The masters of butterfly word power knew that if their work was to mean anything, it had to be housed between covers, whether by established publishers who cared about good writing and good science or by the butterfly people themselves, as in the case of both Strecker and Scudder. In 1878, after the American Entomological Society, which had published Edwards’s first volume, refused to publish Strecker’s catalog, rather than seek another publisher, he printed and issued his best book under his own name. Scudder, too, would break from his publisher to print his three-volume study at his own expense. Grote, Edwards, Scudder, and Strecker, along with a legion of others in the United States and across the Atlantic, were confident that what they did had purpose and made sense and that words—especially words with pictures—had power.
Making lists of American butterflies, as of other beasts, had wide currency among naturalists in the 1880s and beyond, perhaps best represented by one of William Henry Edwards’s dearest friends, a tireless list maker, Joseph Lintner. The son of German immigrants, he was born in Schoharie, New York, in 1822, the same year as Edwards and very near Edwards’s own birthplace in Hunter. Lintner began his insect work later in life than most others, after years in the woolen business.3 At thirty-nine, he met Edwards, who saw at once that Lintner was “too much absorbed” in butterflies to stay much longer in wool. By 1880, at fifty-eight, Lintner was a seasoned, full-time naturalist at the newly reopened New York State Museum of Natural History, in Albany, and the state entomologist for New York; in close touch with farming, he became an exponent of economic entomology intent on wiping away insects as pests and villains. Yet he remained all the while far more engaged with insects for their own sake.4 His painstaking reports, produced entirely by himself in a small, stuffy office, displayed a wealth of fresh insight into butterflies and moths, with eloquent encouragements to children to treat all “creeping and crawling” things with respect. “Ignorance of everything that creeps must be avoided,” he wrote, because it “tends to the development of cruelty towards lower forms of nature.”5
In the 1860s, Lintner and another German-American and Albany butterfly man, Otto Meske, hunted together in a wet and boggy place called Center, forty square miles of “a butterfly good time” (to quote Walt Whitman) midway between Albany and Schenectady, along the line of the New York Central Railroad. Samuel Scudder had walked his “blue roads” in the White Mountains of New Hampshire; Lintner waded through the “blue air” at Center, concocted, he observed, out of the swarming azure blues “driven up from the damp sands by our approach.” By the late 1870s, Center was a “famous collecting ground,” sheltering a rare blue species Vladimir Nabokov would later name Lycaeides melissa samuelis for Scudder himself, today known as the Karner blue (for the town of Karner, as Center is now known; it is a protected site in the Albany Pine Bush preserve).6 In 1872, Lintner penned the earliest list of butterflies and moths indigenous to New York State, documenting more than one hundred species—fifteen more, Lintner boasted, than Scudder had found four years earlier for all of New England.7
As the New York State entomologist, Lintner urged collectors everywhere, “in nearly every State in Union,” to furnish for publication “authenticated lists of Lepidoptera” known to exist in their neighborhood. He appealed to them to reveal their findings, proposing as a model a list by Roland Thatcher of Massachusetts in Psyche, with data on more than 300 species of butterflies and moths found in Newton and its vicinity—a fantastic tally, perhaps, but many were moths.8 Possibly in response to Lintner’s call, in 1882, Eugene Pilate of Ohio, a man with a large collection, delivered to the journal Papilio a list of 450 species of Lepidoptera (72 butterflies) from the Dayton area; and Charles Fernald, a moth fanatic and an educator at the University of Maine, published three lists on all the known moths and butterflies of Maine.9 Another compiler, a young Philadelphia physician, Henry Skinner, cut back on medicine for butterflies and soon emerged as a commanding presence in the butterfly world. By the early 1880s, he had raised “nearly all the diurnals” (day-flying butterflies) in his area, studying “them from egg to imago in three summers,” most caught in or near Fairmount Park, the spacious pastoral site in Philadelphia where the 1876 Centennial Exposition had been held. “We feel certain,” he wrote, “that this list of eighty-seven species is a remarkable one for so restricted a locality,” and “we do not suppose that it is entirely complete.”10 In Wisconsin, Philo Romayne Hoy erected in his backyard a “little house expressly for his cabinet,” with glass-enclosed