ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's retrospective treatments of beetles—and of the whole inhuman array of barnacles, fish, spiders, wasps, earthworms, and so on for which beetles stand by way of synecdoche—evidence the role of feeling in the making of knowledge. They also suggest a new way of thinking about the consequences of evolutionary theory for how the Victorians understood, to quote Barbara Herrnstein Smith again, "the continuity or discontinuity between humans and other species". Darwin tells tales of a younger self, and he cannot help but do so in the way so many other retrospective Victorian narrators do, which is to say by crafting the past from the vantage of the present. Most studies of epistemology in connection with Victorian science implicitly or explicitly endorse that suggestion. Those depictions also indicate the degree to which beetlemania spills beyond the bodily into the remaining types of practice Jardine and Spary identify: material, social, literary, and reproductive.
