by Allen’s success to write another popular Darwinian botany book, The Sagacity and Morality of Plants: A Sketch of the Life and Conduct of the Vegetable Kingdom (1884). One newspaper reviewer commented that many ‘would laugh at the notion that trees and flowers possess any sagacity or morality’,yet‘those who have gone deeper into the matter know that’ something akin to ‘a reasoning faculty … exists among plants’.35 According to Taylor, botany ‘no longer consists in merely col- lecting as many kinds of plants as possible, whose dried and shrivelled remains are too

30 Allen, op. cit. (29), p. 97. 31 Darwin, op. cit. (7), p. 2. 32 G. Allen to C. Darwin, 19 February [1881], quoted in Lightman, op. cit. (27), p. 280. 33 C. Darwin to G. Allen, 17 February 1881, quoted in Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir, with a Bibliography, London: G. Richards, 1900, p. 111. 34 Gianquitto, op. cit. (13). 35 ‘Vegetable life’ [Review], Morning Post, 17 July 1884, p. 3.

the humblest observer, by conﬁning himself to one or two species of ﬂowers, whose devices for securing insect services in procuring cross-fertilisation are as yet unknown or only partially known, may render loyal and genuine service to the cause of science.40

In similar vein, he described how the pollen-masses (pollinia) of an orchid became attached to an insect, noting that it was ‘a device the reader can experimentally imitate by carefully thrusting the conical point of a black-lead pencil down the throat of an Orchid flower’.41 Taylor also worked to explain Darwin’s theoretical views, noting that botanists had only recently realized that cross-fertilized plants were ‘more likely to come off conquer- ors in that keen and never-ending Battle of Life which is going on in every green lane and field, and along every hillside’.42 The benefits of cross-fertilization ensured that any

36 John Ellor Taylor, The Sagacity and Morality of Plants: A Sketch of the Life and Conduct of the Vegetable Kingdom, new edn, London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd, 1884, p. v. 37 Taylor, op. cit. (36), pp. 6–7. 38 ‘Plant life’ [Review], Pall Mall Gazette, 14 July 1884, p. 4. 39 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 88. 40 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 9. 41 Taylor, op. cit. (36), pp. 88–89. 42 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 10.

The desirability of being ‘crossed,’ because of the greater certainty that more and stronger seeds will be the result, – from which may possibly spring a succeeding generation of plants even more robust than their ancestors, – is as important an element in the life of an individual plant as it is for man to work and save, so that his children may be better placed in society.43

However, it was not just in their relations with their insect pollinators that the plants’ seeming intelligence was apparent. Taylor noted that quick-growing climbing plants ‘have beaten the tall, strong, woody trees and shrubs in the contest for light’: ‘They have conquered by sheer wit, or the equivalent of it; and there is little doubt if animals had been similarly successful in their endeavours to achieve a certain end, we should have spoken of them as “clever.”’44 Although Taylor described his book as a ‘parable’, he nevertheless insisted that if any reader were to object to his title he would respond by quoting Darwin on the tip of a radicle acting ‘like the brain of one of the lower animals’ (see above).45 The key to his argument was that botany has ﬁnally been studied ‘from its biological side’ and as a result he credited Darwin and other writers – naming Grant Allen among others – with developing what he explicitly referred to as the ‘new language’ necessary to describe the ‘novel rela- tionships’ between plants and the insects that pollinated them. ‘Whether we believe in the consciousness of plant-life or not, this language almost implies such a belief’.Plants were said to adopt ‘habits and devices’ that beneﬁted them ‘as if they did it of set and intelligent purpose’. Perhaps, he speculated, there could be ‘no life, animal or vegetable, un- accompanied by consciousness!’, and therefore by some form of intelligence.46

Strange orchids The ‘new language’ of post-Darwinian botany would spread rapidly well beyond the genre of popular science writing, to inspire a new genre of ﬁction: the killer-plant story.47 The genre mostly utilized gigantic examples of real carnivorous plants, of which numerous examples can be found in Chad Arment’s edited collections.48 These collections clearly reveal that the genre of active, predatory plants only came into

