Kinsey examines galls — woody structures that gall wasps induce 

 oak trees to produce — in this 1935 photograph. 



the varied art of wood- 

 craft, the skill of living off 

 the land, and spent most 

 of his summers until age 

 twenty-seven as a camp 

 counselor in various 

 parts of northern New 

 England. 



In 1916 Kinsey grad- 

 uated from Bowdoin 

 College in Brunswick, 

 Maine, with a degree in 

 biology. That September 

 he enrolled in the doc- 

 toral program in eco- 

 nomic entomology at the 

 Bussey Institution. Fer- 

 nald, a member of the 

 Harvard faculty, taught a 

 botany course at the 

 Bussey. He had estab- 

 lished his reputation by 

 coauthoring the sev- 

 enth edition of Asa 

 Gray's famous Manual of Botany, pub- 

 lished in 1908, and would later serve 

 as director of the Gray Herbarium. It's 

 not clear how Kinsey and Fernald met, 

 but the Bussey was a small institution 

 and the paths of the two men, who 

 shared a common interest in plants, un- 

 doubtedly crossed early in Kinsey 's 

 tenure there. 



For his doctoral research, as movie 

 fans will recall, Kinsey chose to work 

 on gall wasps. The insects induce oak 

 trees to produce bizarrely shaped 

 woody growths to harbor developing 

 gall-wasp eggs. By September 1919, 

 doctorate in hand, he embarked on a 

 year-long field trip to collect gall wasps. 

 He traveled across much of the south- 

 ern and western United States, on pub- 

 He transportation and on foot, camp- 

 ing and living off the land whenever 

 possible. His travels ended by August 

 1920, when he joined the zoology de- 

 partment at Indiana University in 

 Bloomington as an assistant professor of 

 entomology. There, Kinsey continued 

 working on gall wasps, collecting and 

 classifying hundreds ot species and be- 

 coming an authority on their evolu- 

 tion, until he began his studies on hu- 

 man sexuality in the late 1 930s. By that 



time, he had collected more than five 

 million galls and gall wasps, now 

 housed at the American Museum of 

 Natural History in New York. 



Kinsey 's plan to write a book on ed- 

 ible wild plants took root when he was 

 still a student at the Bussey Somehow, 

 while taking courses, working on his 

 dissertation, and teaching undergrad- 

 uate courses in zoology, he found time 

 to compose a rough draft of Edible Wild 

 Plants. In short, Kinsey's passion for 

 botany was as strong as it was for gall 

 wasps or, indeed, in later years, for sex. 

 In any event, at some time before he 

 graduated from Harvard, Kinsey en- 

 listed Fernald as a coauthor of the 

 book, undoubtedly to help flesh out its 

 technical plant treatments. 



When I sat down at a long table in 

 the library of the Gray Herbar- 

 ium and began leafing through the 

 sixty-four surviving manuscript pages 

 of Edible Wild Plants, I was most struck 

 by their physical appearance. Kinsey 

 wrote the manuscript on a combination 

 of now-crumbling newsprint and used 

 sheets of herbarium card stock that had 

 bits of old labels stuck to them. The 

 pages are large — fourteen by twenty- 



two inches — and writ- 

 ten on both sides in Kin- 

 sey's distinctive, loopy 

 hand [an enlarged example 

 appears in the background 

 on this and opposite pages]. 

 A manuscript written on 

 recycled paper is vintage 

 Kinsey; even after he be- 

 came famous for his sex 

 research, he was notori- 

 ous for his frugality. No 

 doubt his interest in 

 edible wild plants — read 

 "free food" — was part of 

 his belief in the intrinsic 

 moral value of thriftiness. 



The surviving manu- 

 script pages include an 

 introduction, a classifi- 

 cation of edible wild 

 plants into fourteen cat- 

 egories of uses, and de- 

 scriptions of some thirty 

 poisonous plants that could be mistak- 

 en for edible ones. Remarkably, almost 

 all of his writing has been preserved in- 

 tact in the introduction and the first sev- 

 enty pages of the published book. The 

 classification into various usage cate- 

 gories — including such idiosyncratic 

 groupings as "Nibbles and Relishes," 

 "Rennets," and "Masticatories and 

 Chewing Gums" — is an early manifes- 

 tation of Kinsey's lifelong fascination 

 with taxonomy. All his research inter- 

 ests reflect that urge to classify. Even 

 more striking is the evidence of Kin- 

 sey's attraction to primitivism, an incli- 

 nation that shines through in the first 

 two sentences of the book: 



'"Nearly every one has a certain amount of 

 the pagan or gypsy in his nature and occa- 

 sionally finds satisfaction in living for a time 

 as a primitive man. Among the primitive 

 instincts are the fondness for experiment- 

 ing with unfamiliar foods, and the desire 

 to be independent of the conventional 

 sources of supply." 



The statement illuminates the philo- 

 sophical basis of Kinsey's interest in 

 wild plants. And its emphasis on ex- 

 perimentation, primitive instinct, and 

 independence from social norms seems 



July/August 200b NATUHAl HISTORY | 23 



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