Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Insect Life, a government journal popular well beyond Washington, was created by Charles Valentine Riley, the Darwinian head of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology inside the Department of Agriculture, in 1888 and published until his death in 1895. As an instrument of federal government policy, it was, from the outset, economically driven, and in time would help take the country aggressively away from natural history. In Insect Life’s early years, however, Riley had invited naturalists to write pieces on butterflies for their own sake; in response, Lord Walsingham, an English aristocrat and butterfly man, discussed his favorite microlepidoptera; A. H. Swinton (also English) explained the “stridulations,” or grating sounds, made by the mourning cloak butterfly, a lovely maroon-colored species first on the wing in the spring; and Henry Edwards recalled hearing, as a youth in England, the nearly imperceptible “rasping sound” emitted “by the beautiful Vanessa io, a large moth with striking eyespots, when several flew together, or when a male was in hot pursuit after the opposite sex.” One had to listen carefully, Edwards explained, “when all around was still,” lest one miss “the insect’s expression of love.”31

  Entomologica Americana, emerging phoenixlike from the ashes of Papilio, was published by the Brooklyn Entomological Society throughout the 1880s and edited by a hulking, young, tendentious German-American lepidopterist from Brooklyn, John Smith. The society’s members—Smith, George Hulst, Edward Graef, Franz Schaupp, and others—had long felt estranged from the Manhattan naturalists led by Henry Edwards, Neumoegen, Grote, and Mead.32 The Brooklyn journal resembled both the American Naturalist and Psyche in its breadth, while yielding prime turf to butterflies and moths. Upset by the way Papilio met its demise, William Henry Edwards disparaged the new journal as a “mongrel” creation of “ill-informed entomologists” and refused to publish in it. “No one connected with the Brooklyn Society is able to run such a magazine,” he decided. “I will send my papers henceforth to the Canadian Entomologist.”33 But, unlike Papilio, Entomologica Americana survived for several more decades.

  Backed by funds from the American Entomological Society and founded in 1889, Entomological News soon prospered in the butterfly world, especially under its long-lasting editor, the medically trained Henry Skinner, who only a few years before had counted the butterfly species in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Skinner, appointed curator of butterflies at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, lived part-time on a sprawling farm just outside the city, where he planted corn, melons, and peaches.34 He was not the first editor of Entomological News; Eugene Aaron was, after serving as the last editor of Papilio. But Aaron proved unreliable and, later in the 1890s, abruptly quit the News for a career as a “quack cancer specialist in New York City,” Skinner wrote Strecker.35 Skinner then “took full charge,” although he had long been at the helm de facto, making the News the best written, best illustrated, and best printed periodical of its kind. “We now give more for the money than any journal [on insects] in the world.”36 Skinner’s journal cast light on several insect groups but on butterflies abundantly, due in large measure to Skinner himself; the News navigated the globe from Calcutta to Paris, Berlin to the Dutch Indies (as did Scudder’s Psyche, but not to the same degree), and did more than any previous serial to cultivate collecting and to instruct thousands in the elementary basics of entomology. Skinner made reading it “a necessity to every student of insect life,” “guided entirely,” he wrote in one of his later editorials, “by an unselfish love for our interesting study.”37 He kept it in touch with the Romantic tradition, making only grudging concession in the beginning to the merely clinical approach to butterflies, or for what he called “the dry details of descriptive and classificatory work.”38

  Skinner had a kind and sympathetic nature, befriending the sometimes friendless stonecutter, whose 1878 Lepidoptera he greatly admired. He and Strecker exchanged hundreds of letters, as well as hundreds of butterflies and moths, both native and exotic. While Skinner sent Strecker spectacular moth cocoons (most obtained from nearby farms in New Jersey), which Strecker immediately recycled throughout Europe, Strecker sent Skinner the most stunning exotics from southeast Asia. The men regularly visited each other’s homes, and Skinner welcomed his friend back to the Academy of Natural Sciences, although Strecker seemed never inclined to visit that place again, having earlier been blackballed as a thief.

