7

Vanishing Flies and the Lady Entomologist

Catherine McNeur

The flies began emerging from the wheat around dusk, giving Margaretta Hare Morris little more than half an hour to observe the tiny, delicate creatures as they flitted from stalk to stalk. Requiring a magnifying glass to see them in any detail, Morris had first observed the flies as flaxseed-like pupa sleepily clinging to the young wheat plants in her neighbour’s field a few days prior, but now that they had fully transformed, there were too many and they were too quick to count. The swarms hovered over the wheat field, laying their eggs in the grain to secure a good food source for the next generation.1

That summer in 1836, months before what would become known as the Panic of 1837, farmers had discovered something ominous. Wheat fields that showed promise in May had withered by July, producing paltry harvests if any.2 As this plight spread from field to field and state to state, the price of wheat doubled in most cities, impacting everything from flour to whiskey. Consumers, already shaken by other constrictions on their personal finances, felt this price hike in their growling stomachs.3

At the heart of this wheat crisis were the flies, and the most notorious wheat fly was the Hessian fly, named for the mercenary soldiers who fought alongside the British in the American Revolution at the same moment farmers first spotted the tiny, seemingly fragile fly and its devastating effects. For more than a century, naturalists and then entomologists would debate whether the Hessian fly was truly Hessian.4 Regardless of their origin, from the 1780s onwards, Hessian fly larvae would occasionally devastate wheat fields, consuming much of the young plants.

The wheat fields near Philadelphia were not immune, and the entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris was eager to study what to her was an “object of peculiar interest.”5 She was so singularly devoted to observing them that she filled countless conversations with excited details about everything she was learning. One friend remarked that “Margaretta’s heart is as full of Hessian flies, as ever was a wheat field.” After making her own initial set of observations about the fly in June 1836, Morris wanted to compare what she was finding with what the famed American entomologist Thomas Say had published about Hessian flies decades earlier in 1817 in the first volume of the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences. This was the first article to officially describe the fly and its life cycle. Say even gave the species its official name: “Cecidomyia destructor Say.” Say’s friend Charles Alexandre LeSueur provided illustrations a few months later in another issue of the journal (Figure 7.2).6

Morris was familiar with both Say and LeSueur as they had been her tutors when she was just a teenager. They taught her not only entomology but also drawing, and as she would later recount, they “made a pet” of her because of her scientific promise. Like many entomologists of the early nineteenth century, Morris was mostly self-taught, inspired by early curiosity, though she benefited from the lessons she received from the leading American scientists living in Philadelphia.7

Morris had not gone into the fly-infested field looking to prove her teachers wrong. She was there for the “love of the study.” Still, as Morris read Say’s article, she could not help feeling that something was off. Say’s staccato description of the creatures seemed to ring true enough: “Head and thorax black; wings black, fulvous at base; feet pale, covered with black hair.” His language was imprecise but that was also standard for the era, relating the length of one body part to another rather than providing precise measurements, and describing colours as “brownish” or “whitish.”8

Morris’ puzzle, though, came with his vague description of the fly’s behaviour. Say began his narrative of their life cycle with a statement that seemed to lack confidence: “The history of the changes of this insect, is probably briefly this—.” Appearing to make assumptions based on a limited study, Say went on to describe how the female fly deposited its eggs “between the vagina of the inner leaf and the culm nearest to the root of the plant.”9 This is where Morris had an issue, and it was not with the way female anatomy was being mapped onto botanical physiology. She believed she had witnessed the fly laying its eggs in the head of the wheat, amid the seeds—not in the groove between the leaf and the stem. Had Say been wrong? Or had Morris discovered a completely new fly?

* * *

As someone researching the work of a long-forgotten female scientist, I would love to determine what the fly was that Morris discovered, at the very least for the sake of setting the record straight. She was not the only one to witness a fly that appeared to be the Hessian fly but behaved differently; farmers had also reported similar observations in agricultural journals that summer and during the summers that followed as infestations returned.10 And while her life’s work included far more discoveries and insects than just this wheat fly, the fly was Morris’ first step into the public scientific world of presentations and publications, as well as her first vetting. The controversy that ensued ultimately played a role in her erasure from historical memory.

