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Vicar of the Amazon, the Rev. Arthur Miles Moss: In the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Bates
Miles Moss went to Peru in 1907 and from 1912 to 1945 was the Anglican Chaplain of the largest parish in the world, one that encompassed the whole of the Amazon basin from Iquitos in Peru to the Atlantic; an area roughly 3,000 miles long and 800 miles wide, amounting to about one quarter of the South American continent.
His great passion was Lepidoptera: his major contributions to science were in the form of three classic works on hawk-moths and swallowtail butterflies, all published in the journal of his patron Lord Walter Rothschild who established Tring Museum containing the largest collection of butterflies and moths in the world.
Following in the wake of great Victorian naturalists such as Wallace and Bates, Moss’ story has been neglected: apart from his publications in scientific journals he left a collection of 25,000 insects, unpublished manuscripts on Amazonian natural history, and some incredibly beautiful water-colours of bizarre-looking caterpillars now archived in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
His great passion was Lepidoptera: his major contributions to science were in the form of three classic works on hawk-moths and swallowtail butterflies, all published in the journal of his patron Lord Walter Rothschild who established Tring Museum containing the largest collection of butterflies and moths in the world.
Following in the wake of great Victorian naturalists such as Wallace and Bates, Moss’ story has been neglected: apart from his publications in scientific journals he left a collection of 25,000 insects, unpublished manuscripts on Amazonian natural history, and some incredibly beautiful water-colours of bizarre-looking caterpillars now archived in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
241 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2022
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September 7, 2022
Figure 126 is a photograph of Moss’ masterpiece ‘A Too-fond Embrace’. Apparently this is ‘courtesy of Elizabeth & Gordon Nelson’. This was a cause of not inconsiderable surprise to me as I admire the picture whenever I step into my mother’s sitting room where it has been hanging for the past forty years. But wait, what’s this? Oh, it’s an errata slip. I don’t think I’ve seen an errata slip in a new book since publishers started using computers. It’s the strangest errata slip I’ve ever seen. It hasn’t been bound into the book. Six lines copied and pasted into a word processor document either three times portrait or four times landscape and then cut apart with scissors. I have the piece from the top left. No doubt my mother’s name will be on this. But no, the omission of my mother is one of three errors on the errata slip itself. According to line five, ‘Dr Bob Hardwick was a relative in his father’s side’. ‘Is’, surely. If my Uncle Bob is dead then I must say he’s done a good job keeping it quiet. The third error is that the list appears to be ordered by page number – but the page numbers are out of order on the list.
And then I started reading the book. If we wanted a full and accurate errata slip we’d need to chop down another hectare of rainforest. This book has not been proofread. It has not even been spellchecked. There are more errors in this book than in any other book that I have ever read. And I include in that total books self published on Amazon.
On every page we have words misspelled, unnecessary words added, words missing. Missing words on which the sense of the sentence depends. Often these missing words are marked in the text with two spaces. It’s as if Howse has written one word and hit the space key. Then he has thought the next word but a disconnect has occurred between his fingers and what passes for his brain. Then he has pressed the space key again.
He has a particular problem with the space key. There are extra spaces all over the place, even where he is directly quoting from other sources. At other times we have words run together. It’s like he started the book with a space quota and has distributed them at random throughout the text.
Words substituted for other words. Words that may be substituted, or perhaps Howse has used the word he intended, but doesn’t know what it really means.
He has a particular problem typing numbers. I have calculated that when he attempts to do so he has a 1/11 chance of hitting the right one, there being ten number keys on the number pad, plus the plastic casing of the keyboard around it. For example, he successfully tells us the year of Moss’ birth, but then apparently hits the casing when trying to give us the day. Two pages later he manages to tell us that Moss was farmed out to a boarding school aged one.
Punctuation is another one. The correct use of commas and full stops is not a knowledge that is always available to him. The use of the closing bracket is apparently a Mystery unto the Lord. Sometimes a concatenation of all these problems occurs, with the result that no analysis can ever recover the intended meaning.
The technical incapacities of the author are not the only problems. It’s very oddly written. For example (and oh, could I give you a few of them!) in the first paragraph we are told that Lake Windermere is the longest in England. We are told where Moss grew up and where he moved to on his return from Brazil. The second paragraph covers Wordsworth and Coleridge, English educational traditions and the geology of the Lake District. The third paragraph gives us Moss’ birth year and tells us a bit about his parents. I kid you not.
