Though 1869 might have been a thrilling butterfly year for Scudder, personal misfortune robbed him of this glory. His wife, Ethelinda, became gravely ill after giving birth to a son, and they sailed to Europe and North Africa for her recuperation, traveling as far south as Alexandria and Cairo and settling for most of the time in Montreux, Switzerland, on Lake Geneva at the foot of the Alps, where many naturalists lived. (One hundred years later, Vladimir Nabokov, Scudder’s modern champion, would live and die there.) Scudder hated being far away from the butterflies as well as the naturalists at home, principally from Edwards, and Edwards was unhappy to see him leave, partly because he felt Scudder needed him. “You are unfortunate in having to be out of country and dependent on the observations of others,” he wrote. “I could aid you a good deal if you were easier within reach, for I am always observing something.” But he needed Scudder, too: “I have some puzzling things to consider of occasionally and I am sorry you are so far away that I cannot write you as frequently as I would for consultation.”173
To compensate for being abroad, Scudder scaled the high Alps to catch butterflies, and he studied fossil species recently found in Europe, in time emerging as a great authority on fossil Lepidoptera.174 He spent hours in stuffy local libraries cogitating on butterfly genera, with results that would upend conventional notions of butterfly groupings and, eventually, infuriate the likes of William Henry Edwards. Known, in the jargon of the times, as a “lumper,” Scudder made few species but many genera, grouping species together by shared “conspicuous details of structure,” such as the wing veins or the genitalia. (On the other hand, a naturalist who made many species but fewer genera was known as a “splitter,” a term, along with “lumper,” still used today.)175 Following Darwin and Walsh, Edwards viewed genera as arbitrary and artificial constructs, with no actual existence in nature, and serving mostly as convenient devices for classifying organisms. Scudder, on the other hand, believed, with Agassiz, that genera were God-designed and perfect, just like species. “I find them in Nature,” he told Edwards in 1871, “and it is my business, undertaking the work I have, to weigh and publish what I see.”176
He was concerned, however, that too many genera had been made over the years by uninformed individuals who’d used indefensible evidence and fostered a mayhem of names. To establish order, Scudder daringly revised older descriptions, applying in each case “the law of priority,” a “law” invented in England governing the classification of all butterflies and enforcing stability in naming (for example, the name chosen by the first describer sticks, so long as it is accurate).177 “There is hardly one of the genera which I can leave in its old limits,” he told Edwards. On “systematic” grounds, Scudder rejected an older ordering that had put the big showy swallowtails, or the Papilionidae, at the top of the butterfly hierarchy; he placed, instead, the medium-sized, low-flying, and dull brown satyrs and wood nymphs, or, collectively, the Satyridae, at the top, beginning with the genus Oeneis, and put the species Oeneis semidea, Scudder’s own anointed favorite from Mount Washington, the very first in line! He added numerous new genera, enlisting names penned by Jacob Hübner, the man Boisduval thought Edwards most resembled and whom Scudder believed had “priority” in the naming of many butterflies. In the end, Scudder created nearly one genus for every two species!178
Scudder sent a copy of his essay to Edwards, followed by another unsettling paper, this one co-written with Edward Burgess in Cambridge, demonstrating how the genitalia of male butterflies (the most complex of the organs visible on male butterflies, with a character often unique to each species) could be relied on to identity butterfly species. Some Europeans had earlier shown how genitalia might be so enlisted, but Scudder may have been the first to look at them under a microscope, at magnifying powers of 125 times and up.179 Inviting Edwards’s reaction to both papers, he sought an exchange of letters that would, in its own right, cut down the distance between them at this critical moment when both were working on their books at the same time, on the same subject, and for the same publisher. “I am delighted to hear that Hurd and Houghton are to publish your book,” Scudder wrote Edwards in November 1871. “I should have told you before that mine was to be in their hands. I am sure we shall assist each other in this new way.”180 Their letters to each other give a glimpse into their temperaments: Edwards, older by sixteen years, paternalistic, arrogant, and mincing no words; Scudder, guarded and well mannered but just as unbending on matters dear to him.
