Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  To finish Butterflies, which he had decided, in the end, to publish himself, Scudder saddled himself with a debt that took him three years to erase. In 1892, when the U.S. Senate stripped away appropriations, he lost his position as chief paleontologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. The experience caused an insomnia that lasted ten months, until he went off for three weeks into the woods and mountains with his beloved son, Gardiner, “living completely in the out-of-doors away from all entanglements.”122 He struggled to find other work, including, once again, as librarian of Harvard College, but failed and turned to journalism to make a living, writing articles freelance for the popular press and, over time, mining his three-volume study. Within five years, he had added brilliantly to both guidebook and children’s literature, including two short books, Brief Guide to the Commoner Butterflies of the Northern U.S. and Canada, the first designed explicitly for boys and girls “who had caught a common butterfly,” and The Life of a Butterfly, a biography of the monarch that synthesized all existing knowledge buried in hard-to-find places; it proved extremely popular, especially with countless grade school teachers of natural science throughout the country, who adopted it for their classes, and transformed Anosia plexippus, as Scudder called the monarch in Latin, into the “typical American butterfly.”123

  At the end of the century, he completed two other books, Frail Children of the Air: Excursions into the World of Butterflies, using many of the best excursuses in Butterflies, and another popular guide, Every-day Butterflies: A Group of Biographies, a lovingly written series of portraits of more than sixty of America’s most common species, with woodcuts by Anna Botsworth Comstock. Every-day Butterflies was a special book, the last of its kind by Scudder, with most of the species found “in open fields, meadows, roadsides anywhere in the open country,” on “paths in dry pastures,” or down “overgrown pasture tracks in the vicinity of woods,” “on grassy meadows,” “wet meadows,” or “low meadows,” “in open woods and orchards as well as along roadsides and stone walls,” or amid “shrubbery bordering on cultivated fields,” a few species hibernating “in cellars of old buildings, barns, or outhouses,” or pupating “under the sides of fence rails.”

  This was the landscape of the American family farm, familiar to most people of the time, home of butterflies seeable by anyone, prodigal gifts of nature in numbers unimaginable today: “The tiger swallowtail collecting literally by the thousands, and when startled, filling the air with a yellow cloud”; the clouded sulphur or Colias philodice, bursting forth “on meadow-bordered highways after rain, coloring the ground as they sit by the thousands with erect wing”; the pipe-vine swallowtail, a splendid iridescent blue butterfly with tropical ancestors, “particularly fond of flowers and sometimes clustering on them in vast numbers”; and the regal fritillary, “with its rich orange-red and blue-black coloring above, marked with black, orange, and white,” and, like all fritillaries, bearing “large gleaming silvery spots on the under surface,” “frequenting open breezy meadows or pastures in close proximity to marshy lands or ponds,” and “most abundant in the middle pastures of Nantucket.”124

  Every-day Butterflies, however, did not break new ground, nor did the other books; all lifted whole passages verbatim from Butterflies in ways that seem shameless today. Scudder knew how costly his three-volume work was, that it was—as one impoverished butterfly lover called it—“grapes too high for me,” so Scudder pulled the grapes down. All his derivative books sold cheaply, were highly readable, and so small (three by six inches in size) that they could have been easily slipped into the back pocket of his three-volume tome. He democratized the word power of his Butterflies, “opening the door of Nature” to some special American boy or girl who might want to “wander into the byways for more eager personal search.”125 Edwards never took a similar path, the popularization of his knowledge left to Scudder and others who had no trouble or reservations about spreading it around in the public domain. By the end of the century, Americans had produced a foundational literature on butterflies, everything from lists to massive catalogs, dealing especially with native American insects. But we have barely begun to tap into the ideas and insights this word power carried. These butterfly people had a great deal to say about the creatures they or their disciples collected in the mountain meadows, marshes, deserts, semitropical forests, and backyards of America. The portrait they gave was beyond anything achieved before, capturing how the butterflies survived and persevered against all odds, fought and cooperated with one another and with other animals, and contributed to the making of the beauty of the world.

  FIVE

  The Life and Death of Butterflies

  The writings of the butterfly people made nature seem fascinating and magical, just as Romantic Alexander Humboldt had insisted such science should do. In the introduction to his Cosmos, Humboldt rejected the notion held by Edmund Burke, an eminent conservative English thinker of the late eighteenth century, that nature loses its “magic and charm” as people “learn more and more how to unveil her secrets.” Quite to the contrary, Humboldt argued, “the excitement produced by discovery, the vague intuition of mysteries to be unfolded, and the multiplicity of paths before us, all tend to stimulate the exercise of thought in every state of knowledge.” In a way never known before, nature invokes a “sense of the sublime” and a “feeling for infinite things.”1

  In only a few decades, the American encounter with American butterflies yielded new insights into “Nature’s shifting panorama of form and color,” to quote Scudder. It took the art of seeing to a new level, casting light on the changing forms of insects; on the complex ways in which they emerged, developed, and died; and on how they existed in relation to other forms, either as partners with them or as their enemies and predators. The American investigation also led to a more sophisticated understanding of natural beauty. Americans, generally speaking, were not much known for their aesthetics, a situation due to an overriding utilitarianism or, perhaps just as likely, because beauty was (and is) a difficult thing to fathom in the first place. Yet there were some individuals, such as George Santayana, a man trained in both aesthetics and natural science, who in the 1890s attempted to understand beauty. And there were some American butterfly people, too, who knew much about its purpose both as adaptation in the preservation of life and “as a balm for all worldly ills,” in the words of Herman Strecker.

