Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Of all the pioneers, Strecker perhaps suffered the most, no ordinary collector, a true Romantic about butterflies and moths, with a Sehnsucht for them that, once aroused, never waned and was never gratified. Arguably, it was his years sculpting stone and his lack of education and privilege that set him apart from other butterfly people, leading him to violate customary courtesies and sometimes to risk breaching ethical boundaries. But many other butterfly people were from meager backgrounds and worked under bosses, and Strecker, of course, had talented artists in his lineage. It was common gossip in the late years of the century that he wore a stovepipe hat lined with cork on visits to other people’s collections and, when no one was looking, poached a butterfly or two and pinned them on the cork. But the only actual evidence to confirm this gossip came long after his death. Thus, for example, in the 1910s, Preston Clark, a rich Boston manager of silver mines with a huge moth collection, “thought” he found in Strecker’s collection (by then housed in the Field Museum in Chicago) a specimen Strecker “probably” lifted from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. “My guess,” he wrote a friend, “is that Strecker stole it from the Philadelphia Academy.” A guess? No word on how or when Strecker took the insect? Before or after Ezra Cresson locked the cabinets?108 Another collector, an affluent physician with a huge butterfly collection, William Barnes, had the same suspicions, in 1929 remembering Strecker as “a very peculiar man when visiting you and it was better to stay close by his side as a protection to valuable specimens!” Perhaps. But Barnes observed, at the same time, that Strecker had “a most peculiar habit of crawling in between the sheets with his boots and clothes on.” Barnes’s and Clark’s anxieties may have run along class lines. How, anyway, did Barnes know about Strecker’s sleeping habits?109 And how trustworthy was he, a man who resented Strecker for humiliating him twenty-five years earlier over some butterfly matter? “The fool,” Strecker wrote a friend, “I only laugh at him (and he knows it).”110

  Whether Strecker walked off with a butterfly or two, we may never know for sure. What we do know is that the image fashioned by Grote, and supported by Scudder, William Henry Edwards, and others, dispatched him to the ash bin of “déclassé naturalists.” “It is his own fault that he is not at the head of America’s lepidopterists,” George Hulst told Henry Edwards. “As it is with his unquestioned ability and work he has no standing whatever.”111 Not everyone put him down or fled his company, certainly not Neumoegen, or even allies of William Henry Edwards’s, such as Theodore Mead, Henry Edwards, and John Akhurst, who remained friendly long after William Henry Edwards himself shut the door. The banker Joseph Drexel, who bought Strecker’s art pieces in the 1860s, remained loyal to him all his life. He helped Strecker pay for many of the rare butterflies he got from Otto Staudinger and, later in the 1880s, made it possible for him to move his family into a four-story home Drexel owned in Reading, asking in return only that Strecker make a down payment, at 20 percent of its worth, and freeing Strecker from paying for the other 80 percent. Strecker converted the entire upper floor into a butterfly room.112

  The friendship of these people must have done much to salve the injury inflicted by Augustus Grote, who, despite whatever doubts he may have had about Strecker’s behavior at the American Museum of Natural History, never stopped vilifying him. “That entomological spider!” he wrote to the young naturalist Harrison Dyar in 1898, underlining “spider” twice.113

  The disputes among the butterfly people had more consequences than the alienation of Strecker and the weakening of Grote; they also harmed the commonalities that tied the butterfly people to one another as a group and to the butterflies and moths of America. If, before 1870, most naturalists had little trouble accepting a full range of purposes for collecting, from collecting for beauty to collecting for science, by 1880 they were beginning to move in contrary directions. Scudder and Edwards, who were much affected by the beauty of butterflies—color drew them into nature—began to fault those who collected for beauty as bad for science. The “very charms which often attract men to the study of butterflies,” Scudder protested, had “grievously checked” advances in the natural sciences. “There is such a rage for their collection by amateurs,” he charged, “enchanted only by their exquisite beauty”—as he had been at Williams—“that the study of butterflies has been largely abandoned by those who are best fitted for this work by specific scientific training.”114 Was Scudder saying that scientists were staying away from butterflies because others—amateurs, children, illiterate people—found them too “pretty”? Did Edwards, who had little “scientific training,” agree? Must people sacrifice such behavior in order to be scientists? If so, this broke with the Romantic vision espoused by Humboldt, who saw art and science as integral to each other.