43 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 63. 44 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 55. 45 Taylor, op. cit. (36), pp. 1–2, quoting Darwin, op. cit. (16), p. 573. 46 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 2. 47 Strictly speaking, these tales belong to more than one genre: some have occult or ‘weird’ elements that might place them within the gothic tradition, while others are more clearly proto-science ﬁction. However, for present purposes, they belong together because of their common subject matter. See Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction: Cultural History of Literature, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005; and Brian Baker, Science Fiction, Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 48 Chad Arment (ed.), Botanica Delira: More Stories of Strange, Undiscovered, and Murderous Vegetation, Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2010; Arment (ed.), Flora Curiosa: Cryptobotany, Mysterious Fungi, Sentient Trees, and Deadly Plants in Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2nd (revised) edn, Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2013; Arment (ed.), Arboris Mysterius: Stories of the Uncanny and Undescribed from the Botanical Kingdom, Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2014.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 216 Jim Endersby existence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, i.e. after Darwin’s botanical works had been published and were starting to be reviewed, popularized and adapted to various literary purposes. Prior to this, there are stories of poisonous plants, but none in which the plants are imagined as intelligent or actively preying on animals or people. The killer-plant stories allowed Darwin’s animal-like plants to infiltrate public culture much more broadly and rapidly than any kind of science writing could have done. H.G. Wells’s ‘The flowering of the strange orchid’ was one of the first and best examples, and the links between Darwin’s work and Wells’s fiction are explicit in the story. After purchasing his orchid, Wedderburn speculates that it may be an unknown species and tells his housekeeper, ‘There are such queer things about orchids’, adding that ‘Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant’. He even described some of the un- resolved mysteries, including that of plants whose pollinators were unknown, and speculated that ‘my orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did’. As Wells commented soon after ‘Strange orchid’ was published, ‘fiction is widening its territory. It has become a mouth- piece for science, philosophy and art … You cannot blame science for welcoming so popular an expression’.49 Wells’s use of Darwinism is unsurprising, since he had studied biology brieflywithDarwin’s ally Thomas Henry Huxley.50 He also knew Grant Allen (the two men were neighbours in later years) and admired his writing. In his autobiography, Wells acknowledged Allen’sinfluence on him, praising the ‘aggressive Darwinism’ that pervaded his popular natural history and acknowledging that Allen ‘had a very pronounced streak of speculative originality’.51 A year after ‘Strange orchid’, Wells had his first major success when The Time Machine was published, creating a sensation that is often seen as marking the birth of science fiction as a distinct genre.52 In the wake of the novel’s success, Wells went on to become a world-famous figure, whose stories were anthologized, translated and re- printed all over the globe. W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, for example, promoted

49 Interview with Wells, Weekly Sun Literary Supplement, 1895, quoted in Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 2. 50 Norman MacKenzie and J. Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells, London: Weidenfeld, 1973, pp. 50–57. 51 Herbert George Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1967; ﬁrst published 1934, p. 461. For Wells’s wider debt to Darwin and its implications see David Y. Hughes, ‘A queer notion of Grant Allen’s’, Science Fiction Studies (1998) 25(2), pp. 271–284; David Cowie, ‘The evolutionist at large: Grant Allen, scientiﬁc naturalism and Victorian culture’, PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2000; Patrick Parrinder, ‘The old man and his ghost: Grant Allen, H.G. Wells and popular anthropology’, in Greenslade and Rodgers, op. cit. (27), pp. 171–184; Piers J. Hale, ‘Of mice and men: evolution and the socialist utopia. William Morris, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw’, Journal of the History of Biology (2010) 43(1), pp. 17–66; and John McNabb, ‘The beast within: H.G. Wells, the Island of Doctor Moreau, and human evolution in the mid-1890s’, Geological Journal (2015) 50, pp. 383–397. 52 Adam Roberts, Science Fiction, The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–36. See also note 47 above.

53 Joseph O. Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead and the early career of H.G. Wells, 1895–1911’, Huntington Library Quarterly (1974) 38(1), pp. 53–79. 54 The earliest French translation of Wells’s story, by Achille Laurent, appeared in Le Mercure de France in 1899. Annie Escuret, ‘Henry-D. Davray and the Mercure de France’, in Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington (eds.), The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 28–47, 34. The National Library of Australia’s digital newspaper database, Trove, contains numerous reprints and reviews of ‘Strange orchid’, e.g. The Queenslander (Brisbane), 6 October 1894, p. 642, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article20720991, Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton, NSW), 20 November 1894, p. 6 at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article61265642. Western Mail (Perth, WA), 21 June 1895, p. 38, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33115852. 55 Anon., ‘New novels [review]’, The Australasian, 7 March 1896, p. 42. 56 It is unlikely that Darwinian-inspired popular writings were the only source for the increasingly lively and aggressive plants that appeared in early twentieth-century science fiction. Time-lapse film of plants also brought them to life in a very vivid way at around the same time. See Oliver Gaycken, ‘The secret life of plants: visualizing vegetative movement, 1880–1903’, Early Popular Visual Culture (2012) 10(1), pp. 51–69; Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. It would be interesting to explore whether these novel films also inspired some of the fictions discussed here. My thanks to Jesse Olszynko-Gryn for the suggestion. 57 Fred M. White, ‘The purple terror’, Strand (1896) 18(105), pp. 242–251. According to his birth certificate, White was christened ‘Fred’, although numerous sources give his first name as Frederick. Very little is known about him, but a few biographical details can be found at http://freeread.com.au/@rglibrary/ fredmwhite/bibliography/fmw-bibliography.html#sec6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 218 Jim Endersby most orchids, but these ones have ‘expression of ferocity and cunning’, suggesting that they are not merely hostile but also sagacious, combining the qualities Darwin found in orchids and insectivorous plants. Their tendrils move more quickly and intelligently than any real climbing plant could. And the boundaries between plant and animal are explicitly blurred when the attacking orchid’s writhing tendrils are compared to ‘the arm of an octopus’ (just as Darwin had done with his climbers).58 The orchid’s strong scent in the ‘The purple terror’ is reminiscent of the perfume in Wells’s story; when Wedderburn first enters the greenhouse after his unknown orchid flowers, he registers that there was ‘a new odour in the air – a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse’. The en- igmatic perfume draws the timid bachelor into the greenhouse and when he sees the stun- ningly beautiful flower close up he is overpowered by ‘the insufferable scent!’. The narrator continues, ‘How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes’, and then Wedderburn faints, enabling the orchid to attack him. Seductively scented orchids also lay at the heart of John Blunt’s ‘The orchid horror’, which was also written for the mass-circulation magazines that proliferated in the decades around the turn of the century. It first appeared in one of the Frank A. Munsey company’s ten-cent pulp magazines, The Argosy, a title that sold more than half a million copies per month at the time.59 The story’s main character, Loring, is seduced by an unnamed woman (referred to simply as the ‘Goddess of the Orchids’) who sends him off to yet another jungle to find the only flower not in her collection. Loring almost dies in his attempt to retrieve the orchid, whose scent is so powerful (like the ‘fumes of a poisonous sickish-sweet drug’) that it acts like a narcotic. Those who inhale it either die or, if they survive, remain desperately addicted to both orchid and Goddess, unable to break the spell of either. Other pulp orchid stories used scent in similar ways. A 1920 story, ‘An orchid of Asia’, features a hybrid orchid that its creator calls La Revenante (‘the ghost’), whose scent ‘poured over [the hero in] waves of sensual delight which crippled his will’. Under this narcotic influence the hero feels a female presence as if ‘some monster’ were reaching out to him ‘across aeons of time’. The main character finally realizes, ‘He had cultivated a flower beyond the limits of flower life. He had made an orchid-woman … a vampire that sat upon his soul’.60 And Wyatt Blassingame’s ‘Passion flower’ also features an orchid that is both a seductive woman and an irresistible drug.61 The use of an almost overpowering scent as a tool of seduction identifies the orchids in these stories as distinctly feminine, loosely linked to the heavily perfumed prostitutes and other women of ‘loose morals’ who embodied the alluring dangers and freedoms that

