Brewer and Flagg’s Insect Choirs

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century saw two partly competing, partly overlapping explanations for the intricate relations of organisms to the environment. Starting from William Paley’s idea of Natural Theology and Ernst Haeckel’s concept of ecology, and how these two strands of looking at nature come together in Pope Francis’s both teleological and Wordsworthian ecological approach in Laudato si’, this essay concentrates on the way two successful naturalist writers, Cobham Brewer in England and Wilson Flagg in America, express their enchantment with the ‘music’ produced by insect choirs through their respective religious and ecological ideas of nature