“The electric light is quite an invention to get flies,” George Franck, a traveling Brooklyn hat merchant, informed Strecker in the summer of 1884 from Council Bluffs, Iowa. “I am getting some every night, and some times in great numbers. Last night I caught a Sphinx entirely unknown to me.” George L. Hudson, an organist from Plattsburgh, Pennsylvania, hoisted a ladder up to city streetlights to reach the moths that fluttered frenetically around the “globes of light.” A journalist, Edward Warren, caught “some beautiful little moths with mugs like silk” at the electric lights in Pittsburgh.36 In Washington, D.C., a daring young naturalist climbed the capitol dome, recently lighted by electricity, later reporting his trove of insects to the entomology club in Washington; John Morris from Baltimore was there to hear it: the “young fellow showed a lot of insects of nearly every order, which he caught on the dome of the capitol, where they were attracted by the electrical light. The number thus drawn together is simply amazing; of moths there is no end.”37 Clear across the country in southern California, Max Albright, a German immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived at the Old Soldiers’ Home, paid the fifty-cent train fare to Los Angeles to catch moths in the lights. In the summer of 1894, Albright walked an hour to Santa Monica, with its fourteen “electric lights scattered from five to seven miles which I run through in a zigzag fashion.” By eleven-thirty, he was back home, footsore, “in time to wash and eat my meal.” “Every day I make the twelve mile tramp.”38
Before technological advances in printing press technology and photography, the cost of printing and illustration prevented the mass production of nature books, but after 1885 large numbers of books could be produced quickly, with sophisticated black-and-white images, usually created by an advanced photochemical process called the “halftone,” which allowed publishers to reproduce photographs. Between 1890 and 1891, the Entomological News offered the first photographs of butterflies by the orthochromatic process, a step beyond the halftone, with some clear colors, but not nearly as evocative as the earlier hand-colored images of butterflies.39 Doubleday and Page in Manhattan, attempting to erase the color deficit, pioneered the printing of photos in three colors from halftone plates. The company’s first such book, was printed in 1897: Bird Neighbors by Neltje Blanchan, with “birds as they are in life,” the author claimed, “each according to its own habit of existence.” The house’s director, F. N. Doubleday, boasted that he had produced, by 1900, “practically the only popular books illustrated in color photography in this field,” books on birds, trees, wildflowers, fishes, mammals, beetles, and mushrooms. In effect, Doubleday had joined together the two aesthetic imageries of the world’s fairs, one natural, the other man-made. In 1898 it published The Butterfly Book by William Holland, the beneficiary of this iconographical evolution and the most successful book of its kind in America and probably, at the time, in the world.40
Holland was in an ideal position to write this book. Not only did he have his wife’s wealth and an enormous butterfly collection; by the 1890s, he had also captured a high degree of institutional power. In 1890 he quit his Presbyterian ministry (after strategically embracing it twenty years earlier) to become the head of Western Pennsylvania University (later the University of Pittsburgh), in another ten years converting it from a “high school” (his phrase) into one of America’s substantial modern regional institutions, with “income-bearing assets,” as he put it, rising from $200,000 to $600,000. He established an undergraduate natural history society, “went out and shot a few birds” with the students, and taught them the secrets of taxidermy.41 But a few years later Holland’s appetite reached its pinnacle: as a result of his close association with Andrew Carnegie, he became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, soon the nation’s most advanced museum, superior even to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, a post he held along with his university chancellorship, until Carnegie persuaded him to give up the latter for the former.42 Holland had first met Carnegie in the late 1880s, at a fashionable summer resort in the Allegheny Mountains patronized by the “very best people” of Pittsburgh; by 1890, Carnegie had committed $2 million to the building of a library, a museum, and an art gallery just a square block from Holland’s house.43 “This suits me admirably,” Holland wrote Samuel Scudder.44 As one of “the Trustees of this enterprise,” he consulted closely “with my friend Mr. Andrew Carnegie” on how “his magnificent gift might best be applied.”45
