The Bat’s Flea, with Fleabane

The story

John Curtis's British Entomology (1824–1840) set itself an almost impossibly ambitious goal: illustrate every insect species then known to inhabit Britain, published in installments across sixteen years and over 700 hand-colored plates. This one records the yellow bat's flea, an obscure parasite specific to bat roosts, paired — following the convention Mark Catesby had already established decades earlier across the Atlantic — with blue fleabane, a wildflower whose common name reflects the old folk belief that its dried, burned foliage repelled fleas from a household. What to notice: the flea's supplementary anatomical studies along the bottom margin (leg joints, antennae, wing structure) reflect Curtis's real scientific ambition — he was a founding figure in British entomology as a formal discipline, and these weren't decorative plates but a working taxonomic reference meant to let a reader identify a specimen with confidence.