  On its face, a catalog may seem dreary and lifeless, and many of those on natural history subjects did seem so, at least from the late eighteenth century on, in their presentation of name, synonymy, taxonomic description, classification, and so forth. Yet catalogs were also often fluid and open-ended, ideally suited to depict the staggering number of new species and genera of butterflies from throughout the world that Western naturalists came to know. Over a brief twenty-year period, from 1870 to 1890, Americans wrote fascinating catalogs in all sizes, many even more complex than their European predecessors. It was a culminating moment in the history of the engagement of Americans with their own fauna, a “Renascence,” Grote called it, “during which a great deal of work was performed with good humor and at considerable self-sacrifice.”39

  The most impressive volumes were compiled by the main butterfly men, although one middle-aged New Englander, Charles Maynard, who sold birds’ eggs, stuffed birds, minerals, and butterflies in a small natural history shop in Boston, tried to compete with them. In 1886 he issued a quarto-sized catalog, The Butterflies of New England, with 108 descriptions and eight lithographic colored plates, all his own, “for the student of whatever age and sex, to aid in identification of the beautiful, aerial, and almost evanescent forms, which haunt woodlands, fields, and meadows, during the brief summer months of our vigorous climate.”40 The book seemed to one‑up Scudder’s 1889 study, but it actually derived in large part from Scudder’s own system of classification and adopted many of Scudder’s vernacular names. Maynard coined his own names, too, such as “Quaker Butterflies” for the wood nymphs, loping low-fliers usually with eyespots on the wings, because “all in this genus are grayish in color.”41 He ignored, for the most part, the early butterfly stages; opposed giving names to polymorphic forms (something Edwards had insisted upon); and cared nothing about priority in naming, “frankly confessing” his impatience with nomenclature, since “we have arrived at a point where we must choose between wasting our energy upon what is merely secondary to the object in view or advancing scientific knowledge in the study of objects themselves.” He defended readable natural history, hoping to cultivate interest in the beautiful things of nature.

  Scudder met Maynard in the mid-1860s, when both were hired as young men at the Boston Society of Natural History. Maynard stayed only a year, to help curate a bird collection, and Scudder held various executive posts over a period of twenty years.42 He never reviewed Maynard, although he was well disposed toward him, and quoted freely from his catalog later in the decade in his own big book on butterflies. William Henry Edward, on the other hand, picked the book to pieces in a review for the Canadian Entomologist, despite Maynard’s very Edwardsian reservation about Scudder’s nomenclature and his frequent and favorable citations of many of Edwards’s descriptions. The book got everything wrong, Edwards said: the colors, the classification (which was Scudder’s), the numbers of molts and broods, the food plants. “The text, so far as it is correct, is worse than nothing.” Edwards also disparaged the vernacular names. “In Europe before the binomial nomenclature was invented, it was natural that there should be local names for such striking objects as butterflies. But these names have nowhere come to be commonly used here. No one but contrivers use them; they do not stick to the insect.” “The field is open for a well-illustrated book on the same butterflies,” Edwards granted, but it must be “written by one who is well-acquainted with his subject.”43 Edwards could have been more temperate, having nothing to fear from Maynard, and the same might have been said of Scudder regarding French. It is a wonder, given the readiness of these extraordinary Yankees t
o plunge like hawks on prey (one from above, the other from the side) that anyone else would risk writing a new book at all on what Scudder later called “the frail children of the air.”

  In 1886 Augustus Grote, residing in Germany, told Scudder that he had nearly finished a “big popular book on North American Butterflies and Moths, and I really think it might be called the Butterflies and Moths of North America.” “I think everybody in the line will buy it and want to read it.”44 Grote had been living in Bremen, suspended between two worlds: on the one hand, marrying the daughter of a wealthy Dutch tobacco merchant and taking part in the city’s cultural life, and on the other hand, “homesick nigh to crying.”45 “Sometimes I smell the Staten Island woods [where his parents were buried] and then I see Lake Erie in my dreams! Those two bits of water, the New York Bay and Lake Erie, seem to draw me to them, especially the Lake.”46 His big book never surfaced, perhaps because his “exile,” as he called it, had sapped his energies or because his multiple selves—poet, musician, sociologist of religion, entomologist—pulled him in too many directions. The fact is, the only coherent book he ever wrote—New Infidelity—had nothing to do with lepidoptera. A large-scale venture was beyond him. Nonetheless, he did complete two slender catalogs, or extended essays, the first, in 1882, An Illustrated Essay on the Noctuidae of North America, with colored plates of forty-five moths, and the second, in 1886, The Hawk Moths of North America, the skeleton of the never-to-be study, with an unexpected portrait of “the man of science,” who “observes the small changes which underlie the endless succession of life. It is clear to him how we are drifting if, with the rest of humanity, he does not know where. Within certain limits he believes that the will of man counts for something and that, in the perpetual struggle, that which is useful, good and beautiful will prevail.”47

