Exactly when the study of insects became a recognized scientific discipline called entomology is somewhat a matter of speculation.

 

However, humans and insects have shared this earth for eons. Based on evolutionary history, it is clear that those six-legged animals were on earth long before we humans walked upright somewhere in Africa. Thus, it is likely that the poet Ogden Nash was biologically accurate in his poem titled Fleas. The only line in the poem is “Adam Had’em!”

Most scientists would probably agree with the underlying message in the poem that the proverbial first human was infested with ectoparasitic insects such as fleas or lice.

It is certain that humans have recognized the presence of insects throughout recorded history.

Some rock paintings from 1800-1700 BCE depict honey bees. Scarab beetles are painted on the walls of tombs in ancient Egypt.

The King James Version of the Bible mentions insects 55 times. Most of the biblical references are about pest insects including three – locusts, lice, and flies – that were responsible for plagues in Egypt.

Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, wrote about many subjects including biology, and was the first person to write specifically about insects. His work describing the biology of honey bees was remarkable for its overall accuracy.

However, Aristotle did write some things about bees that are not true, including that the queen bee is a king bee and that bees cannot hear.

In the 1700 or so years between the time of Aristotle and the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World, there were few scientific discoveries and nothing new was reported about insects.

Once the so-called dark ages ended and scientific study resumed, an interest in insects was mostly a byproduct of other scientific endeavors.

For instance, in Holland, a Dutch fellow by the name of Galileo was interested in studying the stars.

He used a newly developed device called a telescope to view the nighttime sky. Galileo looked through the device in the other direction to make it into a microscope. In this way, he was able to observe the eye of an insect and discovered it was composed of many lenses.

Marcello Malpighi used a microscope to discover the breathing tubes of insects that are called trachea. He also dissected silkworms, and published a monograph in 1688 dealing with the internal organs of these caterpillars. Malpighi’s work on the silkworm was the first book on a single insect.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is sometimes described as the father of microbiology for good reason.

You see, Leeuwenhoek developed a single lens microscope that produced a much finer image than previous microscopes that used double lenses. With such a microscope, he was able to clearly see things such as bacteria, human blood cells, and skeletal muscle. Leeuwenhoek also used his microscopes to observe the life stages of insects, and he specifically described the development of the flea and the ant.

Herbert Ross, an aquatic entomologist who published “A Textbook of Entomology” in 1948 suggested that 1667 or 1668 should be considered the birth date of entomology.

That was because those were the dates that Francesco Redi, the Italian who is considered the father of experimental biology, did a series of experiments involving flies to disprove the concept of spontaneous generation.

Redi’s experiment compared covered and uncovered jars holding raw meat. The uncovered jars ended up with fly maggots in the meat and the covered jars did not, proving that maggots aren’t spontaneously generated but come from eggs laid by flies.

The first use of the term entomology occurred in 1766 when Charles Bonnet wrote in his book Contemporary Nature IX, “I have given the name insectology to that part of natural history which has insects for its object; that of entomology ... would undoubtedly have been more suitable ... but its barbarous sound terryfy’d me.”

 

In spite of Bonnet’s objection, entomology did become the word used to describe that part of natural history dealing with insects. Entomology doesn’t sound so barbarous to me – maybe I have just gotten used to the word over the years.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and ot necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Tom Turpin may write to him in care of this publication.