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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [234 Line —— -3.0 —— Norm PgEn [234 tina gianquitto Of Spiders, Ants, and Carnivorous Plants Domesticity and Darwin in Mary Treat’s Home Studies in Nature Mary Treat (1830–93), the prolific naturalist of the New Jersey pine barrens , saw the world around her small Vineland home as a rich field of inquiry for scientific investigation. “To the lover, especially of birds, insects, and plants,” she writes in the preface to Home Studies in Nature (1885), “the smallest area around a well-chosen home will furnish sufficient material to satisfy all thirst of knowledge through the longest life” (6). The diverse collection of essays gathered in Home Studies reveals Treat as an equal opportunity naturalist who bonds with all of the organisms that come under her purview, from birds and bees to spiders, wasps, and ants. Observing wild animals allows Treat to “domesticate” them, to bring them in and make them into participating members of an expanded household, a household defined by reciprocal relationships. Treat embraces this model of cohabitation with the birds, insects, and plants that populate her home-laboratory. Her observations take the form of carefully crafted, objective, and regulated experiments, and her essays resemble narrative laboratory reports that successfully engage both the armchair naturalist and the trained botanist. In these essays, Treat openly acknowledges that she is a participating member of a famous and controversial circle of professional scientists that includes Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, and she warns the unsuspecting reader that she writes for a professional audience first and a popular one only second. Treat was more than just one of Darwin’s occasional correspondents; she was one of the few women writers of the time to advocate a sophisticated brand of Darwinian evolution, and she embraced a model of the natural world that focused on the scientific not the moral connections in nature. The lavishly illustrated essays in Home Studies in Nature are cannily organized to ease the reader into what will at times be a disturbingly up-close view of the natural world. In the opening section on birds, Treat tells her readers how to become “good” observers of nature. She outlines the bias 234 Of Spiders, Ants, and Carnivorous Plants 235 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [235 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [235 around which she organizes her observations—specifically that of seeing the natural world as a web of distinct yet interrelated communities. In the next section, “Habits of Insects,” readers learn how they can apply these observational techniques in controlled experiments on the crawling and flying creatures around them. The daily life of the insect world that Treat illuminates for her readers is a peaceful, familial one in which spiders, ants, and wasps build nests in which to bear and rear their young. It is also a vicious, violent one full of war, danger, and death. Other sections demonstrate Treat’s skills as a leading plant scientist who produced better results from her observations than either Asa Gray or Charles Darwin. Treat’s willingness to interact with nature in a systematic manner, the investigation of nature based on scientific as opposed to moral principles, and the author’s active participation in a community of professional scientists distinguish her from other women writing about nature in the nineteenth century. This essay investigates how Mary Treat bridged the gap between the constraints of a domestic ideology that limited a woman’s pursuit of scientific knowledge and her own desire (and economic need) to present herself to the public as a skilled and original scientist. Specifically, I examine how Treat saw the world around her. She adapted to the demands of her environment and produced popular nature books and articles that described the natural world according to the terms Darwin lays out in On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871). At the same time, she interrogates, as Darwin did, the role of perception in scientific investigation. It would be hard to overstate the impact of Origin...

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