Anna Botsford Comstock

Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854 – August 24, 1930) was an American naturalist, author, illustrator, wood-engraver, editor, and Cornell University’s first female professor. She was elected in 1925 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was posthumously inducted in 1988 into the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame.

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Quotes

A real naturalist is never contented with maps of places and pictures of things, but always desires to see the places and things themselves.
- "Chapter X. Hermit and Troubadour. A June Story for Junior Naturalists". Ways of the Six-Footed. Ginn & Company. 1903. pp. 140–149. (152 pages; quote from p. 140; story 1st published in the Cornell Nature-study Bulletin for June 1899)

... the only way to become a connoisseur of honey is to keep bees, for thus only may one learn to discriminate between honey made from basswood and that gathered from clover; or to distinguish, at first taste, the product of orchard in bloom from that drawn from vagrant blossoms, which, changing day by day, mark the season's processional.
- How to Keep Bees: A Handbook for the Use of Beginners. Doubleday, Page & Company. 1909. p. 4. (228 pages)

Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. Nature-study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are.
- Handbook of Nature Study. Cornell University Press. 1939. p. 1. ISBN 9780801493843. (887 pages; 1st edition 1911)

When Anna Botsford Comstock 1885 died in summer 1930 at the age of seventy-five, the pioneering naturalist left behind not only an ailing husband—famed entomologist John Henry Comstock 1874, who was severely debilitated by a series of strokes and would pass away just half a year later—but a 760-page manuscript chronicling their decades of marriage, travel, teaching, and scientific study. It would be nearly a quarter-century until that memoir reached a wide readership, in the form of a book compiled by Glenn Herrick 1896, Anna’s second cousin and the couple’s closest living relative.
Published in 1953 by a division of Cornell University Press, The Comstocks of Cornell was in fact just part of Anna’s original manuscript. It had been heavily edited by Herrick, also a professor of entomology on the Hill—not only to de-emphasize events and characters he considered irrelevant, but to streamline the language, remove any hint of controversy, and shift the focus toward John Henry’s august accomplishments, including his role as founder of Cornell’s entomology department.
- Beth Saulnier, "Her Own Words: A new edition of The Comstocks of Cornell restores the complete voice of its author, squelched seven decades ago". Cornell Alumni Magazine (March/April 2020).