  Grote’s constant stream of articles was more imaginative than his catalogs, including his engaging “Moths and Moth-Catchers,” in two installments in Popular Science Monthly, in 1885.48 He became so identified with the Canadian Entomologist that he was called on to write the memorial poem marking its “quarter century.”49 Unlike Edwards, whose latest fieldwork appeared in those pages, Grote presented mostly theoretical or philosophical analysis. He knew, of course, how crucial fieldwork was to his science, and he criticized “a tendency in Europe” to emphasize “a sort of book working of nature” over “living material,” but after leaving Buffalo, he did little fieldwork himself and depended on others to harvest insect material for him.50 In the Canadian Entomologist, he defended the vernacular in the naming of insects that Edwards always faulted and Scudder celebrated, and he considered at length the structural basis for reclassification of the principal moth families. He reflected on the geographical distribution of insects, the forces that induced migration, the transforming power of climate, the ways in which the American species of moths and butterflies generally were fashioned by the world around them and by evolutionary change—all themes basic to a bioecology of insects. He may not have produced the big popular book, but his output matched on many small canvases the catalogs of the others.51

  Herman Strecker, on the other hand, did complete two significant catalogs in the late 1870s. The first, Butterflies and Moths of North America: A Complete Synonymical Guide of the Macrolepidoptera, was dedicated to William Hewitson in “loving remembrance” and listed all the names given to American butterflies since Linnaeus, along with their localities. Though it lacked satisfactory descriptions and had no color plates, it did contain black-and-white illustrations of butterfly morphology by Strecker himself and an informative bibliography of writings on butterflies by both foreigners and Americans.52 It showed amateurs how to collect, mount, preserve, and store lepidoptera, where best to find them; and how to rear them from eggs and larvae, protect them against pests, pack and mail them, and label specimens correctly (including date of capture, and synonyms, if necessary).

  Strecker’s second publication was his 1878 catalog, Lepidoptera: Rhopaloceres et Heteroceres, which his subscribers combined into a single volume, integrating all the parts he had issued since 1873. The original plates were the volume’s most remarkable feature, in the tradition of European craft and rivaling the more scientifically oriented, precise art of Mary Peart and Lydia Bowen in Edwards’s volume. Nearly all the species were American, except for a few tropical ones, such as Papilio marchandii, from Guatemala, which stood out, amid several other butterflies in the same plate, in an almost radiant orange. His first plate was of an American silk moth, a big, handsome reddish-brown or purplish moth, Samia gloveri, named after Townsend Glover, a naturalist and the pioneer architect of the fledgling U.S. Department of Agriculture, who had given Strecker his type specimen. Strecker named several new underwing, or Catocala, moths for the first time, including Catocala agrippina, Catocala sappho, or Catocala amestris, honoring three famous women of classical ancient Greece and Rome, and arranged the images into ensembles on three separate plates to emphasize the brightness of the colors, the yellow, pink, orange, jet black, white, and crimson of the underwings. Strecker illustrated American swallowtails, hawk moths, coppers, and blues, but despite promising in his “advertisement” to depict larvae, pupae, and eggs “whenever possible,” all he could manage was one caterpillar at the bottom of one plate (his idea of “habitat” was “New York” or “Texas”). He cared most for “the picture” of the adult form because it carried, in his mind, the principal imaginative value, and he faulted naturalists for countless words in descriptions “no one ever reads.” Words had power but only in relation to the image he felt—an anthem struck as well by William Henry Edwards, Scudder, and Grote. “Oh! that we could throw out every description that is unaccompanied by a figure,” Strecker exclaimed, “how our labour would be lightened, how we would be spared the maledictions of after generations for all time to come. With what boundless veneration do we look on the tomes of Cramer, Seba, Drury, Huebner, Hewitson, and Herrich-Schaeffer, not winding into countless useless descriptions in all sorts of scattered periodicals, but a great massive work—grand, compact, solid, every description accompanied by coloured figures. I never open these mighty volumes but feel my soul expand in Hallelujahs to the Almighty that through his great goodness such intellects were allowed to sojourn here and to bequeath to us the result of their vast labors.”53