58 White, op. cit. (57), p. 249. 59 Arment, Flora Curiosa, op. cit. (48), pp. 188–204. The first publication was The Argosy (September 1911) 67(2). For Munsey and his publishing empire see George Britt, Forty Years – Forty Millions: The Career of Frank A. Munsey, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, inc., 1935. 60 Edna M. Underwood, ‘An orchid of Asia: a tale of the South Seas’ (1920), in Arment, Arboris Mysterius, op. cit. (48), pp. 93–99. 61 Wyatt Blassingame, ‘Passion flower’,inThe Unholy Goddess and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, vol. 3, Vancleave, MS: Dancing Tuatara Press, 2011; first published 1936.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 Deceived by orchids 219 came with the anonymous life of the great cities or of distant colonies.62 Such women were frequently depicted as femmes fatales (a French phrase that entered English in the mid-1870s), and these dangerously seductive creatures became a regular feature of various genres of fin de siècle fiction (as female vampires, for example), where they often express contemporary anxieties about race and sex.63 The orchid tales were invariably set in or linked to the jungles of the European imagination – cliché-infested spaces inhabited by lethal diseases, dusky temptresses and shifty, untrustworthy natives – that nevertheless fascinated Europeans, not least because so much wealth seemed to be hidden there, often in the form of rare plants with vast commercial potential (such as rubber). The seductive orchid embodied luxury as well as sensuality, and these stories seem to express a fear that the supposedly easy life of the tropics (and the supposedly easy, flower-like women who inhabited them), might tempt white men away from empire-building. Meanwhile, the women back home were seen to be changing and it is no coincidence that the French also gave English the word ‘feminist’ during this same period. Lucy Bland has shown how the new term reflected a change in campaigns for women’s rights, once focused on the vote and similarly respectable causes; by contrast, in the 1890s, some campaigners focused on sexual consent within marriage and similarly ‘unladylike’ topics, including venereal disease and contraception.64 Some of these shifts were reflected in the genre of New Woman novels, of which one of the most celebrated was Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895). Allen’s novel (written in part to improve his income, after the popular botanical books had not), concerned an ‘advanced’ young woman, Herminia Barton, who refused marriage as a ‘system of slavery’.65 Novels like Allen’s capture some of the complexity of male reactions to women’s changing roles in the final decades of the century; Herminia is depicted as attractive, intelligent and highly principled, yet she is also portrayed as sexually passive (‘giving’ herself to her lover once he had promised not to marry her) and morally culpable (her daughter rejects her mother’s radical principles and Herminia kills herself rather than bring shame on her child). And, given Allen’s botanical expertise, his heroine’s name may well be a conscious echo of that of the orchid genus Herminium, which includes the British H. monorchis (musk orchid).66 In the diverse writings of Grant Allen and Wells (who also wrote a New Woman novel, the faintly autobiographical Ann Veronica (1909)), both women and plants were reim- agined as more active, sexual and intelligent beings than earlier generations had per- ceived. That linked reimagining ran through many orchid stories (as well, of course,

62 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1992. 63 Rebecca Stott, Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 15, 44–45. There is, of course, a great deal more to say on the orchid’s associations with perverse and decadent sexualities at this period; see my Orchid: A Cultural History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, for more details. 64 Lucy Bland, ‘The married woman, the “New Woman” and the feminist: sexual politics in the 1890s’,in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, pp. 141–162. 65 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did, London: John Lane, 1895. 66 My thanks to Christopher D. Preston for pointing this out.