cases for his butterflies and moths, in splendid systematic order, and all designed so that people could comfortably see his bugs. He prepared the first lists of Wisconsin butterflies, one for the Geology of the Wisconsin Survey (1883), another for the Canadian Entomologist (1884). Scudder turned to Hoy for data.11 Lintner, meanwhile, continued with checklists of his own, above all for the vast Adirondack region of New York, “perhaps second only to the White Mountains in point of interest,” though as late as 1879, its “entire entomological wealth” was still untapped and unstudied. In his state report that year, Lintner began to erase this neglect with an account by W. W. Hill of the more than 250 species of butterflies and moths inhabiting the area, scratching the surface of what Lintner suspected was there. In 1880, Lintner himself finished a more complete summary, “The Lepidoptera of the Adirondack Region,” but this list was also incomplete, due to the area’s impenetrability as a wilderness. Even in 2010, Arthur Shaprio, a well-known California butterfly man, observed that “the butterfly fauna, let alone the moths, remains only partly known!”12
Instructional literature for young and old alike, from the first textbooks and guidebooks to the earliest children’s books, reached the public at the same time as the lists. As far back as 1870, Henry Edwards had planned to write a “textbook of our butterflies, so that the young people springing up may be able to recognize their captures.” He’d hoped, also, to finish a monograph on a family of lovely clear-winged moths, but neither book appeared, the latter because he could not afford color plates. In 1889, Edwards did complete the Catalogue of the Described Transformations of North American Lepidoptera, written for the Smithsonian, but it, too, lacked images. Edwards came closest to getting his desired plates in 1884, when he consented to write a chapter on butterflies for The Standard Natural History, a multivolume study published by Samuel Cassino, an entrepreneurial naturalist with several other nature books to his credit. Besides Edwards’s, there were five chapters on other insects in the Cassino History by American experts, all testifying to the extraordinary strides Americans had made in entomology since the Civil War. Edwards’s chapter, with its black-and-white drawings and plates, had the earmarks of his special delight, the words “very beautiful” or “most beautiful” appearing repeatedly. He had much to say about American butterflies (“our fauna”), but his main interest was in the world’s lepidoptera, especially those that “have no special home but are scattered over the whole surface of the globe”—like Edwards himself, an emigrant from England to Australia to San Francisco to New York City, the tension between home and homelessness mirrored in his favorite butterfly families: the fritillaries, the blues, the skippers, and the swallowtails, all with worldwide distribution. His account ended with a tribute to the “glorious Ornithoptera” or the luxuriant birdwing butterflies of southeast Asia, coupled with a long quotation from Alfred Russel Wallace’s reminiscence of the way his heart “beat violently” in Batchian when he captured the golden birdwing, Ornithoptera croesus.13
In 1886, Cassino recruited Edwards to write a “popular entomology book for the large number of students of this subject,” to be issued first “in parts at a dollar each,” then as an inexpensive book. He entreated William Henry Edwards to do the same, but William had come to mistrust Cassino, ever since the late 1870s when Cassino had promised to sell “a large lot of Natural History books” for Edwards that Edwards had wanted to get off his hands. Both men were to share the profits. But the Boston businessman kept most of the books fo
r himself, never giving Edwards a penny, something Edwards learned only too late. “I fancy, if I pressed him at law now,” William wrote Henry, “he would plead the Statute of Limitations. He is a great rascal.”14 This letter effectively erased any hope that either man would ever publish a “popular book on entomology” for Cassino. But two years later, John Comstock, a creative young professor at Cornell University, managed to marshal private funds to bring just such a book to fruition; called Introduction to Entomology (1888), it covered the “elementary principles” of insect life. Comstock, a Wisconsin native, had grown up poor and orphaned and, as a young man, had made his living as a cook on merchant vessels on the Great Lakes, but at Cornell, he formed one of America’s earliest departments of entomology and became one of its most original naturalists, with a talent and passion for Darwinian science to match that of William Henry Edwards. His book remained standard for one hundred years, passing through ten editions, with many woodcuts done by his brilliant wife, Anna Botsford Comstock, who acquired new engraving methods at New York’s Cooper Union in the mid-1880s. The 1888 edition had nothing in it about butterflies, but Comstock would remove this deficit five years later with “Evolution and Taxonomy,” a long and bold essay all about butterflies, especially about the wings of butterflies; this, too, was destined to become standard.15
