In 1733, French scientist Ferchault de Réaumur received a strange package in the mail. It contained a few stalks of asparagus and a collection of leaves. But, among the plants, Réaumur found what he had requested: beetles and bugs in various stages of development. A lawyer named Gilles-Augustin Bazin had assembled the package, one of many he sent to his friend in Paris. Historian Mary Terrall uses this relationship to show how Réaumur created a correspondence network dedicated to the study of insects. She argues that scientists like Réaumur often depended on non-specialists like Bazin to do important field work. In many ways, this story looks like an early form of citizen science.
Terrall explains that the Postmaster General of France was a big fan of science, and Réaumur benefited from this interest—packages like Bazin’s arrived “expeditiously and free of charge.” This enabled Réaumur to openly advertise for people to send him insects, alive or dead, without worrying about shipping costs. Terrall quotes Réaumur instructing his readers to place the insects “in little boxes with the necessary food for the journey.”
As he did with Bazin, Réaumur developed a consistent exchange with Joseph de Seytres, marquis de Caumont in Provence. Terrall’s analysis of their letters reveals a fascinating dynamic. Caumont himself didn’t usually go out collecting insects; instead, he relied on a local man referred to as M Alphons.
A retiree in a small town, Alphons was an ideal citizen scientist. He impressed both Caumont and Réaumur with his scientific instincts, and they relied heavily on his local connections. Terrall writes that Alphons “enlisted the help of peasants with their own even more local knowledge” to collect cicadas and other insects. Terrall believes this was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Scientists in Paris collected distant specimens, and local people increased their own understanding of insects that directly affected their livelihoods.
It took trial and error to perfect their methods. In one letter, Alphons described how a peasant brought him a basket of soil containing cicada nymphs. He sent the entire basket of soil along to Caumont, afraid that taking the nymphs out would kill them.
Caumont extracted the nymphs and sent them to Réaumur with Alphons’s letter. Then Réaumur wrote detailed instructions for Alphons on preparing specimens, and Caumont sent the basket back, filled with the necessary materials.
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Generally this preparation meant killing creatures and preserving them in bottles filled with alcohol and water. Live insects were welcome, and Réaumur tried to raise many himself, though it was difficult and wasn’t particularly fruitful. Regardless, Réaumur believed that working with dead insects enabled observations that would have been difficult or impossible if the insect was alive.
Terrall quotes Réaumur describing one such discovery: “While I was examining one of these muscles, and meanwhile pulled it gently with a pin and moved it a bit from its place to let it then fall back, it happened that I caused a cicada that had been dead for several months to sing.”
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