  By the 1880s, all the leading thinkers about butterflies in the United States had adopted the Darwinian evolutionary outlook, one that viewed natural selection as the guiding impulse behind evolution, that emphasized fertility of form over the confinement of form, and that seemed to exclude nonscientific ways of understanding nature; nothing organized nature except by chance, through a chain of life in relation to surrounding forces and reaching back to the beginning of time. For the fully converted modern evolutionary biologist, beauty in nature lacked interest except as adaptation to change. Among America’s butterfly people, William Henry Edwards was the earliest and most complete exponent of this position. Herman Strecker never seriously entertained it, pro or con, although he did say, in 1879, “I am no believer in the special creation of each species.” “Moreover, a careful study of the moths and butterflies of different parts of the world will show how wondrously today’s species are all linked together, not only in a continuous line, but interlinking, as the rings in a coat of chain armor, and that, too, by species and genera in countries as widely remote from each other as Buenos Ayres and Australia.”2

  Like Edwards, Augustus Grote, too, was a spokesman of Darwinian evolution, and by the late 1880s had adopted a similar phylogenetic approach to butterflies, or that approach, in other words, that traced the identity of species back to shared ancestral roots. Following Darwin, Grote understood nature not as a ladder of ascending species, one species higher or lower than the other, but as a web with branching lines, each adapting in its own way to change. “The evolution of Lepidoptera,” Grote observed, can be “represented
as an inverted and spreading bell of net work, in hanging threads of unequal lengths, branching variously and in different directions. The depending tips of the threads represent the existing species, all connected to the past, and the task before us is the tracing of the threads, always running here and there together, grouping themselves around thicker strands, converging in the hand of time.” “As nature did not produce these creatures in a linear series, one after the other, we can only approximately exhibit their relations in our catalogues and collections.”3

  Samuel Scudder appears never to have abandoned high/low distinctions, yet he did, along with Grote and Edwards, adopt a phylogenetic approach as indispensable to classification if nearly impossible to achieve. The war of all against all in nature’s realm was also part of his outlook. “Nature,” he wrote, “always seems on her guard.” “The struggle for existence is the perpetual inheritance of the individual.”4 He, as much as the other main butterfly people, became engaged with how butterflies evolved or adapted to conditions around them, defending themselves against an army of enemies, escaping concealment, above all, by mimicry. A dark picture emerged in Scudder’s work. Like the others, he had become an ecological Darwinist, no longer loyal to Louis Agassiz (who died in 1873). Scudder not only accepted evolution as a fact of life, he also viewed natural selection as the major animating pivot of evolution, acting through such pressures as competition and predation to “select out” the most fit individuals. It is not clear exactly why or when Scudder took this new route. In late December 1879, Charles Fernald, a Christian naturalist from Maine, visited him in his home in Cambridge and was impressed that Scudder still maintained the “observance of the good old custom of saying grace at the table.” “There are so few of our scientific men at the present day,” Fernald lamented, “who observe or tolerate any form of Christian worship that when we meet one who does it seems like finding an oasis in a desert.”5 Scudder probably never lost a strong faith in God, but he did come close to believing that something else besides God dictated change in the universe.

  American butterfly people, by the 1880s, had done as much as any other group of naturalists in the world to advance the understanding of the life and death of species in Darwinian terms. At the same time, they illuminated each stage of the insect life cycle, “adding to the accumulation of anatomical detail,” as the historian Jakub Novak has written, and presiding over “one of the greatest accomplishments of nineteenth-century life science.”6 Americans had discovered much with the microscope, which they used in an unprecedented way. Charles Valentine Riley, then the Missouri state entomologist, explored pupation accurately for the first time; and Edward Burgess, Scudder’s colleague at the Boston Society of Natural History, established—again, for the first time-—how the monarch butterfly’s proboscis worked to suck nectar from flowers, as well as showing in impressive detail the insect’s internal anatomy based on Burgess’s original dissections in the 1860s.7 Scudder described, often with microscopic care, the surfaces, shapes, and colors of the eggs, larvae, and pupae, and their diversity.8 His drawings in volume 3 of the wing veins of butterflies and of adult male genitalia showed how these features might be used in classification, and better than anyone else at the time, he explained metamorphosis.

  This plate offers an unprecedented glimpse into the insides and outsides of the monarch butterfly, based on the brilliant dissections of Edward Burgess, Scudder’s colleague at the Boston Society of Natural History, who later gave up entomology for the glories of building and racing yachts. From the top down: (1) the external anatomy of the female monarch, side view; (2) the internal anatomy of same; (3) horizontal section of the end of the male abdomen, with emphasis on the genitalia (see p. for penis); (4) lateral view of the same male abdomen, showing the genitalia in position (see t. for testis); (5) the internal anatomy of the female pupa, three days old, side view; and (6) the internal anatomy of the male caterpillar. See Butterflies of Eastern United States and Canada, vol. 3, plate 62.