Biology as public culture Thanks to these various imaginative appropriations, Darwin’s botanical ideas reached a wide audience that extended well beyond the English-speaking world. And as these Darwin-inspired visions of the plant world spread, botanists were finally able to solve Darwin’s remaining puzzles. A direct causal link is difficult to establish, but my goal is to show how these new imaginative possibilities had become part of the way people were enabled to think about plants – and about biology more generally. Like most of Darwin’s works, Various Contrivances was translated promptly after publication; the French edition, De la fécondation des orchidées par les insectes et des bons résultats du croisement appeared just seven years later.68 Among its readers was the Swiss botanist Henry Correvon, who applied Darwin’s ideas to his own orchid studies.69 However, some of the Ophrys species in which Correvon was interested did not grow in Switzerland, so he wrote to one of his many correspondents, Maurice- Alexandre Pouyanne, a French colonial judge in Algiers.70 Pouyanne had begun studying the pollination of North African Ophrys species and after twenty years of painstaking research came to some startling conclusions.71 Among the species Pouyanne studied was Ophrys speculum, which (like the bee orchid that had baffled Darwin) has a labellum fringed with long, reddish-brown strands that are the modified margins of the petals but look like the hairs found on the abdomens of many insects. Pouyanne found that his orchids were visited regularly by burrowing

67 It might be objected that Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, had made his plants both lively and – drawing on the Linnaean tradition of classification – highly sexual in the section of his poem The Botanic Garden (1791) called ‘The loves of the plants’. However, I would argue that those plants he gendered as female are invariably coy, blushing or modest; conspicuously lacking in the predatory and intelligent sexuality that characterizes the killer orchids. However, when eighteenth-century women were seen to be taking too close an interest in the sexuality of plants, they were likely to be severely criticized. See Shteir, op. cit. (3); and George, op. cit. (3). 68 Charles Darwin, De la fécondation des orchidées par les insectes et des bons résultats du croisement, Paris: C. Reinwald, 1870, translated by Louis Rérolle. See Hoquet, op. cit. (23), p. 126. 69 E.G. Britton, ‘The Swiss League for the Protection of Nature’, Torreya (1919) 19(5), pp. 101–102. 70 Almost nothing is known of Pouyanne, other than that he wrote several books on French colonial law. He was born in Tlemcen in Algeria on 14 November 1867 and called up for military service in 1887. He appears to have been a member of the Société d’histoire naturelle d’Afrique du Nord Algérianisation d’une société savante coloniale, and of the Linnean society of Lyon, but I have not found any other biographical details, and would be very grateful to hear from anyone who discovers any more about him. 71 Pouyanne apparently made his first observations in 1891. Masters John Godfery, ‘The fertilisation of Ophrys Speculum, O. Lutea, and O. Fusca’, Journal of Botany, British and Foreign (1925) 63(2), pp. 33– 40, 36. See also Oakes Ames, Pollination of Orchids through Pseudocopulation, Botanical Museum Leaflets, V(1), Cambridge, MA: Botanical Museum of Harvard University, 1937, p. 3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 Deceived by orchids 221 wasps who searched for neither nectar nor insect grubs inside the flowers (these are carnivorous wasps). Pouyanne described how once the insects appeared they would struggle to gain possession of a bloom, after which the successful individual reverses into the orchid, abdomen first, engaging in ‘les mouvements désordonnés, presque convulsifs’ (‘uncoordinated, almost convulsive, movements’).72 Following these movements, the insect would emerge with the orchid’s pollinia firmly attached to it, so that when it entered the next orchid and repeated the same manoeuvres, pollen would be transferred to the receptive stigma of the next flower, ensuring that cross-pollination occurred. Pouyanne’s investigations revealed that all the wasps were males and ‘les mâles sortent de terre environ un mois avant les femelles’ (‘the males appear above ground about a month before the females’); the characteristic ‘convulsive’ movements only occurred in the early weeks after the males hatched, before there were any female wasps around. Pouyanne could find no trace of nectar in the orchids, so he experimented to try and as- certain what was attracting the wasps. If he removed the orchid’s labellum (the part that most resembled an insect), but left the other organs intact, the insects ignored them. That seemed to confirm the importance of the visual similarity; the flowers resembled the female wasps (not very closely, Pouyanne admitted, but argued that insects are very short-sighted). This theory was confirmed when he discovered that flowers placed on the ground attracted insects and that even upside-down flowers worked (although less effectively). However, while his hand-held bouquet attracted males, if the same bouquet were forced on female wasps, they flew off as if repelled. Pouyanne began to suspect that the orchid’s scent, almost imperceptible to humans, was the key; he tried concealing flowers under newspapers and discovered that the males still sought them out.73 Pouyanne’s conclusion was astonishing. When he described his wasps, he put it very plainly: ‘l’insecte tout entier se trémousse; ses mouvements, son attitude paraissent tout à fait semblables à ceux des insectes qui pratiquent des tentatives de copulation’ (‘the entire insect enters a kind of paroxysm; its movements and position seem completely like those of insects engaged in attempting copulation’).74 The male wasps were so completely fooled by the orchids’ mimicry that they attempted to mate with them. Pouyanne discovered that the males hatched up to four weeks before the females; the early hatching and sexual eagerness of the male wasps had been exploited by the orchids, which had devel- oped both visual mimicry and a scent that resembled that of female wasps: ‘Les O. speculum s’offrent à leur procurer quelques distractions, destinées à tromper leur attente, et fort appréciées de ces messieurs’ (‘To shorten their wait O. speculum give themselves over to entertaining them with certain distractions, which are much appreciated by these gentlemen’). Not only does Pouyanne have the orchids ‘giving themselves over’ to the wasps and offering them some much appreciated ‘entertainment’, but he also makes the erotic pleasure of the relationship quite explicit, commenting,