  Lepidoptera conceived of butterflies and moths as parts of a unified field, not separate from the rest of nature and man. Strecker was not a naturalist as Scudder, Grote, and Edwards were; he had a limited interest in life histories and did most of his work in a butterfly room, not in the field. But he did have an ecological sensibility, like the other trailblazers, placing his butterflies in a larger context, if not in evolutionary or Darwinian terms. Strecker worshipped Hewitson, as well as Humboldt, and, like them, believed that the connections among natural forms came from some mystical energy that bound all together. In a section of Lepidoptera entitled “Entolomological Notes,” he recounted a visit to the Smithsonian Institution of Natural History in Washington, where he saw many “pre-Adamite animals,” octopuses in alcohol, the wood carvings of Indians, and the “mass of native copper” in the Geology Department. Now how, he asked, do these things relate to butterflies? In every way, he responded, for “each page of God’s great book is connected with the other, bound in its mighty cover the Universe, and we cannot admire one without admiring the other; we do not love our mistress’ hands alone, but also her brow, hair and eyes, her whole beautiful form, the entire faultless work.”54

  Strecker was thinking of other relationships, in a metaphorical sense. When he described the orange, yellow, and black Guatemalan exotic Papilio marchandii, he placed that butterfly—or, more exactly, its appearance and its name—inside a stream of dreamlike associations. “I have never looked at this lovely thing, with its delicate form and brilliant hue,” he wrote,

  without my thoughts reverting to the long past builders of the temples and altars of Palenque and Copan, the butterf
ly flitting through the tropical groves of their day, as now, but the inhabitants of the old dead cities have passed away, their names, their history unknown! birds, reptiles, and insects now alone tenant the forest where once stood the populous cities, the kings and priests of which, with their slaves and sycophants, long ages ago have gone to rest; naught remains of their past greatness but the moss-coated and timeworn ruins of altar and idol, and the frail golden butterfly hovers, suspended in mid air, over the monster face of some fallen Dagon [an ancient fertility god] which far back beyond even the “night of time,” received its meed of human sacrifice.

  Other butterflies conjured Xanadu or “visions in a dream.” “What a flood of thought suggests itself when we gaze on the gorgeous Ornithoptera Priamus! The court of the old Trojan King arises and is ‘followed fast and faster’ by each varied scene of the Iliad.” And how the “Ornithoptera Croesus reminds in an instant of the magnificence of the Lydian monarch and the death of the hapless Atys.”55 Butterflies could be understood not only in natural ecological terms but in epic aesthetic-poetic ones as well.

  For the depth and variety of his life-history studies, William Henry Edwards had no rival, and Samuel Scudder created the crowning achievement of the era on American lepidoptera, touching every aspect of butterfly existence. Both men built monuments to American butterflies as well as to the American naturalist amateurs, or the hod carriers who helped them research and write their books.

  Many Americans, outside the naturalist community disliked the Linnaean approach to nature. Walt Whitman, on one of his many walks down the farm lanes in Brooklyn or in New Jersey, imagined how good it would be if nature had no names (which is peculiar, given how he loved to catalog the American experience). “Many birds, I cannot name,” he wrote in Specimen Days and Collect, “but I do not very particularly seek information.… You must not know too much,” he said, “or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things. I repeat it—don’t want to know too exactly or the reasons why.” Even Thoreau, writing in his 1860 journal, disparaged the “science” that reduced animals to dry shells with recondite Latinate names. What he found “most requisite in describing an animal” was to capture “its vital spirit,” or “anima.” Science, however, tended to ignore the “living creature.” “A history of animated nature must itself be animated.”56