Many of the chapters in this volume look to uncover how we can know more about the lives and histories of animals, despite their being hidden within archival collections. This task becomes even more difficult if the scientist devoted to learning about the creatures has been largely forgotten and is similarly hidden in the archives, which is the case for Margaretta Hare Morris. Despite being well known during her lifetime, her legacy has mostly been forgotten and her scientific records are, for the most part, hidden in the papers of entomologists she corresponded with. These erasures—of both the fly and the entomologist—in turn reflect not only power structures but also lost opportunities.

That a nineteenth-century woman of science has been forgotten or even deliberately erased is not terribly surprising. There are many hidden figures in the long history of science. Less discussed, however, is how much is lost from the exclusion of talented people because of their race, gender, or class. In this case, opportunities were lost to better understand a fly. If Morris had discovered a previously unknown and unnamed relative of the Hessian fly, the implications were significant. The price of wheat, a major staple crop, fluctuated wildly during infestation years, which resulted in political and economic fallout. Farmers were looking for methods to avoid ruin, and knowing what they were battling was an important first step. Whether they should plant the wheat early or late, plant an entirely new variety, apply some sort of pesticide, or burn the chaff at the end of the season—these were all decisions that required knowing much more about the behaviour of the wheat flies.11

There are many barriers that keep us from truly knowing this fly even today. Determining what a fly from the 1830s was in terms of twenty-first-century entomological nomenclature is a difficult feat, partly because the descriptions of the flies and their behaviour were vague at best, and images imprecise or nonexistent. Though Morris herself was a respected scientific artist, invited to illustrate scientific articles, any sketches or paintings of the insect she made do not seem to have made it into the archives.

It is all the more difficult to know this fly specifically because few contemporaries trusted Morris. Wary of making a public statement about her findings, Morris waited several years to present and publish her work—repeating her observations of the flies as the infestations continued. Finally, in 1840, she succumbed to the pleas of her cousin, the chemist Robert Hare, and allowed him to present her report to the American Philosophical Society (APS), the country’s leading scientific association. Women rarely sent reports to the APS, but when they did it was typical to have a male member of the society read the paper on their behalf. By the time Morris was ready to share her work, the Panic of 1837 was long over, but it was clear that any entomological knowledge might help farmers avoid a similar economic and agricultural crisis in the future.12

After Robert Hare read Morris’ report to the fraternity of male scholars, a committee reviewed her findings and deemed them plausible and significant enough to publish her report in the society’s journal.13 Knowing, however, that it would be another few years before the volume would be printed, they decided to immediately reach out to farmers, given how pressing the issue was. Benjamin Coates, one of the committee members, took the lead and wrote an article on Morris’ behalf for The Farmers’ Cabinet, introducing Morris and her findings to the world, with the APS’ endorsement.14

The reactions from readers were swift, unkind, and mostly anonymous. One of the most vicious came from a writer who repeatedly referred to Morris as “Miss Morris,” italicizing her name perhaps to emphasize her gender or at least marital status. Accusing Morris of reviving a long-settled debate, he called into question her scientific skills, claiming that her findings were “opposed by the every-day experience of thousands of observant farmers.” What he found most upsetting, however, was that her study had the endorsement of “imposing names” from the APS.15 In an article for the Southern Planter, based in Richmond, Virginia, an author reported on Morris’ findings but mostly focused on her gender: “notwithstanding [the Hessian fly’s] cunning, he has been unable to elude the feminine curiosity of the lady.” Mocking Morris and her scientific skills throughout, he made a plea to readers: “As we know that some of our male friends . . . entertain different views on the subject, we invite them, if their gallantry will permit, to entertain the lists with the lady.”16 By implying that it might not be worth the damage to their honour to even engage Morris in a debate, the author further excluded her as an outsider.

The fact that Morris herself was not a farmer was certainly one issue. Agricultural entomology, as a field, was in its infancy in 1840, and it is clear from the agricultural journals of the time that there was a general distrust of the urban scientists who instructed readers on how best to manage their farms. “Book farming,” as it were, received some pushback. The fact that Morris was a woman only compounded this outsider status. These journals, however, were an important space for vetting and spreading agricultural information through the reprinting of articles in geographically diverse journals, and if the information she provided about the fly’s behaviour and appearance was swatted down before it ever spread, that information would fail to reach many readers.