Holland’s relationship with Carnegie was the key to all his later success, and he did everything he could to please the magnate, making the museum a site, above all, for spectacular display (principally of dinosaurs, Carnegie’s favorite fauna). In return for Holland’s services, Carnegie rewarded him by advancing his status as an international butterfly man.46 He lavished insects on Holland and financed construction of a large modern iron-wrought gallery in the museum to hold them, with space for many hundreds of butterfly boxes, turning the collection into the best institutional one in the country. He invested Holland with complete authority over the museum, so much so that it seemed “not for the public” but “for the benefit of the one at its head,” as the Pittsburgh naturalist Edward Klages (one of the two brothers who collected butterflies for Rothschild in Venezuela) complained.47 Carnegie permitted Holland to use the Carnegie imprimatur to get whatever insects he desired for himself and for the museum. If Rothschild had his Tring, Holland had his Carnegie. “My friend, Lord Rothschild and I,” Holland would write an inquiring naturalist in 1902, “have paid higher prices for butterflies than any other individuals now living.”48
Backed by Carnegie, who would leave him $5,000 a year in his will, Holland was a representative figure of the new industrial age, and his institutional status attracted an offer from Doubleday to produce a new book of color photographs.49 Ready to absorb any fashionable new machine, never looking backward, Holland was among the first in Pittsburgh to get a typewriter, telephone, and Dictaphone.50 “It is absolutely impossible for me,” he told his parents, “to accomplish all that I have to do, unless I avail myself of some of these labor saving devices, which are being multiplied in this age.”51 In 1897, seeing a windfall in the new color photography, he responded to a Doubleday overture and began negotiations on a guidebook to American butterflies with abundant color photos. Holland already had the butterflies, possessing by this time all of William Henry Edwards’s insects, plus thousands other Americans had collected, and he had his own money to invest in the book. “Holland must have sunk thousands of dollars in publishing,” Edwards told Scudder. “He told me he would have to sell 8000 copies to get his money back.”52 Doubleday had the technology and was “most energetic in pushing sales,” Holland informed Scudder, whose own books barely broke even. They had “already disposed of 15,000 copies of Bird Neighbors, to which my book, in a certain sense, will be a companion piece.”53
Holland’s Butterfly Book, subtitled A Popular Guide, looked little like the small European pocket guides of the past or today’s glossy paperback guides. Nearly four hundred pages long, and covering most North American butterflies, along with their anatomy, classification, collecting, and historiography, it loosely recalled Scudder’s own great volumes, although Holland, knowing how poorly Scudder’s had sold, had tried to avoid their scholarly “heaviness.” He’d interspersed undemanding, folksy little poems and essays throughout the text (with only a tiny selection from Romantic poetry, most probably lifted from Scudder; there was nothing in a foreign language, and no Shakespeare). The book’s special feature was its forty-eight color plates, five of larvae and pupae, again a borrowing from Scudder (with Scudder’s permission), presented in vivid colors and, according to one expert on photography, demonstrating the color process better than any other book or periodical of the time, the “textures as well as the tints rendered with rare fidelity.”54 Especially impressive were William Henry Edwards’s blue lycaenids; the golden, brown, and black skippers; and the orange-and-black checkerspots, sometimes in straight
rows or in angled portraits, looking as if they had settled on the ground all at once. Other plates showed ensembles of swallowtails—in pairs, in the company of other insects, and on flowers, each perfectly scaled in color and size. On one page, yellow and orange sulphurs, in splendid hues and tints, lined up; a few pages later, purple-and-white admirals seemed to be in flight. But most striking were Edwards’s fritillaries, particularly the male Diana, of the warmest orange and brown, and the female, in deepest black and bluest blue, as if just taken fresh from Paint Creek out of Edwards’s own net.
The two aesthetics, natural and artificial, that had been on display at the 1893 world’s fair converged in Holland’s Butterfly Book, and like all good colored pictures, these fed the imagination. Hundreds of boys and girls who saw them went out to observe and collect. So, too, the photos, despite the extra cost, radically lowered the volume’s price, with large printings feeding demand. Edwards’s volumes cost $125, Scudder’s $75, and Holland’s $3, making it “the cheapest book of its kind ever published.”55 Holland was certain that “the best part of the book is, of course, the pictures, and the making of these involved an enormous amount of labor as well as no small expense, for all of which I expect no adequate return whatever, except the gratitude of my friends,” or so he told a Massachusetts professor.56 In the mid-twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov still found both price and plates exceptional, though he despised the “stale anecdotes, pseudo-Indian legends, and samples of third-rate poetry.” A Samuel Scudder Holland was not, but his book went through several editions, including a 1915 pocket Butterfly Guide, one of the most durable ever on the market, a volume that could be flipped through literally in seconds.57 And despite Holland’s claims to Scudder about expecting “no adequate return whatever,” he reaped a profit (after 1900, about $1,000 annually), encouraging a wave of similar books.