Then there’s the paragraph on page 13. Before I quote this I want to make it clear that by page 12 we have reached the year 1898. In the immediately preceding paragraph 1911 is mentioned, but this might be taken as an aside. This early in the book I had not realised that the narrative timeline is completely disordered. If several consecutive events follow each other in the text then it is chance and not, apparently, the intention of the author. The paragraph I’m about to quote, so help me God, takes us to 1915. The paragraph following it is about Moss’ graduation and has no date, so my brain was still in 1915. The paragraph following that is about Moss’ butterfly collecting. It is only in the succeeding paragraph that we realise we are actually in 1900.
‘In the Parish Church at the seaside town of Sidmouth in East Devon there is a War Memorial for those lost in the First World War, which includes the inscription: Moss, John Miles. 2nd Lt. R.A.S.C.John was Arthur’s step-brother, who was killed in France in 1915. Arthur’s stepmother Ethel Hardwick had a house, Winthwaite, in Sidmouth, where the Moss family lived from 1910 until after the first World War when they returned to Helm near Windermere. Arthur may have obtained the few large blues in his collection from Devon – at least it is difficult to imagine that he did not look for them while he was there. Some of the other species in his collection would have come from East Anglia before he left for Peru.’
There’s a lot to unpack, most of it from Howse’s mind, if we are to attempt an analysis of why a man would choose to express himself in this way. I came back to page 13 many times as I read this book and have formulated a rather complex theory that attempts to explain the author’s intent. I’ll not bore you with it. Howse has only managed to mention the step-brother once before in the note to figure 7, where he is called ‘Jack’. And now to have his traumatic death introduced by mentioning the war memorial feels highly inappropriate. And then in the same paragraph to talk about Moss’ butterfly collecting. If Moss heard about his step-brother’s death and then went out collecting then we need to be told as it speaks to his character. But I’m sure Howse is neither trying to be inappropriate, not to comment on Moss. Whatever his intentions, he simply doesn’t know what he’s writing.
So, if I enjoyed the book so much, why such a high rating? Well, it because of another problem. The references. There are 110 footnotes throughout the book. For some reason, 105 of them are reprinted in the Notes section at the end. Second time lucky. These footnotes are a mixture of further detail and source references. There are also some source references in the text. But not everything is referenced. And then if we look at the errors in even direct quotations we realise that this book can never be used as a source by any other book. If another author saw something interesting, they would need to go to Howse’s source to check it, but first they’d need to work out what that source was. It’s such a shame, because it’s obvious that a huge amount of research has gone into the book.
I noticed all these problems because I can read English, but I suspect there are a great many other errors that are invisible to me. For example, I know nothing about Moss or lepidoptery. There could be any number of factual errors. As it happens, because the narrative is disordered, Howse several times recounts some tale and then, forgetting that he has already told us, recounts the tale again with different details, giving a different meaning. Which version is true? Is either of them true? Or neither? What we have here is a total breakdown of trust between author and reader. There is not a single word or meaning in this book that can be trusted on its own account. It’s quite obvious that there is something wrong with him, but whether the dysfunction is congenital or a more recent dementation I cannot say.
It’s quite fascinating to see a traditionally published book in this condition, exactly as the draft was typed, without the intervention of an editor. It’s quite obvious that the text was submitted and printed without anyone reading it. Not a soul. And it’s not due to lack of time. At one point Howse says he is writing in 2020. Well, there’s a 1/11 chance of that date being right, but there are reviews on the front flap of the dust cover so some time must have intervened between submission and publication. Howse does say that ‘plans are in hand for a supplement to this book’ which would include reproductions of more of Moss’ art. I suppose there’s a 1/2 chance of that statement being accurate. I would suggest that that supplement also contain a list of every single error in this book. And a bloody apology would be nice.
And then I started reading the book. If we wanted a full and accurate errata slip we’d need to chop down another hectare of rainforest. This book has not been proofread. It has not even been spellchecked. There are more errors in this book than in any other book that I have ever read. And I include in that total books self published on Amazon.
On every page we have words misspelled, unnecessary words added, words missing. Missing words on which the sense of the sentence depends. Often these missing words are marked in the text with two spaces. It’s as if Howse has written one word and hit the space key. Then he has thought the next word but a disconnect has occurred between his fingers and what passes for his brain. Then he has pressed the space key again.
He has a particular problem with the space key. There are extra spaces all over the place, even where he is directly quoting from other sources. At other times we have words run together. It’s like he started the book with a space quota and has distributed them at random throughout the text.
Words substituted for other words. Words that may be substituted, or perhaps Howse has used the word he intended, but doesn’t know what it really means.
He has a particular problem typing numbers. I have calculated that when he attempts to do so he has a 1/11 chance of hitting the right one, there being ten number keys on the number pad, plus the plastic casing of the keyboard around it. For example, he successfully tells us the year of Moss’ birth, but then apparently hits the casing when trying to give us the day. Two pages later he manages to tell us that Moss was farmed out to a boarding school aged one.