72 Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne and Henry Correvon, ‘Un curieux cas de mimétisme chez les Ophrydées’, Journal de la Société nationale d’horticulture de France (1916) 17, pp. 29–31, 41–47, 42. Translated for the author by Rebecca Shtasel and Yves Le Juen, University of Sussex. 73 Ames, op. cit. (71), pp. 6–7. 74 Pouyanne and Correvon, op. cit. (72), p. 42.

Pouyanne had found clear evidence of the ‘organized system of deception’ whose existence Darwin had doubted. Pouyanne’s first paper was published in 1916.76 Unsurprisingly, it failed to make much impact at a time when France, like the rest of the world, had more pressing matters than orchid pollination to worry about; it took several years before the significance of Pouyanne’s work was fully recognized, particularly in the English-speaking world. The earliest published reference in English to Pouyanne’s discovery (which, as yet, had no name) came in Britain’s Orchid Review in 1920, when its founding editor, Robert Allen Rolfe, published a condensed account of ‘a rather long paper’ that recounted ‘a very interesting discovery’.77 Rolfe’s account was rather less graphic than the original. It merely commented on the ‘mysterious attraction’ that the flowers exercised over the wasps, apparently offering the males ‘some distraction during their long wait’. The visual resemblance and the possibility that scent was also involved were discussed but neither the word ‘copulation’ nor any more decorous synonym was used and it would have taken a very astute and perceptive reader to discern why Rolfe felt that Darwin’s bafflement over the bee’s ‘attacks’ had now been invested ‘with a new significance’.78 Among the Orchid Review’s regular contributors was Colonel Masters John Godfery, a botanist with a particular interest in orchids, particularly in Ophrys (he published an article in the same volume of the journal in which Rolfe’s report of the Algerian orchids appeared). Godfery began corresponding with Pouyanne and soon published a clearer account of the discovery.79

75 Pouyanne and Correvon, op. cit. (72), p. 42. 76 Pouyanne published a much shorter account in Algeria the following year (Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne, ‘La fécondation des Ophrys par les insectes’, Bulletin de la Société d’histoire naturelle de l’Afrique du nord (1917) 8(1), pp. 6–7), in which he described the phenomenon without referring to copulation or using any sexual terminology. Perhaps space was at a premium, or the colonial society was more prudish than the metropolitan one? 77 Robert Allen Rolfe, ‘Fertilisation of Ophrys’, Orchid Review (1920) 27(335–336), pp. 116–168, 166. This ﬁrst publication has (to the best of my knowledge) never been noted before, probably because Rolfe managed to misspell the Franco-Algerian botanist’s name as ‘Pouzanne’ throughout. 78 Rolfe, op. cit. (77), p. 168. 79 Godfery and Pouyanne were evidently correspondents, since he wrote ‘[Pouyanne] tells me in a letter that if one takes a bunch of O. speculum in the hand to a colony of pupae, the males at once alight on the ﬂowers, and are so engrossed that they pay no attention to the observer’, Masters John Godfery, ‘The fertilisation of Ophrys Apifera’, Journal of Botany, British and Foreign (1921) 59, pp. 285–287, 286. For Godfery see Ray

entered the ﬂowers backwards, instead of in the usual manner of nectar-feeding wasps: the tip of the abdomen appeared to be imbedded in the stigma of the ﬂower, and, in every instance, the insect freed itself with a jerk, which shook the stem and suggested resistance.

