Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Much of the work of the British and the Europeans was magnificent, the color pictures alone often stunning for their beauty and their power to arouse fantasy. But the systematics (or the complex placing of organisms into relationships or “systems” of arrangement) rested on the study of a paltry few specimens from the field or from private collections, often leading to distortions and myth, with little detailed information or none at all about where insects had been caught.5

  Among the British naturalists who conceded the dangers and the injustice of preempting the privilege of naming and describing, notable was Edward Doubleday, an aesthetically sensitive young Quaker much enamored of butterflies. In the mid-1830s, when Doubleday came to the United States to collect, he was “struck” by similarities between American and English insects. But after he captured many “very distinct from any known to us,” including “a magnificent Luna moth,” a soft, light green species with delicate long tails, its caterpillar or larva having a preference for walnut trees, “by far the most foreign Lepidopeterous insect,” he changed his mind. Warned in advance that Americans might mock him for chasing after bugs, he soon realized, to the contrary, that he was “actually looked upon with greater respect on the very account of these pursuits.” He received “assistance from the neighbors around, with whom I may chance to meet. How I love America!”6 One of those helping him was W. Wigglesworth of Wilmington, Delaware, who “walked hundreds of miles” to locate for him a “great number of cocoons” of large spectacular American moths, which he then reared to maturity and dispatched to England.7

  Edward Doubleday wrote an original and influential catalog on butterfly genera (or those butterfly species grouped together according to certain shared properties) and, in a pioneering departure from the English obsession with English insects, dealt at length with the world’s butterflies (with most examples taken from the British Museum) and tracked new methods of identification, especially drawing on the veins of the butterfly wings to establish differences among species and genera. Wherever evidence permitted, Doubleday described full life histories, the larval food plants and habits, and the geographical range or distribution, the last, he indicated, “an important branch of enquiry in Natural History, as yet too much in its infancy, for us to venture to draw general conclusions from the facts we possess.” He was among the first to discuss seasonal variation in the appearance of butterflies. In the spirit of both Linnaeus and Buffon, he urged butterfly people to “accurately record facts, but guard against the error of making a theory.”8 All of this, along with his formal arrangement of butterfly families—the swallowtails (large colorful insects with tails) first in order and the skippers (usually drab small insects with large bodies and small wings, resembling moths) last—would reappear in the work of William Henry Edwards.

  In Louisville, Kentucky, Doubleday fell even deeper in love with America, dumbstruck by “the richest and most verdant pastures” he had ever seen. “The whole country, where it has not been ploughed,” he observed, “is like an English park, excepting that the trees are much finer. You see on all sides fine hills, clothed with gigantic trees, valleys with rich meadows, green as emeralds. Many butterflies are out. [There are] masses of flowers; the corn is just browning, and drooping its ripening ears. I never saw such beautiful scenery. Such a sky! Such a sun! Such sunsets! You in England do not know what these things are.”9 He thought seriously of immigrating to Kentucky.

  Edward Doubleday, along with his brother, Henry, formally identified many American butterflies, but Edward came to realize that Americans could best describe and understand their own natural world. In an 1839 letter to a naturalist friend in Massachusetts, he apologized for “our collectors” boasting that American species were mere “allied British species,” few or none unique to America. He would now leave matters entirely in American hands, he resolved: “I do not wish to take from an American the task of making known the productions of his own country. Little as I am what is called a patriot I know how little I should like a Frenchman or a German to be the first to make known a large portion of our insects, and I can from this judge what your feelings must be in a similar case.”10