  Butterfly naturalists found it more and more difficult to work together, a state of things illustrated best by the short life of what may have been the first magazine in the world devoted entirely to the study of butterflies and moths. In 1881 Henry Edwards, Neumoegen, Mead, and Grote met at Neumoegen’s house in Manhattan to establish a new society and a new journal, similar to those created by Scudder a decade earlier, in Cambridge. Neumoegen hoped to use the new journal to advance his reputation as a butterfly expert, and it was his money that launched it. Grote and Edwards had just arrived in New York, Grote having recently been fired from the Buffalo museum and returning after his father’s death (joined, this time, by his children and his stepmother) to live in a cheap cottage on the northeast side of Staten Island, and Edwards to take a choice position, with time to “entomologize,” offered by Wallach’s Theater in New York, one of the most fashionable theaters in America. Edwards had left San Francisco in 1878 for Boston, attracted mostly to the exciting climate of the natural sciences, but soon hating the “straight-laced, puritanical audiences,” which made acting in theaters around Boston, he believed, akin to “being in a graveyard.” “I should have never have left the ‘Hub’ [Boston],” he wrote Hermann Hagen, “[but] my head and cheese depend on my coming to New York. I must look out for the main chance.”115 With his wife, Polly, and his sprawling bug collection, he set up house on 116th Street in East Harlem, a short walk away from a new railway station at 125th. All the men envisioned a naturalist core “worthy of the great City of New York.” They called the society the New York Entomological Club and the journal Papilio, its name picked by Grote; with etymology in Ovid and Pliny, it meant literally, a tent flap, chosen for the way butterflies hold their wings at rest.

  At first everything was “on the high road to success,” as Henry Edwards, who was editing Papilio, told Hagen. “Grote—Neumoegen—and myself intend to see it safely through its first year’s journey, and by that time I think our subscription list will make it self-supporting.”116 Papilio paid most attention to American species but also treated exotic lepidoptera, presenting the first article ever published in America by a Japanese butterfly specialist, Charles Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo.117 The essays of William Henry Edwards gave the magazine particular distinction, one describing a yellow-and-black swallowtail, Papilio machaon, that, over millions of years, had arisen in various forms throughout the northern latitudes, all looking very much alike.118 Another of Edwards’s articles presented a rather salty account of the “courting” behavior of male sulphur butterflies (genus Colias) in a dry desert habitat in the West, where the males far outnumbered the females. “From what I know of the frenzied eagerness with which certain male butterflies watch the coming of the females from chrysalis,” Edwards observed, “I am confident that they would seize upon the females of any allied species just as readily, if one of their own were not at hand. If such things occur in the mild climate of the Mississippi Valley, where the females are as common as the males, what may not occur in a sage-brush desert? The panting male cannot fly over hill or valley, under these conditions, seeking its mate, as we often see male butterflies doing in a Christian country. Nature impels him, and he captures the first female h
e meets.”119

  Papilio lasted only two years under Henry Edwards’s editorship, done in partly by unbusinesslike practices (Edwards, for instance, gave out free copies) but mostly by the continuing struggle of Strecker, Grote, and their proxies, in a context of worsening economic crisis in the country.120 Theodore Mead, who’d never engaged with the magazine anyway, abandoned ship in 1881 for a new life in Florida, buying an orange grove with his father’s money, taking Willie Edwards’s advice to chase something more practical than lepidoptera. A few years later he married William Henry Edwards’s daughter and, settled in Eustis, Florida, tried to make a living from the orange business, also commencing what would be a lifelong study of orchids and ornamentals. (William Henry was happy to have “Ted” as a son-in-law but much saddened to lose “Mr. Mead” as the man who would carry on his achievements in the study of butterflies. His son Willie must have felt justified, having won his little war for Mead’s soul.)