Coleman confirmed her daughter’s observations, noting that ‘the insect quivered for a moment, and then became motionless. After a second or two, it freed itself, with an apparent effort which shook the flower’.82 Although this was another carnivorous wasp species (an ichneumon), it also showed no signs of seeking insect larvae or nectar. The orchid’s scent (despite being barely perceptible to humans) seemed to ‘lure the insects to the flowers from quite a distance’. Coleman observed that pollination was achieved and added that ‘in shape and colour- ing, the labellum somewhat resembles the body of the insect visitor’ and that its curve ‘so exactly meets the needs of the wasp, that one is easily tempted to hazard a theory’ to explain the nature of ‘the payment exacted by the insects for the service it undoubtedly rendered’. She did not spell out her theory in detail, but to an expert the implications were clear. The ‘apparent effort’ with which the wasp freed itself from the flower was highly suggestive, because these wasps have external genital claspers with which they seize the females during copulation, making post-coital separation difficult.83 The fact

Desmond, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists: Including Plant Collectors, Flower Painters and Garden Designers, London: Taylor & Francis and Natural History Museum, 1994. 80 Godfery, op. cit. (71), pp. 34–35. 81 Edith Coleman, ‘Some autumn orchids’, Victorian Naturalist (1922) 39(8), pp. 103–108. For Coleman see Allan McEvey, ‘Coleman, Edith (1874–1951)’,inAustralian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, at http://adb.anu.au/biography/coleman-edith-9784/text17291, accessed 16 May 2016; and Danielle Clode, ‘Popular and professional communicators: Edith Coleman and Norman Wakeﬁeld’, Victorian Naturalist (2005) 122(6), pp. 274–281. 82 Edith Coleman, ‘Pollination of the orchid Cryptostylis Leptochila’, Victorian Naturalist (1927) 44(1), pp. 20–22, 20. 83 Pat Willmer, Pollination and Floral Ecology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 539.

The riddle of those strange attacks has almost certainly been solved, in the ﬁrst place, by Monsieur M. Pouyanne, in Algeria; later, by Colonel M. Godfery, F.L.S., at Hyères, France; and perhaps even more conclusively by the interesting partnership that forms the subject of this paper.85

Coleman described her observations in detail, noting how closely they confirmed those of Pouyanne and Godfery, and concluded that the wasps ‘are answering to an irresistible sex-instinct’. Although various flowers had evolved a complex variety of partnerships with insects, she believed that between wasp and orchid was ‘a scheme unrivalled, surely, in the history of entomophilous [insect-pollinated] flowers’. The language in which she described the relationship is striking, in that she refers to the mixture of scent and visual resemblance as ‘a cunning mimicry’. The orchid’s scent is such that ‘a single flower will lure an insect from a distance’, and would suggest that ‘even though the perfume is so subtle as to escape our notice, it is very readily conveyed to a wasp’.86 Coleman noted,

The strange labellum, modified out of all proportion to the thin, almost thread-like petals and sepals, with its double row of dark glistening glands that gleam in the hot sunshine loved by the wasp, is perhaps sufficient to justify the theory of an attraction based on the resemblance of the flower to a female wasp.87

In the same paper Coleman again told her readers, ‘Mark the cunning of the plant’, and concluded that to ‘follow closely the act of pollination increases one’s belief in the sagacity of plants’, since such ‘cunning adjustment of its essential organs for the achievement of cross-pollination suggests a plant diplomacy to which the eager instincts of the insect cause it to become a willing victim’.88 She concluded by noting that the orchid seemed to display a ‘discriminating intelligence’ in its efforts to ensure cross-pollination ‘and so, with a Machiavellian cunning almost beyond belief, the orchid lures the artless insect to its service’.89

84 Coleman, op. cit. (82), pp. 21–2. 85 Edith Coleman, ‘Pollination of the Orchid Cryptostylis Leptochila ’ Victorian Naturalist (1928) 44(532), pp. 333–340, 333. 86 Coleman, op. cit. (85), p. 337. 87 Coleman, op. cit. (85), p. 334. 88 Coleman, op. cit. (85), p. 337. 89 Coleman, op. cit. (85), p. 340.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 Deceived by orchids 225 In addition to providing the detailed evidence that fully explained Pouyanne and Godfery’s observations (including the first microscopic observation that the wasps left their sperm in the flowers), Coleman’s paper vividly illustrates the spread of the ‘new language’ of botany that Taylor ascribed to Darwin and Allen. She referred repeatedly to ‘cunning’ (even ‘Machiavellian cunning’), to the orchid’s apparent ‘discriminating intelligence’ and to the ‘sagacity of plants’. Moreover, it was because of the male wasps’‘irresistible sex-instinct’ that they ‘become a willing victim’ of the cunning orchid, which ‘lures’ them (a word she uses twice) into their ‘service’. Coleman’s style and argument seem indebted to Darwin’s, but even more to the ways in which Darwin’s claims about the cunning of plants were reinterpreted by writers like Allen, Taylor and Wells, all of whom were well known in Australia.90 That Coleman’s ‘plant diplomacy’ closely echoes Taylor’s phrase ‘floral diplomacy’ to describe the pollination syndrome is striking (I have not found either phrase in any other contemporary source, other than reviews of Taylor’s book). Allen’s work was also still being reviewed and discussed in Australia at the time Coleman was writing, not least because the Story of the Plants was republished there in 1927.91 And, as noted above (see note 54), Wells’s ‘Strange orchid’ was republished several times in Australia; Coleman’s grandson, Peter, remem- bers that she ‘did read quite a lot of H.G. Wells’.92 By contrast with Coleman, it is much harder to establish connections between Pouyanne and the kinds of writing analysed above, mainly because the sources are so limited. However, it may be significant that Wells enjoyed a high reputation in France; he was translated into French before any other language (in 1896) and translated more frequently (fifty-three of his titles appeared in French, compared with only thirty- two in German). He was fortunate to have been championed by Henry Durand-Davray, an influential critic who was a huge admirer of Wells and promoted him enthusiastically, ensuring his works were both published and reviewed in the influential bimonthly La Mercure de France, widely read by intellectuals in both France and Algeria.93 La Mercure published ‘Strange orchid’ (as ‘Une orchidée extraordinaire’ (1899)) alongside Davray’s translation of ‘The man who could work miracles’. The two tales were intended by Davray to demonstrate to the French public that Wells was a superb short-story