Farmers may not have trusted Morris for not being a farmer herself, but entomologists hardly trusted her either. In the mid-nineteenth century, entomologists—like other scientists—were forced to depend on the observations of others to make sense of species that were not available for them to see with their own eyes. Careful drawing and painting skills, as well as specialized jargon and descriptions of anatomy, were integral for communicating with other naturalists if specimens could not be sent. Peer review and the support of institutions like the American Philosophical Society were even more vital. But even if the observer’s drawings were perfect and the description precise, even if he or she used a microscope to amplify observational skills, trust remained central. And most entomologists did not trust Morris.17

The entomologists most interested in and critical of Morris’ findings were Thaddeus William Harris and Edward Claudius Herrick, university librarians who fit insect studies in after their workdays. At the time that Morris had sent her report to the APS in Philadelphia, Harris was busy writing a book on the insects of Massachusetts. Herrick was the closest thing to an expert on wheat pests since Thomas Say’s death several years prior. Performing experiments in his backyard in Connecticut, Herrick helped Harris verify a lot of what was going into the book and the two exchanged letters regularly.18

When Harris read the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, the brief mention of Morris’ report caught his eye. Immediately recognizing the threat that it would pose to the accuracy of a large section of his book, Harris breathlessly penned a letter to Herrick to alert him to the controversy. He urged Herrick to publish something quickly that he might then be able to cite in his book, thus putting to rest the egg-laying controversy.19

Following Harris’ advice, Herrick did just that and published an article in the American Journal of Science and Arts. The puzzle was how to publish something that would dismiss Morris without insulting the men at the American Philosophical Society who had endorsed her observations. Herrick did this by arguing that Hessian flies never laid their eggs in the seed, without ever directly referencing Morris or the APS. Knowledgeable readers would understand what he was doing. By not mentioning Morris’ name and refusing to engage with her directly, he avoided elevating her fame or notoriety, while simultaneously excluding her from the fraternity of entomologists. This also erased her from the historical record.20

Meanwhile, Thaddeus William Harris finished writing his Report on the Insects of Massachusetts in the summer of 1841, feeling all the more confident about his section on Hessian flies now that Herrick’s research had been published.21 Harris, throughout his entire volume, was fastidious in giving credit to the entomologists whose discoveries he relied on. It is in that way that it becomes possible to pick up his subtle tone of disrespect toward Morris, as he suddenly refrained from his more typical offerings of praise and gratitude when discussing her work. Harris described Morris as reviving an “old discussion,” implying that it had long ago been settled and discredited. After describing her intervention briefly, he shot it down, writing “The fact that the Hessian fly does ordinarily lay her eggs on the young leaves of wheat, barley, and rye, both in the spring and in the autumn, is too well authenticated to admit of any doubt.” He later explained to Herrick that he had only even mentioned Morris’ “pretended discoveries” in his book because she had been so warmly defended by the men at the Philosophical Society. His tone and emphasis in the book, though, successfully worked to support Herrick’s claims and dismiss Morris’, disregarding the possibility that Morris had discovered something that needed addressing in the wheat fields of Pennsylvania.22

* * *

One of the ways we might be able to make heads or tails of this debate would be to see the specimens that Morris collected. Modern-day entomologists might then be able to help determine what the fly is known as today. Even in 1841, Morris understood how important obtaining a full set of specimens was for her being trusted. Perhaps her critics would never believe her when she told them what she had seen, but they would have to believe it if they saw it for themselves.