Contemporary with these texts were the earliest compact guidebooks intended for young people, which, like so much else entomologically speaking in the United States, piggybacked on an already mature tradition in France, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere, begun, perhaps, when Sweden’s Linnaeus printed his own botanic handbooks for his students in the 1740s.16 In Germany alone, well over fifty books on German butterflies had been published in various towns, many for the beginning collector, offering instruction on collecting and on gear (nets of different sizes, mounting boards, pins, cork) and on rearing and breeding. Calendars and diaries indicated where and when to find particular species throughout the year.17
England pioneered the first guide to reach a mass audience, Henry Stainton’s Manual of British Butterflies and Moths (1857), complete with biographies of species and collecting places, written in lucid prose, but unillustrated.18 After 1880, pictorial guides in England dealing with many entomological fields “grew in number astonishingly,” according to Theodore Cocherell, an English immigrant to America in the 1880s, a skilled observer and butterfly man, and an expert on bees and on much other natural life, as well. Cocherell considered guides on butterflies and other organisms actually “superior to class instruction” because they made young people think for themselves and required that they go out into the fields to collect. “I believe a strong argument could be presented,” Cocherell said, “for the abandonment of formal instruction in science as a means of education, except in relation to manifest utilities and technical trades, and the substitution of something more like the apparently haphazard method of the English amateur.”19
In 1880, demand was still insufficient to support a genuine butterfly guide. “It is too bad,” William Walters, a butterfly man and book dealer in New York City, wrote Strecker that year, “that America, the greatest Butterfly Country in the world, has no book to encourage its people to study its beauty and wonders.” “What is wanted is the names of our Butterflies, so that our children can know them.” For a while, Walters thought he might do it. “Like yourself,” he told Strecker, “I have to work hard for my corned-beef and cabbage, but I make time for little recreation such as this.” Still, the task was too great, and he urged Strecker to write the book instead. “You are at the pinnacle, and I am at the foot of the ladder,” but “if I had your knowledge and collection, I could do a book that would make the children rise up and call me blessed. What a book you could compile, if you would.”20 Snowed in or over by work, family, and collecting, and perhaps dispirited by months of entomological sniping, Strecker snubbed the proposal.
Others acted more decisively, among them Helen Conant and Julia Ballard, who wrote books for the children’s market: The Butterfly Hunters (1881) and Moths and Butterflies (1880, revised in 1889), respectively. Conant crafted each of her chapters around a single popular American butterfly, such as the mourning cloak or tiger swallowtail, that the children could find in the fields and byways. She explained taxonomy, noting how “moths are divided into two great classes—Hawk-moths, or Sphinxes, and Moths, or Phalaenae,” these, in turn, “subdivided into many smaller classes in regard to which nearly all naturalists differ in opinion.”21 Ballard, the wife of an old college chum of William Henry Edwards’s, took a bit more humorous approach. She had a butterfly narrate its own life history: one chapter on the pupa, one on metamorphosis, and so forth. “I am only a day old,” the butterfly says in chapter 1. “I was born in a prison,” and though “I can see right through my walls, I can’t find any door.”22 Both women, unblinking about killing, readily described how to end insects’ lives, Ballard, with a little more clinical precision, as if following a recipe for making pudding: “Take a glass jar with a large mouth and closed lid, perhaps your own candy jar, into which put four or five lumps of cyanide of potassium. Dissolve enough plaster of Paris in water to cover the cyanide evenly over, forming a hard, smooth surface. Put the moth (or butterfly) into the jar, close the lid, and let it remain five or six hours, after which it can be taken out and mounted.”23
