Science in Arcady

Science in Arcady is a collection of nature essays by Grant Allen, published in 1892. It is one of several similar volumes Allen produced in the 1880s and 1890s in which he turned his evolutionary biology training to short observational pieces about plants, animals, and landscape that originally appeared in the better English monthlies and the Strand Magazine.

The essays are mostly set in the English countryside, with a few pieces from the south of France and from the Riviera coast where Allen spent winters for his health. The subjects are exactly what you would expect from the title. There are pieces on hedgerow flowers, on the natural history of orchards, on the way particular weeds spread, on the lives of butterflies, on river fish, on the seasonal changes in a particular Surrey lane Allen walked often. Each essay is short, perhaps fifteen pages, and combines straightforward field observation with a longer explanation drawn from evolutionary theory.

Allen’s method is to start with something a reader will recognise from their own walks, the smell of meadowsweet in a damp lane or the way certain trees are colonised by specific lichens, and then to work outward into an account of why the thing is the way it is. He is good at making the abstract evolutionary explanation feel local and grounded. The chapters on insect plant relationships are particularly strong because Allen was working in a period when the basic discoveries about pollination were still recent.

The writing is in the warm fluent manner of the late Victorian nature essay, which produced a great deal of good work by figures like Richard Jefferies and W H Hudson. Allen is less lyrical than either of those writers but more informative. The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read a chapter at a time, ideally in summer when the subjects of his observation are around. For readers who want more, his other essay collections include Vignettes from Nature, Moorland Idylls, and The Evolutionist at Large.