Butterfly People
Page 14
To be sure, Scudder was a highly respected naturalist, and certainly no pushover for Edwards. In 1875, despite rejection of his theories, the AAAS honored Scudder for his work on fossil butterflies with a prestigious grant from a fund created by Elizabeth Thompson, a wealthy Boston widow with a devotion to scientific causes; it was the first such award given by the AAAS to any naturalist.41 Nevertheless, Scudder’s status had been weakened, though he was unwilling to defend himself at public meetings. But in his formal articles, he did not back down, offering other versions of his revision of genera without making any concessions. He “never retracts an error,” Edwards wrote in high dudgeon to his friend Joseph Lintner.42 In a private letter to Edwards, Scudder insisted that it was Edwards, not he, who had distorted the “face of nature,” a claim that infuriated his opponent, who, in turn, charged that Scudder “attributed the distorting characteristics to the wrong individual. I could run down the page with your efforts at improving on Nature. It is not I who’s in that business, not by any manner of means.” Edwards went on to fault Scudder’s entire systematics as based on speculation, not on the “facts.” Scudder had “learning and ability and industry” but had invented a system that only Alice in Wonderland would understand. “A few years ago,” said Edwards,
we had a fairly settled and well working system of arrangement and nomenclature, as regards the fauna of this country. You first set the fashion of glorifying the upside-down, and taught how to plant tops in the ground and set the roots in the airs, and see what has come of it!…If I can lead any of my lepidopterological friends and others interested back from the bogs and pitfalls into which you have been sedulously beguiling them I shall be able to sleep the sleep of the just. We will then hope to travel on Nature’s highways instead of spending our days in a bedeviled maze. There will then be some study of things, instead of harping on words. In one year, in my plan of action, we shall learn of what it befits us to know, as students of Nature, than in ten decades spent in evolving truths from the depths of one’s consciousness, or by spinning themes as do the spiders their webs, from their own entrails.43
Harsh words. Scudder stopped the correspondence. “Scudder does not write me anymore,” Edwards told Henry Edwards, rather smugly. “I suppose he’s taking it hard. But he will have to come back some day for what I know he can’t learn elsewhere.”44
The most heated contests occurred over collecting itself, the activity crucial for all butterfly people, rousing them out of bed and into contact with the life around them. The Americans had a lot in common as collectors. They all used a net, an indispensable talisman of sorts capable of conjuring up a butterfly person out of the welter of childhood yearnings. (“Do you know what a butterfly net is?” my own father asked me when I was nine years old. “Yes.” “Well, good, I’ve made a net for you from cheesecloth, a coat hanger, and an old pole. Go out and catch some. Here’s a cigar box for you, too.” So that’s all it took—no guidebooks, no other collectors beyond my own family, since there were none I knew of, nothing but my father’s unexpected proposal, the fragmented nature around me, and a net.)