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  Scudder posed and answered a basic question: How did the butterfly escape from “its iron prison, hardened by months of exposure to wintry cold and sleet and sun in rapid succession?” Answer: “There is a weak point in every structure, and in the chrysalis it lies next to the point of greatest strength in the captive butterfly.” After winter ends, and

  the more genial showers of spring or damp air of a summer’s night have softened the texture of its prison-walls, they are further weakened by the moisture now exuded by the twice-bound prisoner, feeling the hour of release draw near. A suture along the crest of the thorax gives way, often with a perceptible click, to the force of the great muscular mass within; the rest is easy; the rent is continued on both sides down other sutures, until a door is opened, whose inner walls suffer no harm to the delicate creature struggling to escape.

  Next, the butterfly leaves its “encasement,” finds “a friendly twig,” and “sitting in the sunshine dries its moist quivering wings, gently fanning them up and down, until, full of new life and courage, it ventures forth—a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”9

  Life stages inspired an entire generation of naturalists to breed and study butterflies and moths, among them Emily Morton, Caroline Soule and Ida Eliot (who worked together), Thomas Bean, William Wright, and Samuel Eliot (who bred more butterflies than even William Henry Edwards). Will Doherty, a talented young naturalist from Cincinnati who would become the country’s greatest collector of tropical Lepidoptera, modeled his investigations on “eggs and larvae” after those of Scudder and Edwards, intending to write a “useful supplement” to their labors.10 Scudder drew on his work in volume 2 of The Butterflies of the Eastern U.S. and Canada.11

  Evolutionary thinking transformed the work on stages, above all for Edwards, captain of American breeders, who was fascinated with how the multiple forms in nature emerged, evolved, diverged, and fought for precedence. By the late 1870s, with a little help from the brilliant German zoologist August Weismann, he had charted the extent of polymorphism in butterflies, narrating the life story of the zebra swallowtail, once thought by Europeans to be three distinct species instead of one species in three forms, which Edwards had discovered it to be. In a series of cold experiments, modeled after Weismann’s, Edwards traced how temperature shifts from spring to summer changed the zebra’s morphology, essentially reproducing evolutionary history, the “primary,” and smaller, spring form having arisen in the glacial period, and the “secondary,” larger summer form in a period of climatic warming. He made the summer form revert back to spring’s by placing pupae, for a time, in a cold environment (such as a cellar or icebox). Edwards wrote glowingly to his favorite audience, Henry Edwards, that his “experiment” produced “results much more satisfactorily, than did Dr. Weismann’s. If all comes out, it will be triumphant,” and it was, with Edwards broadcasting his triumph in the late 1870s, through the many journal articles he published, from Berlin to Boston.12 John Lubbock, one of England’s most respected naturalists, in his 1881 book, Fifty Years of Science, ranked Edwards as a great pioneer of biological science, on a short list with only four other men: Weismann, Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin.13

  Edwards’s volume 2 of The Butterflies of North America gave the same treatment to the tiger swallowtail, a butterfly strategic to his analysis, and the first American butterfly ever pictured: in a painting by the Englishman John White and rendered as a woodcut by his countryman Thomas Moffat, in 1634, in his Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum.14 The tiger flew throughout North America, from central Alaska to the summit of Mount Washington, its first brood in the Atlantic states in May, during a promise of warmer days, and its second as a summertime visitor, darting and swooping in arcs of energy among the trees or sailing gracefully down like falling leaves from roosting sites into the gardens or meadows below. Wild cherry, birch, ash, tulip poplar, and basswood were among the many food plants for its larva
e, and the adult was remarkable for “its peculiar dimorphism,” Edwards said, “which, so far as is yet known, is without parallel among butterflies.” At its most northern point, all the females and males were yellow with black vertical stripes on the wings (the females with much blue in the hindwings, the males usually black). At its most southern point, the females were all black, or melanic, without any stripes, the males yellow and striped. As with the zebra swallowtail, naturalists had for many years seen these forms as separate species, not as the same butterfly. Edwards exposed their mistakes, building on the work of earlier Americans. He relied on Weismann to determine where the black form came from and why it was black. Drawing on Darwin, Weismann had asserted, in 1872, that “the yellow is the ancient and original form, the black a much younger or more recent form able to perpetuate its type through its descendants till it has become common, sometimes, almost to the exclusion of the yellow and original form.” Edwards carried this argument further by outlining an ecological “belt of dimorphism” or realm of “intergrades” between the northern and southern extremes along the northeast corridor; in this area of swirling incoherence, several butterflies (pearl crescents, blues and purples, and wood nymphs) struggled over millions of years to achieve species identity. Here, too, the melanic and yellow female swallowtails competed, according to Edwards, with the blacker form being more tenacious.15