90 Taylor toured Australia in 1885 and his work was still being discussed in Australian newspapers in 1902. His Sagacity and Morality was cited in a paper called ‘Do animals and plants think?’ by Rev. Professor Gosman, Colac Herald (Vic.), 7 November 1902, p. 6, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87669061. The same talk was reported in the West Gippsland Gazette (Warragul, Vic.), p. 4, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news- article68721899. 91 There were dozens of Australian reviews of most of Allen’s main books, dating back to their ﬁrst publication. The newly republished Story of the Plants was brieﬂy reviewed in several papers, including the Sunday Times (Perth, WA), 16 January 1927, p. 18, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article58315893, and in a review of ‘Miscellaneous works’ in The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 8 January 1927, p. 52, at http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article140726583, which reminded its readers of the ‘uproar and controversy’ which had greeted The Woman Who Did. 92 Personal communication with Danielle Clode, Flinders University (via email, 4 September 2015), who has interviewed Coleman’s grandsons in the course of her biographical research. 93 Christopher Alexander MacKenzie Churchill, ‘Neo-traditionalist fantasies: colonialism, modernism and fascism in Greater France 1870–1962’, PhD thesis, Queen’s University, 2010, p. 308.

Conclusion Definite connections between the various co-discoverers of pseudocopulation and the wider cultural dissemination of Darwinian botany are hard to make, but then that is rather in the nature of wider cultural dissemination. The more important point is that orchids had become sexy, decadent killers in the late nineteenth century and, as a result, helped reshape visions of nature in the twentieth. It would be perfectly possible to make this a purely internalist history of science in which Darwin’s brilliance prompted other naturalists to pursue the kind of floral biology, especially the investigation of pollination, that he had pioneered. As a result (such a story would go), keen-eyed, patient naturalists took his insights and applied the classic observational methods of nineteenth-century natural history to a problem that Darwin himself had left unsolved. However, while such a narrative strategy is possible, it is difficult to make it entirely credible. To start with, over sixty years passed from the publication of Various Contrivances until Pouyanne’s first publication. If seeing plants through evolutionary eyes were the essential step, why was Darwin unable to ‘conjecture’ what those mysterious attacks meant? It is also telling that, as Richard Bellon has shown, the Darwinian, floristic botanical tradition (which emphasized research on pollination) was at its strongest in Germany, Italy and Sweden, not in France (where Darwin has never enjoyed the reputation he does in many other countries).96 Moreover, it peaked in about 1900 and was declining in the face of labora- tory-based research by the time Pouyanne published (and had declined further before Godfery and Coleman became involved). And if developments within the scientific world were crucial, one would have expected a German, such as Friedrich Hildebrand

94 Escuret, op. cit. (54), pp. 28–30, 4. 95 Godfery’s monograph on native British orchids was listed as forthcoming twice in Nature and then reviewed in 132(3334) (23 September 1933), p. 464. For an overview of Wells’s contributions and reviews see John S. Partington, H.G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Modern orchid enthusiasts who mention the Wells story include Joseph Arditti, ‘Orchids in science fiction, mystery and adventure stories’, American Orchid Society Bulletin (1979) 48(11), pp. 1122–1126; Arditti, ‘Orchids in science fiction, mystery and adventure stories, Pt. 2: no blandishments for Miss Orchid’, American Orchid Society Bulletin (1980) 49(9), pp. 1005–1009; Peter Bernhardt, Wily Violets and Undergound Orchids: Revelations of a Botanist, New York: Vintage Books, 1990; and Retha Edens-Meier and Peter Bernhardt (eds.), Darwin’s Orchids: Then and Now, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 19. None of the handful of obituaries that I have found mention his literary tastes, and I have not located any other biographical materials. Again, I would be most grateful to hear from surviving descendants or anyone else who can tell me more about him. 96 R. Stebbins, ‘France’, in Thomas F. Glick (ed.), The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 2nd edn, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988; first published 1974, pp. 117–167.