Punctuation is another one. The correct use of commas and full stops is not a knowledge that is always available to him. The use of the closing bracket is apparently a Mystery unto the Lord. Sometimes a concatenation of all these problems occurs, with the result that no analysis can ever recover the intended meaning.
The technical incapacities of the author are not the only problems. It’s very oddly written. For example (and oh, could I give you a few of them!) in the first paragraph we are told that Lake Windermere is the longest in England. We are told where Moss grew up and where he moved to on his return from Brazil. The second paragraph covers Wordsworth and Coleridge, English educational traditions and the geology of the Lake District. The third paragraph gives us Moss’ birth year and tells us a bit about his parents. I kid you not.
Then there’s the paragraph on page 13. Before I quote this I want to make it clear that by page 12 we have reached the year 1898. In the immediately preceding paragraph 1911 is mentioned, but this might be taken as an aside. This early in the book I had not realised that the narrative timeline is completely disordered. If several consecutive events follow each other in the text then it is chance and not, apparently, the intention of the author. The paragraph I’m about to quote, so help me God, takes us to 1915. The paragraph following it is about Moss’ graduation and has no date, so my brain was still in 1915. The paragraph following that is about Moss’ butterfly collecting. It is only in the succeeding paragraph that we realise we are actually in 1900.
‘In the Parish Church at the seaside town of Sidmouth in East Devon there is a War Memorial for those lost in the First World War, which includes the inscription: Moss, John Miles. 2nd Lt. R.A.S.C.John was Arthur’s step-brother, who was killed in France in 1915. Arthur’s stepmother Ethel Hardwick had a house, Winthwaite, in Sidmouth, where the Moss family lived from 1910 until after the first World War when they returned to Helm near Windermere. Arthur may have obtained the few large blues in his collection from Devon – at least it is difficult to imagine that he did not look for them while he was there. Some of the other species in his collection would have come from East Anglia before he left for Peru.’
There’s a lot to unpack, most of it from Howse’s mind, if we are to attempt an analysis of why a man would choose to express himself in this way. I came back to page 13 many times as I read this book and have formulated a rather complex theory that attempts to explain the author’s intent. I’ll not bore you with it. Howse has only managed to mention the step-brother once before in the note to figure 7, where he is called ‘Jack’. And now to have his traumatic death introduced by mentioning the war memorial feels highly inappropriate. And then in the same paragraph to talk about Moss’ butterfly collecting. If Moss heard about his step-brother’s death and then went out collecting then we need to be told as it speaks to his character. But I’m sure Howse is neither trying to be inappropriate, not to comment on Moss. Whatever his intentions, he simply doesn’t know what he’s writing.
So, if I enjoyed the book so much, why such a high rating? Well, it because of another problem. The references. There are 110 footnotes throughout the book. For some reason, 105 of them are reprinted in the Notes section at the end. Second time lucky. These footnotes are a mixture of further detail and source references. There are also some source references in the text. But not everything is referenced. And then if we look at the errors in even direct quotations we realise that this book can never be used as a source by any other book. If another author saw something interesting, they would need to go to Howse’s source to check it, but first they’d need to work out what that source was. It’s such a shame, because it’s obvious that a huge amount of research has gone into the book.
I noticed all these problems because I can read English, but I suspect there are a great many other errors that are invisible to me. For example, I know nothing about Moss or lepidoptery. There could be any number of factual errors. As it happens, because the narrative is disordered, Howse several times recounts some tale and then, forgetting that he has already told us, recounts the tale again with different details, giving a different meaning. Which version is true? Is either of them true? Or neither? What we have here is a total breakdown of trust between author and reader. There is not a single word or meaning in this book that can be trusted on its own account. It’s quite obvious that there is something wrong with him, but whether the dysfunction is congenital or a more recent dementation I cannot say.
It’s quite fascinating to see a traditionally published book in this condition, exactly as the draft was typed, without the intervention of an editor. It’s quite obvious that the text was submitted and printed without anyone reading it. Not a soul. And it’s not due to lack of time. At one point Howse says he is writing in 2020. Well, there’s a 1/11 chance of that date being right, but there are reviews on the front flap of the dust cover so some time must have intervened between submission and publication. Howse does say that ‘plans are in hand for a supplement to this book’ which would include reproductions of more of Moss’ art. I suppose there’s a 1/2 chance of that statement being accurate. I would suggest that that supplement also contain a list of every single error in this book. And a bloody apology would be nice.
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