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38 2 The Evolution of a Taxonomist I have kept the cynipid research going, though it has slowed because of the other research problem. —Alfred C. Kinsey to Ralph Voris, c. October 1939 Kinsey’s scientific work in the late 1910s through the 1930s was in two broad categories: writing and teaching. As he wrote a book on edible wild plants, wrote and edited three different editions of a high school textbook and two different editions of a workbook, and published his last texts on gall wasp speciation , his academic interests began to change. His coauthored book on edible wild plants demonstrated his curiosity about wild foods and his interest in reordering and challenging accepted forms of classification. Through writing and editing his high school textbooks and workbooks, he developed a philosophy of science for himself and for young people that blended the basics of biology, including an introduction to evolution, with an enthusiasm for the application of science to everyday problems and concerns. That his textbooks and workbooks sold well throughout the country was a testament to his ability to make studying the life sciences interesting to high school teenagers and prompted him to write a biology pedagogy text for like-minded instructors as well. Through continuing his gall wasp research into the early 1940s despite challenges to his theoretical framework from other evolutionary scientists, he forged strong connections with colleagues in the United States and Europe who were intensely The Evolution of a Taxonomist 39 interested in the application of their work to human development. While he left the formal study of gall wasps behind him in the early 1940s, he took with him into the next phase of his research an abiding interest in gathering large data samples to make claims in the human sciences. Together, his writing and teaching prepared him to take on the new intellectual challenges of the marriage course and to consider a larger project on human sexual behavior. The Use and Misuse of Classification Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America was the product of a collaboration between Kinsey and Merritt Lyndon Fernald, who taught botany courses at the Bussey Institution. Fernald remains best known for coauthoring the seventh edition of Asa Gray’s classic Manual of Botany (1908). Kinsey, while completing courses at the Bussey and writing his dissertation, found time to draft a book on edible wild plants in the region of North America with which he was most familiar. Early in his three-year graduate career, in late 1916 or January 1917, he enlisted Fernald’s assistance, “undoubtedly to help flesh out its technical plant treatment.”1 Kinsey appears to have finished the book before he finished his dissertation and left on his gall wasp collecting trip in 1919–20. Portions of the first forty pages and the bibliography survive in manuscript form in Kinsey’s hand at the Archives of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University. The lead author of the remaining three hundred pages remains unknown, but the text throughout maintains the scholarly yet cheerful and occasionally humorous tone of the first forty pages. Kinsey and Fernald drafted the book between 1917 and 1919 but did not find a publisher for it until 1943, when the US army, “then in the throes of the Second World War, used the book in its wilderness survival training program.” Though the first edition lost money initially, it has been revised and reprinted twice (in 1958 and 1996) and remains “among the best of its kind for the number of species it covers, the accuracy of its descriptions, and the practicality of its recommendations for harvesting and preparing wild foods.”2 Kinsey and Fernald divide their findings into fourteen chapters, according to how the nearly one thousand plant species are best prepared for consumption. Each entry contains a textual description of the plant; a short discussion of how previous authors evaluated its palatability; and how successfully the present authors prepared it. Tales of preparation failures and successes often include dry humor, such as the entry for celandine, or swallowwort: “It is a member of the Poppy Family, in which toxic or narcotic properties are frequently present, and has long been viewed with suspicion. However, when young and inexperienced domestic rabbits . . . get into a patch of Celandine, they devour all within reach. Taking this hint, the senior author has eaten young Celandine-leaves, dressed with oil and vinegar, with some enjoyment; nor has he acquired a habit from so doing. Perhaps Che...

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