Sniffing the scent of Agassiz in Scudder’s analysis, Edwards challenged his colleague, “I do not believe in such a thing as purity of genera. A genus is fluid as water or elastic as rubber.” Two years before, Edwards had asserted nearly the same about species, based on his research on polymorphism, much of it unpublished at the time and shared with Scudder (who was then in Cairo with his sick wife and must have been excited to receive it). “There are some curious things about this species,” Edwards explained about seasonal forms of the zebra swallowtail, “not paralleled by anything I have read of.” He added, “I don’t know what to say of such a strange complication. It confounds one’s notions of species. I don’t believe in the immutability of species anyhow, and I study these variations with great interest.”181 Edwards, known in his own day (and in the present) as a splitter, not a lumper, ever the careful Darwinian, sometimes seemed neither of these.
Yet Edwards did not oppose making new genera, so long as “there is really a reason for it,” he advised Scudder, and especially if one could show some “natural” justification. “And if you follow the butterfly from egg to imago and form your genera upon differences in all stages, nothing can be said against them, that is within any reason.” Still, Scudder, he complained, was himself making too many genera, and relying too much on Hübner for names. Although Boisduval had flattered Edwards by calling him the “Hübner of America,” he had unwittingly praised the wrong man; Edwards actually detested Hübner and his system, thought him uneducated and barbarian, and despised his “tribal names” as nonsensical. Edwards said nothing against Hübner in his letter to Scudder, but he did argue that the established arrangement of butterflies was sound. “The system was a good one,” he maintained, the Darwinian supposedly more radical than Scudder. Nor was Edwards alone in this belief; few labeled him a radical or troublemaker (although they might well have), whereas many were certain that the younger Scudder, a believer in the God-ordained, was a bull in a china shop. Edwards himself accused Scudder of betraying “the fathers.” “I don’t allow your right to deviate from usage and to attempt introducing an entirely new mode of identifying species, and that no man in a hundred could follow,” he wrote. “Microscopic examinations are very well as a mode of distinguishing difficult species and so an adjunct, but you should not cut adrift from the fathers.”182
Edwards was unhappy that Scudder had “put his name to such a paper” and suggested that he pay less mind to classification. Taxonomy and nomenclature were important, Edwards conceded, and he certainly did his share of it, but they often proved a waste of time. In echoes of Comte de Buffon’s harangue against Carl Linnaeus in the 1750s, Edwards urged Scudder to stick to natural history or biology. “I cannot go with you in this barren field you have entered upon. Life is too short.”183 He criticized Scudder, too, on morphological grounds, disputing his use of male genitalia—or what he half-jokingly called “the tails”—to identify species.184 And please remember, he added, when you address “the tails,” that butterflies come in two genders; “your scheme makes no provision” for “a female. She is a superfluous individual.”185 Scudder reacted defensively: “I do not intend to make the genital organs the prime feature of my book—I only meant that it would be a noticeable one because heretofore neglected. I shall simply describe those of each species in connection with the description of the other parts of the body; and I shall figure each because they are difficult to comprehend without illustration.”186 Privately, Edwards also disparaged Scudder’s hierarchical arrangemen
ts—that one butterfly family was “higher” or “lower” than any other. Nature, Edwards maintained, on Darwinian grounds, did not make such distinctions, and nor should we.