After all of the controversy she had stirred up that winter, Morris was worried that she might lose the support of her local endorsers. Her greatest discovery, therefore, came right in the nick of time. In July 1841, she caught sight of a female wheat fly laying its eggs among the grains of wheat. The fly, interrupted in the process, began laying those eggs on Morris’ finger. Excitedly, she wrote: “I have seen a Tipulous fly in the act of placing her eggs on or in a grain of wheat. This fly and these eggs I have in good preservation.” Comparing the fly to the one drawn by LeSueur in 1817, Morris found only minor differences. The male version of the insect looked precisely like those described by Say and illustrated by LeSueur, according to Morris. The female, however, did not. Her body was entirely black or blackish-brown and her wings “destitute of the hair fringe so conspicuous in the male.” With the new evidence in hand, she could now confidently assert: “These important facts and specimens may prove my theory correct or that there are two species of this distinctive pest.” The next month, Morris submitted an extensive letter documenting her observations to Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Science, another leading if young scientific organization. She also triumphantly submitted the indisputable evidence she had collected. After several summers of gathering infested sheaths of wheat and putting them under bell jars in her library only to find that the flies had died or failed to mature, she finally had a complete set. 23 Unfortunately, this would not be enough.

The specimens that Morris hoped would finally silence her critics were so disregarded and neglected by the scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences that the flies and eggs were destroyed. The Academy’s members did not study them in any way that might officially corroborate Morris’ findings. When Morris learned of the fate of her prized collection years later, not only was she disappointed, she was distressed. Finding a full set of the flies required summers of infestation that were not as regular as they had been a decade earlier. Determined to replace what had been destroyed, she had the great fortune of finding and collecting new pupa in 1847 that she happily deposited with the Academy of Natural Sciences. The set, however, was incomplete, and it, too, no longer exists. When I reached out to the entomological curators of the Academy of Natural Sciences, now a part of Drexel University, they reported that they no longer have specimens from that era. Any chance of seeing or testing the creatures that Morris so painstakingly hunted for have vanished.24

Still, despite not finding a full replacement set of the fly that she studied for years, in 1849 Morris, with encouragement from the entomologist Samuel Stehman Haldeman, gave the fly its name: “Cecidomyia culmicola Morris.” Haldeman suggested using culmicola as the fly moved into the culm or stalk of the wheat plant to mature, something that distinguished it from other Cecidomyia flies.25 Morris sent a letter to the corresponding secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences, officially announcing the name and giving a brief description of its defining characteristics with the promise to donate a full set of specimens as soon as she was able to obtain them.26

Morris was never able to get that full set again though. The fly rarely returned with the frequency it once had.27 Still, in 1852, she was able to send pupa of the Cecidomyia culmicola to Thaddeus William Harris to satisfy his request, and his response was likely very satisfying: “you have sent to me the puparia of your Cecidomyia culmicola. Any person familiar with the puparium of the Hessian fly cannot fail to perceive that these are totally different.”28 Despite this late verification, despite the fact that Morris gave her fly a name, it still managed to vanish. Part of the reason has to do with the endless published critiques Morris received.

* * *

When Morris had initially submitted her report about the wheat fly, she had been reluctant to make a public statement at all. Years later, after receiving a relentless stream of critiques, something in her had changed. Asa Fitch, an entomologist more than two hundred miles away in New York State, sought to make a name for himself in 1845 by publishing a series of articles about wheat flies in the American Journal of Agriculture and Science. Morris was disgusted to find what he had written about her. In these articles that were republished together as a pamphlet in 1847, Fitch catalogued not only the habits of the fly but also the various ways American scientists had described the fly over the previous half century. He included some of Morris’ publications in the list, but toward the end he made space to dismiss her account completely, saying “it appears manifest that the lady was widely misled at the very outset of her observations” and claimed, erroneously, that she must have known she was wrong because she stopped publishing on the topic.29 She had not stopped publishing. Morris fumed over the fact that Fitch had found “every other publication on the subject” but conveniently missed hers.30

Initially, Morris decided to ignore Fitch’s insult, or, in her words “to pass him by in silence as I had my other opposers,” but she was overruled by her friends who encouraged her to stand up for herself. In a polite but fierce letter published in the April 1847 issue of the American Journal of Agriculture and Science, Morris wrote that she craved Fitch’s indulgence to “point out a slight error in his statement, which has arisen from misinformation.” After defending her research and publication record, she put the onus on Fitch to determine what the species of fly actually was, if she was mistaken. Well aware that Fitch and other entomologists like Harris and Herrick questioned her observational skills, Morris pushed back. She emphasized her close inspection of her subjects, writing: “If Dr. Fitch will prove that the flies I so carefully watched for so many years, whose larva feeds in the centre of the straw, as seen by hundreds in this neighborhood, is ‘the fly he suspects it to be,’ I will acknowledge my error as frankly as I now maintain my difference of opinion.” Morris not only emphasized how carefully she observed the specimens, later bringing up her use of a microscope to augment her sight, but she also asserted that her observations were corroborated by “hundreds in the neighborhood” who saw it themselves. Fitch had not only challenged Morris and her scientific authority, in other words, but also local environmental knowledge more generally.31