97 Bellon, op. cit. (6). 98 The ﬁrst reports of the discovery all credit Pouyanne, Godfery and Coleman with making it independently – and given the speed of communication and need for translation involved, I would argue that within a decade may be called ‘simultaneous’. See E.B. Poulton, introduction to Edith Coleman, Edward Bagnall Poulton and Arthur Mills Lea, ‘Pollination of an Australian orchid by a male ichneumonid Lissopimpla Semipunctata’, Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London (1928) 76, pp. 333–340; Edward Bagnall Poulton, ‘Address of the president of Section D – Zoology, British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, September, 1931’, Science (1931) 74(1919), pp. 345–360; and Ames, op. cit. (71). 99 Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, London: Michael Joseph, 1991; Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; Jim Endersby, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (ed. Jim Endersby), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. xi–lxv. The simultaneous discovery has sometimes led to an exaggeration of the similarity between the two men’s ideas; there were many important differences. For a brief overview see Michael Ruse, ‘Myth 12: that Wallace’s and Darwin’s explanations of evolution were virtually the same’,in Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (eds.), Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 96–102.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 20 Jan 2020 at 18:54:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 228 Jim Endersby Biology would continue to inform and shape all kinds of writing throughout the century. As pseudocopulation became more widely recognized, it inspired a fresh round of science fiction following the Second World War.100 Of these, the most intri- guing example is a novel by John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden (1969), which concerns the human discovery of a planet dominated almost entirely by plants, the most advanced of which are, of course, orchids. However, the story’s botanist, Paul Theaston, is unable to discover how they are pollinated, since the planet is completely devoid of insects. (Whatever the pollinators are, he notes, they must have a sense of smell, since the orchids ‘exude a perfume so enchanting that if I could bottle it and ship it home it would devastate the ecology of earth in nine months’.) The pollinator proves to be a pig-like animal, with which the orchids are engaged in an ‘ecological cold war’, since the animals feed voraciously on the plants. The orchids are intelligent and mobile enough to kill the pigs, but must keep enough alive to ensure that they will still be pollinated. The orchids seduce Theaston’s fiancée, fellow botanist Freda Caron, into mating first with a male then a female orchid, rewarding her not with nectar but with intense sexual pleasure (despite never having met humans before, the orchids are able both to sense and to stimulate human desire).101 Theaston tells her that the orchids are looking for a new pollinator, and have finally ‘found the ideal animal for their purpose. We are the pollinators of Eden’. Boyd’s bizarre fiction is the most vivid (although not the most literarily accomplished) example of a science fiction genre that takes Darwin’s insights so seriously as to imagine plants as our intellectual equals, perhaps even our superiors.102 If the late nineteenth- century killer-plant stories did indeed play some part in the discovery of pseudocopulation (perhaps by simply attracting a more imaginative breed of botanist into the field?), who knows what the effect of late twentieth-century plant-based science fiction on today’s science may turn out to be. Perhaps it has already had an impact, since it is striking how many plant scientists are currently working on plant signalling and communication, and many are not embarrassed to refer to their work as being on ‘plant intelligence’ or even ‘plant neurobiology’.103 It would be interesting to know what these researchers were reading when they were growing up. My main concern is not to establish a plausible connection between pseudocopulation’s discovery and the specific kinds of writing analysed, but to analyse how biology

100 Examples include J.G. Ballard, ‘Prima Belladona’, in Ballard, The Four Dimensional Nightmare, London: Science Fiction Book Club, 1963; first published 1956, pp. 79–92; John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, London: Pan Science Fiction, 1972; first published 1969; and Pete Adams and Charles Nightingale, ‘Planting time’, in Brian W. Aldiss (ed.), Galactic Empires, vol. 1, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976, pp. 293–305. 101 Boyd, op. cit. (100), pp. 190–199. 102 Another example would be Clifford Simak’s ‘Green thumb’, Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1954, pp. 58– 78. For a fuller discussion of this theme see Lynda H. Schneekloth, ‘Plants: the ultimate alien’, Extrapolations (2001) 42(3), pp. 246–254; T.S. Miller, ‘Lives of the monster plants: the revenge of the vegetable in the age of animal studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (2010) 23(3), pp. 460–479. 103 For an accessible overview of this field see Stefano Mancuso, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015.

104 As I have acknowledged elsewhere, I am indebted to Jan Golinski for the idea of science functioning as ‘public culture’; see Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760– 1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Golinski’s formulation helps erase the unhelpful distinction between ‘science’ and ‘society’ that once bedevilled history of science, much as New Historicist literary theory has helped overcome a parallel – and equally unhelpful – distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ writings. For a brief introduction to the New Historicist approach to literature and history see the chapter ‘History’ in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, London: Prentice Hall Europe, 1999, pp. 117–128. 105 For examples see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000; Bernard Lightman, ‘The story of nature: Victorian popularizers and scientiﬁc narrative’, Victorian Review (2000) 25(2), pp. 187–211; Lightman, op. cit. (27); Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007; and Aileen Fyfe and Bernard V. Lightman, Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 106 Taylor, op. cit. (36), p. 61. 107 I discussed this aspect of twentieth-century plant sciences in Jim Endersby, ‘Mutant utopias: evening primroses and imagined futures in early twentieth-century America’, Isis (2013) 104(3), pp. 471–503.