For all their testiness, Edwards’s letters to Scudder were warm and friendly, as were Scudder’s to him. “I have been daily watching for the first butterfly,” Edwards wrote, soon after a last winter snow storm had blanketed Coalburgh, “which will be Violacea (an azure blue), and till that happens, I will not allow that spring has really come.”187 Once, learning that Scudder and his wife were going to Paris, he asked the younger man to get Boisduval’s photo from Boisduval himself “for my Album” (a ritual among butterfly people), and Scudder did so with pleasure, as when he’d been in Cairo and Edwards had requested Egyptian stamps for his children.188 Edwards may have disagreed with Scudder’s generic distinctions, but he wanted the two of them to present the same face to the world. “Now give me your genera,” he wrote in December 1870; “it is better that we be in accord.” And, three months later: “I would rather be uniform with you, if I know your determinations.”189
Both men complained that Europeans snubbed Americans as ignorant about their butterflies. In June 1871, Edwards wrote Scudder about the German naturalist Otto Staudinger, one of the most sensational men in the history of butterfly science, whose catalog of European species was so influential, another leading naturalist had argued, as to induce “all collectors to use the same names.” Staudinger had asserted in a letter, Edwards told Scudder, that most of the American fauna were “the same as the European,” and to find out if the German knew what he was talking about, Edwards had mailed him three butterflies that looked alike and that Staudinger had never seen. “I innocently asked him to tell me what they were,” and Staudinger had replied that they replicated exactly a single European butterfly. How ludicrous, Edwards told Scudder, since the two Americans knew how different the larvae of each insect was from the other. “Suppose I undertake to pronounce on the butterflies of Europe with one or two of each or none at all in hand. They would feel insulted by the suggestion.”190 (A year later, Edwards stated this categorically in volume 1 of The Butterflies of North America: “The truth is, the sooner the theory of the identity between the European and North American fauna … is exploded the better.… The number common to the temperate regions of both continents can be counted on one’s fingers.”)191
Scudder responded in complete agreement: “The view of Staudinger and others about our species seem to me inadmissible on general grounds. They seem to think that our fauna in its general aspects differ but little from theirs, but I shall be able to show that it is far from being the case.”192 How ironic that both these men—one a Darwinian who believed that butterflies might migrate or hybridize freely, the other an anti-Darwinian certain that the boundaries of species could not be breached—were arguing for the independence of American butterflies. As the targets of Edward Doubleday’s advice, they wanted to affirm to the world a common sense of American destiny and identity.
In August 1872, Scudder’s wife, after much sufffering, died in Montreaux, leaving him broken and with the care of their son, Gardiner. The following year, in April 1873, he came home to begin, in earnest, his work on butterflies. In the summer, with help from his wife’s legacy, he traveled to the Smithsonian in Washington to inspect the butterfly collection there, followed by a visit to Edwards in Coalburgh, West Virginia, and ending in Reading, Pennsylvania, to see the insect cache of the weird and intense Herman Strecker, a German-American stonemason in love with the beauty of butterflies as no one else in America.193 Scudder’s purpose was to examine all the specimens he could, and in the greatest number, so that he might distinguish species correctly. Later in the year, he presided over the Cambridge Entomological Club, the first such group in America and one of the two important clubs he either cofounded or led in the mid-1870s. In the Cambridge club’s early years, members convened at a midsummer campsite on the slopes of Mount Washington. In 1874 it published a new journal devoted to insect study, called Psyche, meaning in Greek both “butterfly” and “soul.” Still available today, it was edited by Scudder for a time, with articles by both men and women.194 Around the same time, Scudder further upset Edwards by defending, in Psyche in 1874, the common names for butterflies. Edwards preferred the Latin names of Linnaeus, again the “radical” Darwinian loyal to “the fathers.” Although Scudder, too, employed Latin or Greek nomenclature, he also thought that Americans might prefer more everyday names. “It is my belief,” he wrote, echoing a view prevalent in England, “that the study of butterflies would be far more popular, if they … had common names.”195 He invented many names himself, still used today, such as “the Blue Swallowtail,” “Regal Fritillary,” “Great Spangled Fritillary,” and, most celebrated, the “Monarch,” so called because it “ruled a vast domain” and had a life span longer than any other butterfly on the continent.196
A second club, cofounded by Scudder in 1878, the Appalachian Mountain Club, was the country’s first enduring mountain-climbing group, modeled after a British prototype, and responding to a wave of Romantic recreational mountaineering begun in the 1840s.197 Scudder edited the club’s journal, naming it Appalachia. The club, also chiefly Scudder’s handiwork, had a remarkably mixed membership, thirteen women and eleven men, most of them from Williamstown and nearby towns, its purpose to know “the natural history of the localities.” Familiar with every inch of the countryside and the group’s leading spirit, Scudder conducted one exhausting “tramp” after another, “scouring the whole region,” scrutinizing ponds, glens, meadows, basins, and springs. On one occasion, he supervised a spectacular three-day hike of eight men and women to the top of Mount Washington, on a pathless route through a maze of scrub, soft mosses, leaves, and hazardous rocks, ending at twilight. The Cambridge and Appalachian clubs were partly excuses for Scudder to get back to the White Mountains. “It is a good thing,” he later said, “to come into direct contact with Nature in the fields and woods.”198
In 1874 Scudder wrote an eloquent chapter on insects for The First Volume of the Final Report upon the Geology of New Hampshire, devoted principally to the distribution of butterflies. He laid out beautifully the three distinct zones of life along isothermal lines (forest district, subalpine, and alpine) in his favorite place—the White Mountains, which he explored up and down in the Humboldtian manner, tracking what he had come to believe was the most exceptional butterfly fauna in the United States.199 He began, of course, with an account of his discovery, O. semidea—the longest and most affectionate description in the volume—followed by a parade of fritillaries, skippers, angle-wings, swallowtails, purples, and the monarch. But it was only a taste of the work that in 1869 he had hoped to finish in a few years’ time. He had misjudged: his grandest achievement lay in the future, coming twenty years later than he had planned. Edwards’s best work, too, lay in the future, and would emerge, surprisingly, out of the sudden wreckage of his coal business.