  Most Americans in the early nineteenth century probably viewed nature as something to dig up or harvest from the earth or to be torn down and transformed into real estate or money. By the late 1840s, they were well on their way to forging a new capitalist civilization. On the other hand, there were many Americans who were, like the mine owner William Henry Edwards, both extractors of natural wealth and serious naturalists. Still others resembled Edward Doubleday, turning to nature wholly for insight, and some of these helped create a new American science of butterflies. One such individual was an English émigré, John Abbot, who foraged for insects in the woods, swamps, and fields around Savannah, Georgia; in 1797, he coauthored, with the Englishman John Smith, the first significant volume on American butterflies, The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia, lauded as “perhaps the best lepidopterological work of the eighteenth century.” The book deviated from earlier efforts by illustrating clearly and meticulously the caterpillar, pupa, and adult butterfly, as well as larval food plants and sometimes the egg for each insect observed, most discovered by Abbot himself.11 Boisduval later adopted several Abbot images in his own first catalog, with full attribution. In his old age, Abbot continued his investigations, working from a small cabin in Georgia, cared for by a slave named Betsey.12

  Another early enthusiast was Titian Peale, a Doubleday acquaintance and the son of Charles Willson Peale, founder of the country’s first natural history museum, in Philadelphia, then a magnet of American natural science, and Titian’s birthplace in 1799. Titian’s artistic family was fiercely ardent about nature; for him, as for his father, “Art and Nature” were inseparable, and butterflies integrated the two perfectly.13 At the age of twenty, Titian was hired as a “painter of natural history” on a government-backed expedition to inspect the mostly unmapped Louisiana Territory as far west as Yellowstone.14 Years later, he sailed recklessly alone to Brazil with a merchant as his sponsor. From the deck of a steamboat on the Magdalena River, he sighted on the sandbars near Buena Vista many hundreds of iridescent, rainbow-colored Urania fulgens (from the Latin and the Greek, meaning literally “shining heavenly female”), an unusual moth with swallowtails that flew in the daytime, “their expanded wings, in clusters on the moist earth, rising in such confusion when disturbed that numbers were caught at a single sweep of a collector’s net.”15 The sight burned in him a desire for tropical species many decades before others in the United States had acquired a taste for them.16 Peale had ambitions to write an exhaustive volume titled Lepidoptera Americana, a catalog on all known North American butterflies “in the various stages of their existence, and the plants on which they feed,” intending to do his own fieldwork and his own plates, and also to prepare another volume on tropical insects; but no market existed, and neither book saw the light of day.17

  Abbot and Peale, reflecting the impact of Buffon, unlocked the gates for greater American work on life histories.18 In other ways, their era had limits: no major collections, few journals or societies, no original books, no core group to broadcast the gospel of butterfly collecting and study. But by the late 1860s, these limits were nearly all gone, erased by the rise of a new literature, new clubs and societies for butterfly study, and the brilliant Yankee trailblazers, William Henry Edwards and Samuel Scudder.19

  Edwards and Scudder were the master figures in the history of the American encounter with the butterflies of North America, building on the achievements of the others. These two men, sons of Calvinists or neo-Calvinists, would tell the stories of more unsung American butterflies than anyone in history. They would go further, too—they would enrich the biographies of all known American butterflies, previously described by the Europeans and the English on the basis of only a few specimens, almost always with an eye to the adult insect. In a way well beyond earlier naturalists and, to som
e extent, later ones, Edwards and Scudder would scrutinize all butterfly existence: every stage, what the insect ate, its courting and mating behavior, its “parenting” practices, how it dealt with the surrounding world, how it kept going in face of a grisly army of enemies, and what finally killed it. In books of remarkable depth, figured in unprecedented clarity and completeness, and written in lucid prose, they would deal with butterflies almost completely as living things and with a determination to remain independent from the reigning economic priorities in America.

  Samuel Scudder fought with William Henry Edwards throughout their relationship but still considered him the “foremost student of the life history of American butterflies.”20 That view has persisted up to our own time. Edwards would combine in his life the enterprise of a pioneering coal mine manager with the enthusiasm of a butterfly man; he was an extractor of two different kinds of wealth, both of which he saw as part of the plenitude of the natural world. A direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, America’s foremost theologian and one of its most powerful minds, William was born in 1822, only sixty-four years after Jonathan Edwards’s death. In religious terms, the years between them could have been centuries, a void. William hated Jonathan’s Calvinism, with its assertion of the sovereignty of God over all creation, of eternal damnation as the price of sin, and of the impossibility of people saving themselves or knowing for sure whether or not they were saved at all. William himself was a secular agnostic and a Darwinian; he believed that most people made their own way in life and had no need for a sovereign God.

