National Insect Week
For National Insect Week, here is an extract from the very first volume of the Calcutta Journal of Natural History, published in 1841. The Reverend Frederick Hope, a well-known entomologist from Oxford, solicits information about insects in India and asks for specimens.
Calcutta Journal of Natural History 1841
In the same edition are an article on a species of civet, a review of Robert Wight’s Illustrations of Indian Botany, and an account of a particularly ill-tempered meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (‘A committee that would lay down rules for the direction of a curator, ought to know the difference between minerals and rocks’).
Many of Hope’s entomological collections are now in the Museum of Natural History, Oxford.
Antonia Moon
Lead Curator Post-1858 India Office Records