Probably invented in the early 1700s, in both England and Germany, the net later took many incarnations.45 Young Theodore Mead purchased twelve-inch net-rings and nets made on demand from Akhurst.46 For fancier things, he shopped by mail at Deyrolles in Paris or Janson’s in London.47 So did George Crotch, an English immigrant and specialist in moths at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “What a thing it is to have a net you can catch things with,” Crotch wrote a friend in 1873, of his Janson’s purchase. “My net you never saw, it is a buster, two feet across and two feet and six inches long. It just catches things itself.”48
Americans also had few or no reservations about killing insects or using poison to kill them, unless they had read too much Romantic poetry (especially by the English) or spent time in London long enough to absorb a climate hostile to killing.49 Augustus Grote, having lived in London for several months in 1882, announced that he had “abandoned collecting” on the grounds that moths and butterflies “were part of the Universe of Stars and Sun. I could not understand the life I was taking; and then I felt the grief that arises when we become conscious of the role played by Destruction. I hope that the enthusiasm of the student will not cause him to forget that these little creatures suffer and feel pain.”50 For Grote, however, Romanticism worked both for and against collecting; in London, he opposed it, but a few years afterward, he reversed himself, observing that “poison bottles are indispensable to the collector, and can be recommended on account of the probably painless death they inflict. When we recollect that insects are the main store of food to numberless birds and animals, besides falling prey to each other, so that the greater proportion meet a violent death in any case, the comparatively small number which fall a sacrifice to the pleasure of the collector, or supply the studies of scientists, cannot be in reason objected.”51 Later, he wrote simply that “the poison bottle should be kept handy” when “taking Moths with the net.”52
In America, a seeming superfluity of nature, along with conditions that condoned or depended on the routine slaughter of animals for food on family farms, reinforced an outlook easily tolerant of the killing of insects (and again, of birds as well, as shown by the behavior of Theodore Mead, William Henry Edwards, Samuel Scudder, and Herman Strecker). In this context, most Americans agreed with Grote (the later Grote, that is). Strecker explained, in one of his books, how to kill smaller moths with chloroform. Use heavy doses, he suggested with irony, since the insects “may recover from the effects of the drug—more tenacious are they of their worthless lives than are we greater human beings.”53 Theodore Mead sugared trees to catch moths in a style characteristic of his cat-killing methods and one that cleverly had no need of nets. One August night in 1872, on a visit to the Catskill summer home of William Henry Edwards, he painted surrounding trees with a “wonderful mess of molasses, sugar, and water flavored with vanilla and cologne.” At the same time, he learned by experience that moths do not fly up when disturbed but head down; this discovery allowed him to enlist “a large cyanide poison bottle with a mouth as wide as possible,” rather than only nets, to capture his prey. Stepping gingerly about with a lantern from lathered tree to lathered tree, he poked one moth after another, inducing each to dart downward like clockwork into the jar, until many hundreds “piled together, making a stratum an inch or two thick in the bottle.” Another American, Andrew Foulks, a cattle herdsman from upstate New York, also dispensed with the net by converting his daughter’s bedroom (she was living elsewhere) into an insect trap. He attached a muslin funnel to the window, and behind it plate glass and “a large [oil] lamp with a powerful reflector.” “I left a long narrow opening at the bottom of the glass,” he told a friend, so that “the flies [moths] come in, strike the glass, slip down in the room, and in the morning I go around and pick what I want.”54 Even John Muir, one of America’s most Romantic and tenderhearted naturalists, accepted the merit of the butterfly net, and presumably of the poison as well.
Observe, at bottom left, a “bag net made of fine strong gauze—a mosquito netting from which the stiffening has been well washed,” according to Strecker. He wrote further of nets that they “are made in various ways; in some the rim folds up in sections, in others it is made of steel and can be coiled up like a watch-spring, all with the object that they may be put in some big pocket to be put out of sight until we are in the fields, for in this enlightened land a man can easily earn a reputation for lunacy if he lets it once be known that he is a butterfly hunter or any kind of hunter except a money hunter” (Butterflies and Moths of North America [Reading, PA, 1878], 7, 32–33). Also shown, at top left, are the different parts of butterfly morphology. On the right are shown standard mounting boards at the top; display cabinet and drawers in the middle; and storage trays and storage envelopes at the bottom.