  William Henry Edwards. Courtesy of the West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, West Virginia.

  Yet William Henry Edwards’s feelings about the natural world can be traced back to his renowned relative, who viewed nature not as something to be appropriated as wealth but as “spiritual beauties.” “Bodies being but the shadow of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties. This beauty is peculiar to natural things, it surpassing the art of man,” Jonathan observed in an essay of his youth, “Beauty of the World.” “The fields and woods seem to rejoice, and how joyful do the birds seem to be in it. How much a resemblance is there of every grace in the fields covered with plants and flowers, when the sun shines serenely on them.”21 At the same time, Jonathan delved into the latest scientific discoveries, including those of the equally religious Isaac Newton, which he tried brilliantly to reconcile with his religious vision. Jonathan was fascinated with the small things, such as spiders, especially forest spiders, whose silken threads let them float about through the air. He decided that their “floating” gave them “a great deal of their sort of pleasure,” while making them, at the same time, susceptible to the wind which, he thought, carried the spiders off and destroyed them. Such was God’s way of checking spider fertility, which, left unchecked, would skyrocket. God used similar methods to restrain all insects, Edwards asserted, so that “taking one year with another, there is always just an equal number of them.”22

  His great-grandson shared his curiosity about the little things, though he specialized in butterflies, not spiders. William Henry Edwards had a comparable conception of an energy coursing through organic life, forming and unforming it, and fostering some kind of harmony over the very long haul. For Jonathan, this power was God power or the “Being” of God, the architect of nature “in the beginning” and throughout time, inherent yet transcendent: “The universe is created out of nothing every moment, and if it were not for our imaginations, which hinder us, we might see that wonderful work performed continually.”23 For William Henry, the deciding impulse was, rather, natural selection, acting in bits and pieces intrinsically, each organism constantly in a perpetual “struggle for existence” that made life and took it, too, checking fertility and creating the fittest specimens. Was this chaotic force but another version of God power, acting ruthlessly and without purpose, just as God often seemed to do in the eyes of Calvinist sinners, helpless to save themselves (like all those spiders dead before their time)? If anyone had told William Henry that his butterfly interests might have been found in the crucible of his forebear’s Calvinism, he would have jeered, given his contempt for his ancestor’s religion and his own radical take on the “beauty of the world.”

  William Henry Edwards was born in his grandfather’s house, “in the village of Hunter in the heart of the Catskill Mountains,” as he put it, nesting ground for many butterflies he would later study. His grandfather, Colonel William Edwards, erected what was at the time the largest tanning factory under a covered roof in the country, standing at the heart of Hunter, with sheds for hemlock bark and cordwood and a boardinghouse for single men. Edwards grew up amid strangers and factory smells, along with the poverty caused by economic cycles that would sometimes afflict his family; he accepted the toxic impact of tanning on nature as a fact of life.24 William Henry’s father, William, cut in the religious mold of Jonathan Edwards, believed in a “personal devil” and “a fiery hell,” while his mother, Helen Mann, was a religious liberal. In 1838, the elder Edwards sent his son to Williams College, in Massachusetts, a Congregationalist school governed by strict religious principles, established, in Edwards’s words, for “the sons of poor men who had striven hard to get to college.” The sixteen-year-old Edwards nearly “froze to death” his first year, during an “infernal winter” that seemed to seep into the beds and books and was worsened by his roommate, a zealot of twenty-eight who tried, one Sunday, as Edwards later recounted to Scudder, “to get me on my knees to prayers.” The zealot tattled to the college president that Edwards had violated a Sabbath law against all secular activity by reading Livy on Sunday, and Edwards was dressed down by the president for violating the ban.25