  Berthold Neumoegen lost nearly all his money on Wall Street, in turmoil caused by speculation in the railroads; he was forced to move into his father-in-law’s house and find ways of selling his collection.121 (“Neumoegen is really poor,” William Henry Edwards informed a friend, “and Papilio is poor.”)122 But it was Grote’s and Strecker’s behavior that perhaps most damaged the magazine. Strecker, feeling excluded, struck from the outside, complaining to friends of “the Club composed of 4 whole persons” and “that New York thing Papilio.” “They meet in each other’s houses,” he sneered. “No respectable man” should “pay for their rubbish.”123 Strecker hated the efforts of the club’s committee on nomenclature, led briefly by Mead, to diminish his credibility as a describer and namer of new species, and, understandably, he turned against Neumoegen for joining with Grote. Neumoegen was mystified.124 “What the promptings on your part, for such a step are, I do not know,” he wrote Strecker, “but I regret its existence, for I always shall and will bear friendly feelings toward you and will never attempt crossing your path in an inimical way. Nobody shall ever bias me in that direction.”125 Neumoegen’s longing to be respected as a naturalist had got in his way. In any case, he assured Strecker later, when this storm was about to pass, that he was “no satellite of Grote, nor of Edwards.”126

  Grote let his prejudice against Strecker spill onto Papilio’s pages. His belated apologies to Strecker notwithstanding, and all Henry Edwards’s efforts to stop him to no avail, Grote seemed trapped in the conviction, expressed best by the poet Heinrich Heine, that “one must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”127 In one essay in Papilio, without mentioning Strecker’s name (though no informed naturalist could have missed his target, least of all Strecker), Grote rampaged against Strecker for “slovenly descriptions and confessed unacquaintance with structure” that “places him on a level with the worst amateur who has ‘coined’ a ‘species.’ In vulgarity and misrepresentation he is, fortunately, without a rival.”128 Angry at the diatribe in their magazine, Henry Edwards and Neumoegen called a private “crisis” meeting in November 1881 (with Grote absent) and in Neumoegen’s parlor denounced all references to “personality” in Papilio.

  Meanwhile, mercurial Grote, desperate to escape his own poverty, was trying to sell his moth collection—first, fruitlessly, to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, or the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in Cambridge, and then to the British Museum, which took it after haggling him down from £1,000 to £800. (At least the British were interested!)129 Then, telling no one in New York, he sailed off to England with seventy-four glass boxes of priceless moths, packed with nearly eleven thousand lepidoptera and more than twelve hundred valuable type specimens, to deliver them himself.130 After returning, he fell into a depression, stayed in bed for days, suffering from “insomnia and worry,” and then, feeling betrayed by many people, accepted an invitation from a European friend willing to pay his passage, so that he could “work in Germany.” Grote sailed alone again across the Atlantic, this time to Bremen, where one of his sisters took him in, as well as, later, his children and stepmother.131

  Henry Edwards was sickened—Grote had not prepared him (or anyone else, for that matter) for his flight, and he now had the full editorial burden of Papilio on his shoulders.132 He was disturbed, too, that the war of “personalities,” so visible in Papilio, had given the wrong impression abroad—that American naturalists did more to tear each other down than to build each other up. Worst of all, subscriptions to Papilio had begun to fall; at the end of 1883, Edwards quit as editor. Eugene M. Aaron, a young naturalist from Philadelphia, took over, only to hasten its decline by siding with Strecker against Grote and by publishing an article (written by his brother, Samuel, a callow youth in his early twenties) that argued against William Henry Edwards’s strongly held belief that the study of caterpillars helped significantly to establish valid species.133 William Henry’s “preposterous” positions, Samuel insisted, “do not work for the good of science.… Larval characters will not do.”)134 In November 1884, Papilio was shut down. Three years before, William Henry Edwards had warned Henry Edwards that Papilio would “overtax” him and that he “would have to give it up,” but when it finally happened, William was saddened, despite the silly attack on his views that had meant to validate Strecker.135 He thought of “continuing Papilio myself,” but had hardly enough funds to pay for volume 2 of his Butterflies of North America, let alone anything as expensive as a journal.