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bsp; The enthusiasm for nets, poisons, and other strategies underlined what Americans shared most of all: the love of collecting itself, although such a love came in diverse forms. Many collected merely to fill their cabinets with specimens, having no other aim than to beat out their friends next door or at the local tavern. More serious naturalists knew about these people, called them “stamp collectors,” and expected little else from them.55 On the other hand, some naturalists, like the remarkable Eliza Fales Bridgham of New York City, collected selflessly, as it were, for the pleasure of sharing their insects with others and for advancing the cause of science. Born in Boston to a rich Yankee family in 1813, Bridgham enjoyed the usual sheltered upbringing of upper-class girls, until on a holiday trip, she noticed spiders crawling about her family’s summer place in St. Augustine, Florida. “I am trying to get some Spiders to bring home with me,” she told her sister. “The Spiders here are very beautiful.”56 When she married Samuel Bridgham, a prosperous New Yorker, she branched out from spiders to moths, collecting many near their summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. She got her son, Joseph, who was later a respected illustrator of scientific books, to go with her, and together, the two of them, with her husband’s blessing, often stayed up until two or three o’clock in the morning, wondering over, arranging, mounting, and chatting about their quarry.57
Bridgham’s “extensive collection is a model of useful collecting for scientific purposes,” Augustus Grote observed. “She has allowed me” again and again “to examine most of the species occurring near the seaboard of the Eastern States.”58 Strecker and William Henry Edwards both studied the moths in her cabinet in Manhattan, and Alpheus Packard spent hours in 1862 pondering the whole array.59 “I felt rebuked by her industry in collecting,” Packard told his father. On one visit, he spotted a bizarre specimen of one of America’s most lovely large moths, a blond-and-pink emperor moth with blue eyespots or ocelli, of the family Saturniidae (from the Latin name of the goddess Saturnia, or Juno, the daughter of Saturn), bred by Bridgham herself and discussed by Packard in his Guide to the Study of Insects. “It is,” he wrote, “a curious instance of an imperfect hermaphrodite. The left antenna and left primary [top wing] are male; the right antenna and left secondary [bottom wing] are female; the right primary is also female, but the right secondary is something between the two, neither male nor female. In this hermaphrodite, the confusion of the sexes is conspicuous.”60 Eliza Bridgham often gave away specimens to those eager to have them, such as to her equally generous neighbor Berthold Neumoegen; in 1877, Bridgham surprised him with a gift of a “splendid pair” of American lappet moths (“lappet” meaning, in Middle English, a small flap or looking like a folded garment), male and female, “as a present out of her own collection.”61
The differences between selfless and selfish collecting seemed unbreachable, although they often overlapped in the same person. They rarely caused serious trouble among collectors (at least not at first), and they never interfered with what Americans seemed to share most of all: the thrill of knowing an immense number of natural forms on the American scene—the various beauty of the natural world—wherever and whenever they looked. “When I go anywheres,” wrote Fred Tepper to Berthold Neumoegen, “I want to take in all I can, everything gives me pleasure, from the grandest Papilio down to the interesting little Noctuids and Geometrids—But I suppose we were not all born alike.”62
In 1873, a feud broke out between Grote and Strecker more extreme than any between Edwards and Scudder, and with repercussions deadly enough to alienate Strecker from many of his contemporaries, sully Grote’s reputation, and change the course of American work on butterflies. In the early 1870s the most critical thing William Henry Edwards said about Strecker was that he was a “queer genius,” and Edwards happily lent him specimens. In 1874 he informed Henry Edwards that Strecker “is a rascal” and “too dirty a fellow to handle.” An amateur naturalist himself of the greatest distinction who depended on other amateurs, Edwards now pounced on Strecker as an “amateur” collector whose “work is too cheap and ill-done for consideration,” “an illiterate, uneducated man who could not possibly identify all the insects he collects. He is a maniac.” Edwards was delighted to see “Grote punch his head” in the Canadian Entomologist.63 In the summer of 1873, Samuel Scudder had traveled to Reading, eagerly studied Strecker’s collection, and borrowed specimens from him (something Strecker rarely allowed for anyone), but after 1873 Scudder came to see Strecker as a mere compulsive collector and, despite Strecker’s later overtures, refused to deal with him. Earlier, Grote, too, had treated Strecker in the most amiable