  Edwards could not stomach Williams, except for one thing: it was among the first colleges in the country to put natural history at the forefront of its curriculum, unwittingly giving him a secular bridge to the glories of the natural world. Wherever natural history appeared in America, it had this effect: it created and justified the logic of collecting, which was not merely “getting” or “assembling” objects to have or hoard them or to put them on display but a path into nature; it was the thing itself, the clarion call of Western systematics; countering the economic, extractive approach to nature, it beckoned young men and women to go out into and to feel and touch the living world around them. Under the tutelage of Jeremiah Emmons, a professor of natural history at Williams, Edwards became a collector, later observing, “There is no occupation so delightful as that of collecting examples in any branch of natural history.” He read deeply “along natural history lines,” admiring, especially, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne and Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist; the former set him to keeping a journal, the latter to dreaming of exploration. His first interest, as a freshman, was in the study of birds, one he picked up “all of a sudden,” “going out every fine day,” aroused by the colors and patterns; he “hunted and stuffed” them, as did many boys throughout the transatlantic world until the end of the century. Edwards sold subscriptions at Williams to Audubon’s The Birds of North America, the fourth volume of which had just come out in Edinburgh and London. He tried, briefly, to collect butterflies and even made a net, but he had no clue how to pin insects or preserve them from decay. He knew of no one else anywhere who collected butterflies.26

  Although, at twenty-two, Edwards hoped to become an ornithologist, he had to settle for jobs teaching at middling boys’ schools in New Jersey. The work was made bearable, however, by frequent excursions into nature for birds, mostly with other young men, such as a “Mr. Kowalski,” who in May 1844 “brought a double barreled gun” with him. “Mr. Kowalski shot a New Warbler. Besides this we shot a Black throat Blue. Black throat Green. Black and white creeping and Blue wing, yellow Warblers, a Red-eyed Vireo. Saw a Scarlet Tanager, but he flew from us.”27 Then, unexpectedly, in 1846, Edwards’s resourceful uncle Amory, a businessman near his own age, persuaded Edwards t
o join him on a nine-month voyage on the Orinoco River, along the very same route Alexander Humboldt had taken and whose Personal Narrative of Travels Edwards had read. Once there, Edwards hired soldiers to help kill birds for his collection and journeyed to the breeding grounds of the scarlet ibis and the roseate spoonbill, “the gaudiest birds that fly.”28 Edwards’s account of the trip—Voyage up the River Amazon, written in 1847, on his return home—made him briefly famous. His only regret was failing “to collect butterflies,” “everywhere, and often beautiful.”29

  Also in 1847, Edwards’s youngest and dearest brother, Jonas, died at age twenty-four, and William inherited from this budding artist two things: a costly antique gold cross bought partly with a loan (at the time of his Jonas’s death still unpaid) and thirty thousand acres of land in West Virginia (then still part of Virginia). William, out of brotherly love, sailed to London to find a buyer for the cross, so the loan could be repaid. Equipped with his explorer’s reputation, he had easy access to naturalists.30 In London, he met William Spence, the elderly coauthor (with William Kirby) of the best-selling 1815 book An Introduction to Entomology, the first work of its kind, with lively stories about insects, including butterflies and descriptions of “metamorphosis.” Spence and his wife had just finished “reading my book,” the young Edwards rejoiced, “and their heads were full of it.”31 He also met John Gould, the “Audubon of England,” whose sons had read his Voyage up the River Amazon “over and over again,” and together they discussed Gould’s popular books. Gould showed Edwards his hummingbirds, “exquisitely mounted and arranged in glass cases,” a form of display of birds and of insects that had just become popular in England.32 Edwards “turned the hummers” around, he later recalled, “so as to present their several fronts to the light. I never saw anything half so magnificent.”33 In a visit to his hotel, two starry-eyed young men, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Bates, not yet famous, told him they had been inspired by his book to go to the Amazon themselves and were leaving for Brazil the very next day. The many butterflies they caught there later became evidence for their own original evolutionary studies.