TWO
The German-American Romantics
Throughout the nineteenth century, Germans migrated to America in larger numbers than any other group, introducing into the country a mature scientific tradition. They brought with them the oldest butterfly culture in Europe, dating back perhaps to the late seventeenth century.1 From San Francisco to Newark, often in rooms above saloons, they either founded or cofounded America’s first societies for the serious study of insects. In the early 1870s, many of Brooklyn’s butterfly people, most of German extraction, met upstairs at a saloon on Broadway in Williamsburg to talk butterflies and other insects, afterward stepping downstairs, where the beer flowed freely. Once the same group gathered in another Williamsburg saloon, John Kramer’s on Graham Avenue, each man with a raffle ticket giving him a chance “on a collection of butterflies to be drawn for.” “The event was an orderly jolly gathering of entomological enthusiasts,” one ticket holder recalled, “who discussed collecting experiences and drank vast quantities of wholesome lager
beer.”2 Germans also emigrated to Philadelphia and to the Baltimore region, among them Karl Zimmerman, an aristocratic German who in the 1840s collected butterflies and other insects in the southern United States and in Brazil, financed by German merchants eager to sell exotic wildlife, including butterflies.3
Another Baltimore resident and lepidopterist was John Morris, a Lutheran minister and the son of a German mother and a Prussian-German doctor who’d served in the American Revolutionary War. Born in 1803, he briefly taught at the Pennsylvania College in Gettysburg, and, with the help of thirty students, organized one of the country’s earliest natural history societies. “I am the only person in Baltimore,” he told a friend, “who pays any scientific attention to butterflies.”4 In 1859, he completed the first catalog devoted entirely to American butterflies by an American; unlike the German-American John Weidemeyer of New York City, whose later 1864 book, Catalogue of North American Butterflies, also dealt with Central American species, Morris kept his sights clearly on nature above the southern border of the United States, treating nearly two thousand insects, which he arranged along the German model.5 It had no pictures and was unoriginal in its entomology, since all its species had already been described by Europeans. Nevertheless, as William Henry Edwards later observed, it was not until Morris’s book came out that one knew “whether a given insect had been named and described or not. Its publication gave a start to many collectors, and the work of describing caterpillars and moths went on rapidly thereafter.”6
Herman Strecker and Augustus Grote came out of this German immigrant world, beer and all, and, along with the Yankees Edwards and Scudder, belonged to the advance guard of American butterfly people. In the 1870s Strecker would write one of the ablest (and most egomaniacal) books on American lepidoptera and would amass the largest private collection of butterflies in American history, now housed in the Field Museum in Chicago. When Grote was fifteen, in the mid-1850s, no one in the United States could identify any native moth species, but twenty-five years later, thanks largely to his labors, hundreds of species had been described and identified, usually based on specimens lent or given to him by others; many still stand, including nearly one-fourth of all Noctuidae, a great and diverse family of “night butterflies,” its name derived from Latin meaning “owl.”7 At the end of the century, Grote would make original contributions to the evolutionary study of butterflies and moths.
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