Morris recognized the inequities inherent in why people did not trust her observations. Even with the support of the most elite scientific societies in the country, her research was still being dismissed. She made a plea for the trust given so freely to other entomologists:

I do not, nor have I ever doubted the statements of gentlemen so learned in the science of Entomology . . . their assurance that they had seen the insect in its different states of egg, larva, pupa, and perfect fly, was sufficient to satisfy me that it was so; I therefore, in all fairness, claim the same indulgence from them and others, when I state that I saw, captured, and glued to a piece of paper, a fly, while in the act of depositing her eggs on a grain of wheat, so like the drawing made by LeSueur, of Say’s Cecidomyia destructor, that it not only deceived me, but all to whom I showed it.

Morris, called on her critics to push aside any issue with her gender and treat her as an equal. What was at stake was not just whether farmers and scientists would take Morris and her research seriously, but also whether her critics’ inability to do so might mean that a tiny, powerful pest would continue to gorge itself in American wheat fields without farmers being able to muster an educated defence. 32

Morris’ defences of her methodology and skills, valuable as they were, ultimately did little to shape the future discussion of her work. The damage done by those who dismissed Morris in print echoed in the entomological literature over the next century and beyond, as they became invaluable references for those making sense of the flies threatening wheat. Morris’ discovery of the Cecidomyia culmicola was occasionally mentioned in the entomological literature, starting with the second edition of Thaddeus William Harris’ A Treatise on Some of the Insects of New England (1852). Even Asa Fitch came around, in 1851, and essentially apologized to Morris for dismissing her work, accepting that she likely discovered another species of Cecidomyia, though he buried this mea culpa in an article directed at a different topic entirely. In addition, Ebeneezer Emmons’ Agriculture of New-York (1854) includes extensive coverage of Morris’ fly. Other entomologists continued to include Morris’ discoveries in their bibliographies and announcements of new wheat fly species, both in the United States and abroad.33

However, in 1897, something changed. In an extensive article about Cecidomyia flies, the French entomologist Paul Marchal dismissed Morris’ diagnosis as unsatisfactory and the discussion of its life cycle as problematic, without going into further detail. Perhaps Marchal, relying heavily of Asa Fitch’s extensive essay on the fly, was swayed by his initial dismissal of Morris’ work fifty years earlier. Whatever the case, after Marchal’s denouncement, other entomologists followed suit. In 1900, J. J. Kiefer, another French entomologist, decided that the culmicola was likely just a misidentified Hessian fly, and eleven years after that the American entomologist Ephraim Porter Felt followed suit.34 So in 1954, when H. F. Barnes, a British entomologist who specialized in Cecidomyia, wrote in a reference book for agricultural entomologists that continues to be cited that Morris must have been confused, observing several different kinds of flies and conflating them as one species, he had more than a century’s worth of doubters to reference. By 1989, when Raymond J. Gagne wrote The Plant-Feeding Gall Midges of North America, he made the decision not to mention Morris or the culmicola at all.35

Whether Morris was mistaken, or whether her critics’ words outlasted her rebuttals, the Cecidomyia culmicola has in many ways vanished. As Barnes wrote at the end of his description of the fly: “the name Cecidomyia culmicola Morris can only be of historical interest.”36 Without specimens for modern entomologists to reference, any solution to the mystery remains elusive. A 2016 study of Canadian insects estimates that in Canada alone there are 16,000 species of Cecidomyia, and over 1.8 million worldwide, with only a tiny fraction of those named. It is likely that the Cecidomyia culmicola is now part of the unknown, anonymous masses.37