George French, an Illinois professor and a faithful follower of the entomology of William Henry Edwards, produced America’s first full-scale reliable guidebook, Butterflies of the Eastern United States, a far more substantial work than Conant’s or Ballard’s, although devoid of their lightness of touch and, unfortunately, nowhere near as successful as its European predecessors. Designed mainly for students in zoology—who had “clamored” for it, according to French—it had the virtue of being small (one could stuff it into a knapsack), with the latest knowledge compactly delivered, arousing one butterfly man to recommend it to a friend as “another gift of the period for young entomologists.”24 French borrowed from William Henry Edwards in every way that mattered, from the formal ordering of butterflies (swallowtails first, skippers last) to the life histories. Not surprisingly, Edwards told French in a letter, “The more I have read the book, the better I like it. It is exactly what beginners and many who are not beginners want.”25 Scudder, on the other hand, in a review of French’s book in Science, faulted “the book’s arrangement” as “unnatural, holding its ground only as a legacy from the less-informed authors of fifty years ago.… It is but the rehabilitation of the dry husks of a past generation,” he insisted. “We fail to see how the work can be of any pedagogical service, although this is claimed as its chief end.”26 Holding his fire on Edwards, Scudder had decided to pummel one of his proxies instead.
The periodical press fed this growing outpouring of words, with frequent forays by the broad literary magazines, such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, into the butterfly world. The naturalists themselves, of course, had more to say, beginning just before the Civil War with the American Naturalist in 1867, edited by Alpheus Packard, the author of the first general insect guidebook, and Scudder’s Psyche in 1868, followed by Papilio, the Canadian Entomologist, Popular Science Monthly, Science Magazine, Insect Life, Entomologica Americana, and Entomological News. Altogether, these periodicals surveyed every facet of the natural world, seeking to “popularize the best results of scientific study.” All had a national and, most, a transnational character (“for science is cosmopolitan,” Packard observed).27
Brilliant in many ways but spoiled by feuds, by weak subscriptions, and by a policy of sending out free copies, Papilio lasted only three years. The Canadian Entomologist, subsidized early on by the Canadian government and still published today (as are Psyche, Science, and the American Naturalist), was edited by William Saunders and Charles Bethune, both Canadians, and remained the bible of Americans right up to 1900. “More than any other similar undertaking,” Grote observed in 1886, “the publication of the Canadi
an Entomologist has assisted the progress of Entomology in America.”28
Popular Science addressed the whole panoply of science, issuing news on butterflies and moths, if only in spurts, while Science Magazine, one of the most venerated such journals ever published, was more generous with up-to-date information on butterfly work, largely because, between 1882 and 1885, Samuel Scudder served as its editor in chief. Thomas Edison had funded an earlier, short-lived version of Science, and Scudder revived it, after getting backing from another rich inventor (and relative by marriage), Alexander Graham Bell.29 Free to proceed in any way he wished, with no one meddling, Scudder imposed a new agenda on Science, departing from Edison’s focus on electricity and totally in line with the vision of Alexander Humboldt surveying the map of science to a degree unimaginable today, from physics and chemistry to meteorology and entomology (reviews of the work of Grote and Edwards, and of other butterfly people, regularly appeared there). He wrote weekly summaries himself in every area, “rejoicing the hearts of scientific men of the day,” as one of them put it, but Science, too, had a short life, lasting only until 1885, so financially vulnerable that, in the winter of 1885, Scudder complained to Bell that Bell owed him $500 and he (Scudder) was thinking about jumping ship.30 Offended, Bell wrote “Surely—my dear Mr. Scudder—you cannot mean to convey the idea that, so far as Science is concerned, the main thing to you is money—-regularly paid! I am sure that at heart you really wish to see the child of your creation grow to manhood and prove a power in the land.” Very likely Scudder did not care about the money so much as about Bell’s plans to centralize the magazine in Washington, meaning Scudder would have to leave Cambridge, the heart of his life in countless ways, and so Scudder quit, and Science went down again, to be resurrected in 1890, this time with stable backing (and an established subscription list) from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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