The Life of a Naturalist
The Life Story of Amalie Dietrich, Naturalist, 1821-1691. By Charitas Bischoff. (Martin Hopkinson. 10s. 6d.) NATURALISTS will probably recognize the name of Amalie Dietrich, though it is not so well known in this country as in Germany. Her work as a naturalist and collector is remem- bered, but few will know anything of her life, nor could they
know it as it is here set down by her daughter, with something of the directness and simplicity that must have been gained frorar'the mother, a- story so simple and poignant that it is difficult to believe it a true tale, and not a work of consume mate art in the substance as well as in the telling of it. It opens in the true fairy tale style :
In the little Saxon town of Siebenlehn there lived in the early part of the nineteenth century Gottlieb '-belle, the.pun3emaker, and Cordel, his wife."
Cordel and Amalie, her " Malchen," out gathering mush- rooms, meet with the young wizard, who turns out not to be a wizard at, all, but the youngest of a long line of distinguished naturalists, who falls in love with Amalie and obtains her reluctant parents' consent to marry her.
The years immediately following her marriage were among the few happy ones which Amalie Dietrich enjoyed. Her house was kept by old Cordel, while she herself helped her husband with his field work, and in the preparation of the specimens which they sold to provide a living. In both she was an apt pupil. The first cloud on their happiness arose when Charitas, the author of this biography, turned out to be a girl, instead of the son for whom Wilhelm had hoped. Them Cordel died, and troubles began in earnest.
Amalie could not manage the housework and help Wilhelm too, so she engaged a servant, who ill-treated the child and eventually proved too attractive to Wilhelm. At the shock Amalie left him, but returned after a year, her illusions gone, to continue the drudgery of preparation, and the long journeys carrying creels or dragging a cart of specimens, her husband always less anxious to take his share of the burden, her beloved child left in the care of strangers. Finally, on one of her journeys, this time alone with the dog who helped her to drag her cart of specimens, she broke down. When she re, turned, after a long illness, it was to find herself and her child deserted by Dietrich, who had accepted a post as tutor and thrown up the struggle of his hopeless household and his life's work at the same time.
It was then that she also was tempted to throw up the work that for her represented the life of the spirit and to take, as her peasant neighbours advised, a greengrocer's business for a living, but she resisted the temptation, enduring untold hardships. Her work, with its contact with the intellectual world, and Charitas, now provided the only two emotions of her life, and from the latter, left behind in Saxony herding cows, she was almost completely separated. But her luck turned at last. Some rich naturalists in Hamburg, attracted by the excellence of her technical work and by her force and sim- plicity of character, found her a commission from the firm of Godeffroy to go as a collector to Australia, and at the same time undertook the education of Charitas.
The rest of the story, in particular that of the ten years of collecting which made her name, is told largely in her own letters to Charitas: One could wish that there were more of them. They are full of such passages as these :
" Don't expect long letters often. I have no time for lengthy correspondence, as fortunately I have plenty of work in hand. How long shall I be occupied in. Australia ? We must reckon on many years."
" You write a great deal about your longing. Does it occur to you that I also have my longing ? . . . it is not good to be for ever wallowing in one's emotions. . . . Send me a picture of what you are doing. I don't mean a diary ; I can't stand diaries, for something worth recording doesn't take place every day."
We have pictures from her, who had once been afraid to go into Zelle Wood gathering specimens, of herself disem- bowelling a twenty-two foot crocodile, being rescued from drowning in a swamp by a tribe of naked Papuans, sitting in camp, surrounded by specimens " whiles all kind of creatures keep crawling in and out between my feet."
She returned at last, an old, shabby, white-haired woman, landing at Hamburg with a cage of eagles as personal luggage, and found Charitas, to whom she had thought to be reunited, about to be married. But now she had friends and leisure to work as she liked, and for thirteen years more she lived in Hamburg, working in the Museum which she herself had largely filled, or visiting her daughter in North Slesvig, tramping in a beeline over fields and ditches to the church tower which marked her home. Before she died she was honoured as she deserved. With this life it is at last possible to estimate the full desert of what it is not too much to call a life of con- sistent heroism.
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