The story of Margaretta Morris and the vanishing Cecidomyia culmicola underscores the dangers of not trusting scientists because of their sex (as was the case for Morris), race, or class. Thanks to such social inequities, knowledge was lost and opportunities missed, further revealing the social contingencies in scientific taxonomy and the historical archive.38 We may never know the Cecidomyia culmicola that Morris studied year after year in her neighbour’s field, the one that lived under the bell glass on her desk and that she pinned and sent to a number of entomologists around the country. Any attempts to understand this creature—its behaviour, its appearance, its life cycle—continue to be lost because in the 1840s a number of people refused to believe that a “lady entomologist” knew what she saw. The authority they held and hold and the ways their critiques have rippled outward in entomological literature means that the fly and Margaretta Morris have been lost to history, or at least human history. The flies, after all, no matter their name, might still be enjoying the fields of wheat, flitting from stalk to stalk.

Notes

1 Margaretta Hare Morris, “On the Cecidomyia Destructor, or Hessian Fly,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia Series 8 (1843): 49–51; M. H. Morris to Thaddeus William Harris, September 12, 1847, Thaddeus William Harris Papers (hereafter TWHP), Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

2 Henry Green, “The Wheat-Worm,” The Cultivator (June 1836): 53; “The Harvest Prospect,” The Cultivator (July 1836): 59; “A Preventive of the Wheat Fly,” The Farmer’s Cabinet 1, no. 5 (September 1836): 73; William Penn Kinzer, “The Cut Worm and Hessian Fly,” The Cultivator (October 1836): 109; “The Crops,” The Cultivator (September 1836): 87; J. Hathaway, “Italian Spring Wheat,” The Cultivator (September 1836): 94; “Enemies of the Wheat Crop,” The Cultivator (September 1836): 93; “Lime as a Manure for Wheat,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 6 (October 1836): 85–85; “Hessian Fly,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 12 (January 1837): 185–86; “The Observer—No. 5,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 19 (April 1837): 290; “The Observer—No. 6,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 20 (May 1837): 306–7; “Wheat—Important Discovery,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 23 (June 1837): 359–61.

3 “Price of Flour—Comparative Table,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 19 (April 1837): 303; “High Price of Provisions,” Connecticut Courant, October 15, 1835; Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67–70; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 456–57.

4 Philip Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 33–50.

5 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, 31 August 1843, TWHP; W. Edmunds Claussen, Wyck: The Story of an Historic House, 1690-1970 (Philadelphia: Printed for Mary T. Haines, 1970), 108.

6 Mary Donaldson to Ann Haines, October 13, 1841, Series II Box 267, Folder 418, Wyck Association Papers, American Philosophical Society; Thomas Say, “Some account of the Insect known by the name of Hessian Fly, and of a parasitic Insect that feeds on it,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1, no. 3 (July 1817): 45–48; Charles Alexandre LeSueur, “Plate III,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1, no. 4 (August 1817): 64–65.

7 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, November 6, 1850, TWHP; M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; Deborah Jean Warner, “Science Education for Women in Antebellum America,” Isis 69 (1978): 58–67; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1–28; Kimberley F. Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: An American Pursuit (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003).

8 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; Thomas Say, “Some account of the Insect known by the name of Hessian Fly;” Charles Alexandre LeSueur, “Plate III.”

9 Say, “Some account of the Insect known by the name of Hessian Fly,” 47.

10 “A Preventive of the Wheat Fly,” The Farmer’s Cabinet 1, no. 5 (Sept 1836): 73; “Lime as a Manure for Wheat,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 6 (Oct 1836): 85–85; “Hessian Fly,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 12 (Jan 1837): 185–86; “The Observer—No. 5,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 19 (April 1837): 290; “The Observer—No. 6,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 20 (May 1837): 306–7; “Wheat—Important Discovery,” The Farmers’ Cabinet 1, no. 23 (June 1837): 359–61.