way, making him an honorary member of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, borrowing his insects, publicly praising his submissions, and inviting him to write articles for the museum journal.64 “Mr. Strecker kindly sends me” or “I owe to the obliging disposition of Mr. Strecker” or “both sexes of this species have been obligingly communicated to me by Mr. Strecker” frequently marked the pages of Grote’s journal.65 Both men dreamed of collaborating; Grote wrote Strecker that “you and I must be good friends,” and Strecker told him, “As we are about the hardest workers on Lepidoptera in America, we might as well go it hand in hand as not.”66 One year later, however, a friend told Strecker, “There is bitter feeling against you in high quarters.”67
The shift began on a day in April 1873, when Strecker visited the new American Museum of Natural History to inspect the butterflies and moths that Theodore Mead, the temporary curator of insects, had just put on display.68 Strecker wanted to see, in particular, the specimens Augustus Grote had recently given the museum, and two insects caught his eye: a yellow-and-black swallowtail and a sphinx moth. He told Mead that both specimens belonged to him and that Mead should give them to him. Dismayed, Mead asked Strecker to have a friend—preferably, Grote himself—verify that the insects were Strecker’s. “If you want to do me an everlasting favor,” Strecker requested of Grote, “write me a line saying that they are mine, or write a line to Mead, telling him to give them to me so that he don’t make me out a humbug or worse.”69 Instead, Grote wrote everyone—including Strecker’s friends—that Strecker was a “thief” and a “liar.”70 In March 1874, he reported to Philipp Zeller, one of Europe’s most admired authorities on moths, that he had “caught Strecker stealing specimens from the Museum of Central Park.” “He is not respected here” and “has been refused admittance to the Academy of Natural Sciences.”71 Grote sent Zeller copies of Strecker’s letters to him that, Grote implied, confirmed Strecker’s guilt. By the mid-1870s probably all the principal butterfly people in England, Europe, and America had received the news through the Grote grapevine. Even William Hewitson, whom Strecker worshipped as the finest lepidopterist in the world, heard the gossip, but he refused to take it seriously. “The American entomologists are I hear greatly incensed with you,” he wrote Strecker in 1875, “because they say that they cannot trust any butterflies in your hands…, which I told my informant is I am sure an infernal lie.”72
Grote embarked on a public smearing that lasted throughout the decade and into the next. He went out of his way to target Strecker as a member of a “certain class of collectors who ‘covet’ diverse and pretty specimens without any higher philosophical value” and as the kind of person who takes advantage of “uninformed young collectors, whose rarities are speedily transferred out of their keeping by false statements and industrious letter-writing.” There were further implications: “As indulged in by such persons, Entomology loses much of its refining influences and educational value, and becomes merely an opportunity for the display of human passions and idiosyncracies.”73 In the entomological press, many people read Grote and trusted him, and Scudder and Edwards respected him. In the mid-1870s, Ezra Townshend Cresson, the head of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, ordered all the specimen cabinets to be locked up whenever Strecker entered the building. Strecker never defended himself in any periodical or newspaper; nor did Grote present persuasive proof of a
crime, beyond the letters Strecker had written to him that he had copied out for Zeller, and these letters contained no admission of theft.
Being shut out from the cabinets in the place where he, as a boy, had first plunged irretrievably into his paradisiacal pool would go far to explain why Strecker hit back just as hard with so much invective in his writings. If, in 1872, he had good relationships with William Henry Edwards, Scudder, and Grote, none of whom found fault with him, he now despised those whose status had risen as his had fallen and partly at his expense. He loathed Edwards for being the “demigod of North American Lepidopterology,” “a charlatan,” and a “Coalburgh Ass,” he wrote Theodore Mead. With penetrating sarcasm, he stereotyped Scudder as “a tight-lipped Yankee” who “treated” his competitors “with silent contempt.” “Grote flares out if you touch his vanity, but Scudder. Well, if he and I traveled in the dark together, I would want a shirt of chain-mail under my coat, if I had done ought to offend him, though in the sunlight he would smile, oh! so blythely.”74 Strecker never lacked bite before in what he wrote, but after that summer, and especially by 1875, at the time of the Eudaemonia controversy, he heaped abuse evenhandedly on all his major competitors, leaving only Henry Edwards, Theodore Mead, Berthold Neumoegen, John Morris, and a few others unscathed or even praised.