Edward Step

Edward Step FLS (1855–1931) was the author of many popular and specialist books on various aspects of nature. He wrote many books on botany, zoology and mycology, which were published between 1894 and (posthumously) 1941. Some of those on flowers were beautifully illustrated by Mabel Emily Step (his daughter, b. 1881), including the 1905 'pocket guide' entitled Wayside and Woodland Blossoms. He also contributed to the periodical, Science-Gossip: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Nature, Country Lore & Applied Science.

An inaccurate image showing a grasshopper feeding on a mouse
Another view

When Arthur Mee produced the first edition of his famous Children's Encyclopædia – initially as a fortnightly series from 1908 until 1910 – he asked Edward Step to contribute the articles on plant life. These provided a comprehensive and interesting survey of all the common plants in Britain and many less well-known ones, giving an incentive to young readers to take an intelligent interest in the natural history of the world around them. There were numerous illustrations, but they consisted exclusively of monochrome photographs, attributed to Edward Connold. Illustrations from Step's first work of 1896, Favourite Flowers of the Garden and Greenhouse, have been reproduced on some internet websites.

Although a careful naturalist, Step overstepped the mark by creating the myth of a mouse-eating grasshopper in his book 'Marvels of Insect Life (1915), where he wrote, "In the British Museum (Natural History) there is a specimen of one of the largest known locusts, which was received from a missionary in the Congo Free State a few years ago, who had taken it in the act of feasting upon a mouse it had caught. ... The locust in question does not confine its attention to mice; large spiders, beetles and other insects, and probably small nestling birds serve it equally for food."[1] No grasshopper is however known to feed on mice.[2]

His views on evolution are not obvious from his books. At one point he referred to "the wonders of Creation" (with a capital 'C’ as here),[3] and he wrote a chapter in the same book on the giant tortoise of the Galapagos Islands, including reference to Charles Darwin, but with no mention of evolution. Religious examples are frequent in his books, for example, quoting Beecher's "Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest; a vast and majestic tree is greater than that", and again, "Thousands see in cathedral aisles the reproduction in stone of the pine-forest or the beech-wood."[4]

References

  1. ↑ Step, E. (1915). Marvels of Insect Life: A Popular Account of Structure and Habit. Hutchinson & Co., London.
  2. ↑ Song, Hojun (2007). "Mouse-catching Locust – A Mysterious Creature Revealed" (PDF). Metaleptea 27 (1): 6–7.
  3. ↑ Step E. (1899) By Sea-Shore, Wood and Moorland: Peeps at Nature, S.W. Partridge & Co. Ltd., London: 320 pp.
  4. ↑ Step E. (1903) Wayside and Woodland Trees: A Pocket Guide to the British Sylva, Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd., London & NY: 308 pp.

Books

The following is a list of publications by Step and his co-authors, arranged in chronological order by the dates of the first editions of each work. It does not include the many revisions of his books that appeared into the 1960s.

External links