11 For more on nineteenth-century American women in science, see, for instance: Rossiter, Women Scientists in America; Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls; Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “In from the Periphery: American Women in Science, 1830–1880,” Signs 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 81–96; Margaret W. Rossiter, “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science,” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 2 (May 1993): 325–41; Vera Norwood, “The Illustrators: Women’s Drawings of Nature’s Artifacts,” in Made from This Earth (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1993), 55–97; Debra Lindsay, “Intimate Inmates: Wives, Households, and Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 89, no. 4 (Dec 1998): 631–52; Tina Gianquitto,“Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885 (University of Georgia Press, 2007); Renee Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008); Renee Bergland, “Urania’s Inversion: Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and the Strange history of Women Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 34, no. 1 (October 2008): 75–99; Tina Gianquitto, “Botanical Smuts and Hermaphrodites: Lydia Becker, Darwin’s Botany, and Education Reform,” Isis 104, no. 2 (June 2013): 250–77; Jenna Tonn, “Extralaboratory Life: Gender Politics and Experimental Biology at Radcliffe College, 1894–1910,” Gender & History 29, no. 2 (August 2017): 329–58; Kara Swanson, “Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office,” Isis108, no. 1 (March 2017) 40–61; Britt Rusert, “Sarah’s Cabinet: Fugitive Science in and Beyond the Parlor,” in Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 181–218.

12 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; “Stated Meeting, October 2,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1, no. 13 (1838–1840): 282; “Stated Meeting, December 18,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1, no. 14 (Nov-Dec 1840): 318–19; Morris, “On the Cecidomyia Destructor, or Hessian Fly.” On women having men present their findings, see Kohlstedt, “In from the Periphery,” 90.

13 Morris, “On the Cecidomyia Destructor, or Hessian Fly.”

14 Benjamin H. Coates, “Hessian Fly,” The Farmers Cabinet 5.6 (January 1841): 201–05. On the role of agricultural journals as spaces for public science, see James E. McWilliams, American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 16–24.

15 “Observer—No. 24: ‘Who Shall Decide, When Doctors Disagree?’” The Farmers’ Cabinet 5, no. 7 (February 1841): 237–39.

16 “Hessian Fly,” Southern Planter 1, no. 1 (January 1841): 14.

17 On the early professionalization of American entomology and the limitations of the field, see W. Connor Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840–1880 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1995); James E. McWilliams, American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 26–55.

18 Clark A. Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris (1795–1856): Nature, Science, and Society in the Life of an American Naturalist (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 33, 48–50, 62–65; Thomas Anthony Thacher, Sketch of the Life of Edward C. Herrick (New Haven: Printed by Thomas J. Stafford, 1862); “Death of Edward C. Herrick, Treasurer of Yale College,” New York Times, June 22, 1862. A selection of the letters between Herrick and Harris are excerpted in The Entomological Correspondence of Thaddeus William Harris, ed. Samuel H. Scudder (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History, 1869), 181–207. Many of the originals as well as additional letters are in the TWHP and the Edward Claudius Herrick Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives. For more on the role of correspondence in nineteenth-century science, see Janet Browne, “Corresponding Naturalists,” in The Age of Scientific Naturalism, ed. Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 157–70.

19 “Stated Meeting, December 18,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1, no. 14 (Nov-Dec 1840): 318–19; T. W. Harris to Edward Claudius Herrick, March 6, 1841, TWHP.

20 Edward C. Herrick, “Art. XV.—A Brief, Preliminary Account of the Hessian Fly and its Parasites,” The American Journal of Science and Arts 41 (1841): 155.

21 T. W. Harris, A Report on the Insects of Massachusetts, Injurious to Vegetation (Cambridge, MA: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1841), 423–24, 426–27, 431–32, 440–41.

22 Harris, A Report on the Insects of Massachusetts, Injurious to Vegetation, 429–32; T. W. Harris to E. C. Herrick, Esq., copy, November 24, 1841, Series 1, Box 2, Folder 19, Edward Claudius Herrick Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives.

23 M. H. Morris to Benjamin Hornor Coates, June 9, 1841, Asa Gray Papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Folder 11; M. H. Morris to Dr. B. Coates, July 14, 1841, Special Collections, Pennsylvania State University Library, 104 Paterno, Vault, 1986-0104R VF Lit; “Verbal Communications,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia 1 (June 1841): 44–45, 54–56; “Written Communications,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia 1 (June 1841): 57; (August 1841), 66–68.