  By the end of the 1870s, the hearts of many Americans were beating hard in response to the beauty of the world. Thousands were in pursuit of lepidoptera, a manifestation of that beauty: some collecting specimens for their own sake, others to get insight into natural diversity, or to achieve scientific understanding, or to help others find their way. All adopted the tools of collecting—above all, the net. Collecting was the first step in assembling insects into a coherent whole, in preparation for study, reflection, and understanding. It was an indispensable entry point into experiencing the many-faceted forms, shapes, designs, and colors of nature. At the same time, like a thief in the night, collecting and everything tied to it (naming, identifying, and classification) became occasions for rivalry and conflict, even greed and villainy. Some American butterfly people entertained serious doubts about collecting for beauty rather than for science, thereby forfeiting the satisfying wholeness of an older approach. In the process, two apostles of aesthetic pleasure, men joined at the hip by the same impulses, were in effect lost: Herman Strecker, who would never write another significant book on butterflies, and Augustus Grote, who would spend the rest of his life in Germany.

  FOUR

  Word Power

  The emotional toll inflicted by the conflicts of the butterfly people proved costly, but it should not obscure or detract from the character of what they achieved as naturalists. On the most basic level, that achievement took shape as lists of words, lists of American butterflies and moths tracked and recorded by diligent butterfly detectives, who drew out of the shadows for the first time an account of the wonderful species life of the North American continent. At the next stage were the first guidebooks, butterfly manuals, and textbooks, for young and old alike, at once instructive and entertaining. Then followed a steady outpouring of periodicals and journals, popular and scientific, presenting a new world of knowledge about butterflies. At the summit were the grandest word-carriers of all, the catalogs by the primary butterfly people. Creativity squandered in quarrels and backbiting was redeemed in books of beauty and distinction, in the excellence of the writing and illustration, the very best demonstrating an integration of art with science.

  All the butterfly people understood the power of words and books, with each of their catalogs stamped by an identifiable character as unique as the men themselves. Thus, Herman Strecker produced a feisty, combative book, every feature conceived and executed by himself, and Samuel Scudder an imposing, huge systematics leavened with poetry and lucid reflection. Augustus Grote mi
xed the poet’s voice with that of the philosopher and naturalist; William Henry Edwards constructed an Apollonian interplay of word and image. Taxonomic dullness sometimes marred their work, but, more often, their volumes burst with energy and life. At home, in Cambridge, Scudder had unusual access to books from around the world, and he incorporated what he absorbed into a full vision of nature. He loved big canvases, and his were among the biggest ever realized by a naturalist, reflecting an intimidating quantity of hard work. At least until the railroad offered regular passage northeast from Coalburgh, West Virginia, to Philadelphia and Washington, Edwards had a much smaller library than Scudder. “I work under great disadvantages here,” he complained in 1871 to Hermann Hagen, “in the absence of libraries.”1 But less, for Edwards, may have meant more, freeing him to read wisely and comprehend thoroughly, and he did—much of Darwin read three times over, near equal amounts of Thomas Huxley, and, nonscientifically, all of Jane Austen’s novels, six times over; he preferred her, as a writer, even to Darwin or Huxley, and his writing style may have been partly shaped by hers, testimony, perhaps, to the interrelationships of novel writing and modern natural history, each subtly influencing the other.2 Grote and Strecker read more unconventionally than both Yankees, Grote in philosophy, sociology, poetry, and religion, Strecker in myth, poetry, art, and history, each injecting what he learned into his writing on butterflies and moths.