Entomology and biogeography of the Himalaya: Frederick W. Hope (1839) and Mahadeva S. Mani (1968)

Reverend Frederick William Hope, whose name is celebrated at the University of Oxford as the ‘Hope Entomological Collections’, which houses c. 3.5 million specimens, wrote an article entitled ‘the entomology of the Himalayas and India’ in the Saharanpur botanist John Forbes Royle's Illustrations of the Botany and other Branches of the Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains and of the Flora of Cashmere (1839). In this article, he elaborately talks of various insect taxa, most importantly of the nature of their distribution along the Himalaya and elsewhere in India. His remarks on the biogeography of the Himalaya are striking and foreshadow the biological thoughts that were verbalized in later decades. For instance he talks of ‘ecological selection’, although sketchily, looking at the variations and forms of the Himalayan Coleoptera he examined by obtaining from various English and European museums. Reading this article and the depth at which Hope had analyzed the biogeography of the Himalayan insects, I felt provoked to explore Mahadeva S Mani's commentaries on the insects of the Himalaya, taking his chapter on the Himalayan insects in his monumental book the Ecology and biogeography of high-altitude insects (1968). The present article is a synthesis of key elements from Hope (1839) and Mani (1968). Notwithstanding the fact that the Himalaya, by itself, is a mammoth biome of unique biota, the insects living in that distinct biome are no way different. How Hope's remarks gel with those of Charles Darwin and how Mani relates to both Hope and Darwin in terms of their phenomenology form the remainder of this article.