24 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; M. H. Morris to W. R. Johnson, July 20, [1847,] ANSP Correspondence, Coll. 567, Folder 276, Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA; W. H. Morris [sic], “Hessian Fly,” American Journal of Agriculture and Science 6, no. 16 (August 1847): 105–6; Email from Jon Gelhaus, Academy of Natural Sciences to author, May 16, 2018.

25 Samuel Stehman Haldeman to M. H. Morris, May 21, 1849, Asa Gray Papers, Box 1, Folder 8, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

26 M. H. Morris to W. R. Johnson, July 21, 1849, Academy of Natural Sciences; Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia 4 (1849): 194.

27 M. H. Morris to Dr. Leidy, September 10, 1852, Joseph Leidy Correspondence, Collection 1, Box 4, Folder 112, Academy of Natural Sciences Archives; Thaddeus William Harris to Margaretta Hare Morris, March 17, 1852, Asa Gray Papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Folder 9, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

28 T. W. Harris to M. H. Morris, December 1852, TWHP.

29 Asa Fitch, The Hessian Fly: Its History, Character, Transformations, and Habits (Albany, NY: C. Van Benthuysen and Co., 1847): 23, 42–43.

30 “Stated Meeting, 10 August 1841,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia 1, no. 5 (August 1841): 65–68; M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP.

31 M. H. Morris to T. W. Harris, September 12, 1847, TWHP; Morris, “Controversy Respecting the Hessian Fly,” American Journal of Agriculture and Science 5, no. 12 (April 1847): 206–8.

32 Morris, “Controversy Respecting the Hessian Fly,” 207.

33 T. W. Harris, A Treatise on Some of the Insects of New England Which Are Injurious to Vegetation, 2nd ed. (Boston: White & Potter, 1852), 464–66; Asa Fitch, “Wheat Insects—Joint-Worm,” The Cultivator 8, no. 10 (Oct. 1851): 321; E. Emmons, Agriculture of New-York (Albany: Printed by C. Van Benthuysen, 1854) 5: 179–80; Benedict Jaeger and Henry C. Preston, The Life of North American Insects (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 306; Entomologischer Verein in Stettin, Linnaea Entomologica: Zeitschrift Herausgegeben von dem Entomologischen Vereine in Stettin (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1860) 14: 263; Entomologischer Verein zu Stettin, Entomologische Zeitung 22 (1861): 420; United States Bureau of Entomology, Bibliography of the More Important Contributions to American Economic Entomology (Washington, DC: Government print office, 1889), 66–68; Lawrence Bruner, The Insect Enemies of Small Grains (Lincoln, NB: Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, 1893), 361, 367; Lawrence Bruner, A Preliminary Introduction to the Study of Entomology (Lincoln, NB: J. North & Co., 1894), 205.

34 Paul Marchal, “Les Cécidomyies des Céréales et Leurs Parasites,” Annales de la Société Entomologique de France 66 (Paris: Au Siege de Société, 1897): 64; J. J. Kieffer, Monographie des Cécidomyides d’Europe et d’Algérie (France: Société Entomologique de France, 1900), 413–14; E. P. Felt, “Hosts and Galls of American Gall Midges,” Journal of Economic Entomology 4, no. 10 (October 1911): 473.

35 H. F. Barnes, Gall Midges of Economic Importance, vol. 7: Gall Midges of Cereal Crops (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1956), 84; Marion Harris, email to author, 4 August 2017; Raymond J. Gagné, The Plant-Feeding Gall Midges of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 30–32.

36 Barnes, Gall Midges of Cereal Crops, 84.

37 Paul D. N. Hebert et al., “Counting Animal Species with DNA Barcodes: Canadian Insects,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 371, no. 1702 (September 2016), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0333; Gagné also talks about the vast number of Cecidomyia that remain unnamed and unstudied in The Gall Midges of the Neotropical Region, ed. Raymond J. Gagné (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, Cornell University Press, 1994), 2.

38 For more on taxonomies and their fallibility, see Harriet Ritvo, “Species,” in Critical Terms for Animal Studies, ed. Laurie Gruen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 383–94.