Edward Step

Edward Step FLS (11 November 1855 – 1931) was the author of many popular and specialist books on various aspects of nature. He wrote many books on botany, zoology and mycology, which were published between 1894 and (posthumously) 1941. Some of his books on flowers were illustrated by Mabel Emily Step (his daughter, b. 1881), including the 1905 'pocket guide' entitled Wayside and Woodland Blossoms. He also contributed to the periodical, Science-Gossip: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Nature, Country Lore & Applied Science.

When Arthur Mee produced the first edition of his famous Children's Encyclopædia – initially as a fortnightly series from 1908 until 1910 – he asked Edward Step to contribute the articles on plant life, to which Step agreed. There were numerous illustrations, but they consisted exclusively of monochrome photographs, attributed to Edward Connold.

Step created a myth of a mouse-eating grasshopper in his book 'Marvels of Insect Life (1915), where he wrote, "In the British Museum (Natural History) there is a specimen of one of the largest known locusts, which was received from a missionary in the Congo Free State a few years ago, who had taken it in the act of feasting upon a mouse it had caught. ... The locust in question does not confine its attention to mice; large spiders, beetles and other insects, and probably small nestling birds serve it equally for food." In fact, no grasshopper is known to feed on mice.

His views on evolution are not obvious from his books. At one point he referred to "the wonders of Creation" and he wrote a chapter in the same book on the giant tortoise of the Galapagos Islands, including reference to Charles Darwin, but with no mention of evolution. Religious examples are frequent in his books, for example, quoting Beecher's "Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest; a vast and majestic tree is greater than that", and again, "Thousands see in cathedral aisles the reproduction in stone of the pine-forest or the beech-wood."