“Following the publication of The Butterfly Book, and certainly because of it,” wrote Harry Clench, a respected expert at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the late 1940s, “the day of the amateur began in earnest, not only in the large increase in collectors and collections, but in the published record as well.”58 The day of the amateur had actually already arrived, and if numbers rose (as they most certainly did), the causes could be found elsewhere as well. Between 1895 and 1900, state after state passed laws ending the collection of birds and birds’ eggs, a response to the Audubon Society, led mostly by women sickened by the slaughter of birds to supply feathers to the hat business.59 The crusade was a remarkable episode in American history, with notable outcomes for butterfly collecting, since naturalists, male and female, who had collected only birds or birds and butterflies now shifted wholly to butterflies (and moths), their numbers growing across the country two or threefold by 1900.60 Holland’s book stoked the fever. It inspired a woman from Portland, Maine, to reclaim the joy of her childhood, “the one thing I cared for” which others thought “queer in a girl.” Now, she wrote, “I want to take it up” again “as a study,” and “your Butterfly Book is the best book I have ever seen.”61 “I am 55 years old,” wrote a German immigrant in Fort Collins, Colorado, “and since my boyhood have collected butterflies and moths at first in Germany, here in Colorado since 19 years. I have your book about our butterflies and I am very glad to have it; it is just what we wanted.”62 “I began collecting butterflies, when I was about nine years old,” explained a young man from Neligh, Nebraska, “but lost interest in them when I was thirteen or fourteen. When I got a copy of the Butterfly Book last spring all of my old interest was revived, and it is now my intention to form a large collection. The students of butterflies all over the country should have nothing but the deepest gratitude for what you have done for them.”63
Electricity, color photography, industrial technologies, and the railroads all increased American contact with the natural world. But they had adverse impacts, too. Moth collectors may have benefited from electrical lights, but the insects themselves fared less well, dying by the many millions as they collided with hot streetlamps or were distracted by glare, suffering the same fate as at the fiery gas wells around industrial cities like Pittsburgh, which could scorch or swallow any living thing that approached them.64 Yet it seems that no naturalist in the nineteenth century bothered to consider the impact of electric light in any extended way; even into our own time, no one has “measured the effects [of artificial light] on moth populations,” as Kenneth Frank recently observed in Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting.65 What evidence exists confirms a negative relationship between artificial light and the life of moths. Victimized by the “captivation effect,” moths often lose their ability to find food and cease to reproduce in a predictable and normal way. They fly about madly, in swooping, chaotic, repetitive, and self-destructive patterns; as one early observer put it, “if a new electric light establishment has been installed near your neighborhood, you will be certain of some rare catches and specimens, but after a few years most of the moths and insects in the vicinity will have become extinct, by reason of beating themselves to death against the lights.”66 Two of today’s observers, Kenneth Frank and Gerhard Eisenheis, have conjectured that artificial lighting may undercut or devastate small populations also threatened by habitat fragmentation.67
In an irony of the time, William Henry Edwards’s third volume came out the same year as Holland’s The Butterfly Book, each with pictures of the same butterflies but differently produced, Edwards’s by the human hand, Holland’s by photographic technology. William Holland’s photos may have attracted a new legion of amateurs, but in time, and in the manner of all such photos, they would also promote distance from butterflies and from the natural world generally by “suppressing” the handwork or the illustrating skills of individual naturalists.68 In contrast, by depending on their own artistic craft, both Mary Peart and Herman Strecker engaged butterflies more intimately and closely than if they had photographed them, relying on machinery devised by others. “The correlation of nature-study and drawing is so natural and inevitable,” Anna Comstock argued in her popular Handbook of Nature Study, “that it needs never be revealed to the pupil. When the child is interested in studying any object, he enjoys illustrating his observations with drawings; the happy absorption of children thus engaged is a delight to witness.”69 By enlisting the child’s own ability, sketching or painting led to a level of seeing and immersion greater than any reached by those who lacked the skill or discipline to draw or paint.
So, too, photographic machinery made collecting butterflies irrelevant or superfluous. For children, however, actual collecting served best as an introduction to butterflies, to the point of arousing the “beating heart.” There were dangers in it, as many indicated, but collecting that served some educational or spiritual purpose could be relied upon to open a door. Comstock made this point, and so did naturalist Herbert Smith, in 1897, in response to those who considered all collecting murder. “The collecting instinct,” he argued, “is inherent in almost everyone, and through it, nearly every boy can be drawn into the study of nature. There is something tangible about a collection: the possessor feels the richness of it, and his interest continually grows.” Besides, “the quick death of a poison bottle can hardly be regarded as cruelty compared with the lingering death caused by an ichneumon.”70
Charles Valentine Riley, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Scudder in 1888 that he doubted that color photos of lepidoptera would ever exceed in “naturalness, accuracy, and clearness” the great handcrafted images of the past.71 Ten years later, fewer doubts existed, for color photography had begun to “capture” so clearly the insects themselves as to foreclose collecting, or so two respected naturalists inferred soon after Holland’s book appeared. Frederic Clements, a young university instructor from Lincoln, Nebraska, and later one of America’s great ecologists, wrote Holland that he had “become too soft-hearted to be able to ‘cyanide’ a bee or butterfly, and yet I must know them quite well in my work. Your book helps
me out very nicely, as I have no compunctions about catching a butterfly, if I let him loose again.”72 And Gene Stratton-Porter of Indiana, a popular author of books for young people, in 1912 discovered her mission in life: to photograph moths in color immediately after release from the chrysalis or pupa but “before circulation was sufficiently established for them to take flight.” In an earlier novel, A Girl of the Limberlost, she had dealt with collecting but had had nothing critical to say against it; in fact, she’d recommended selling moths as one way for poor girls to help pay for their education. Three years later, however, in Moths of the Limberlost, she wrote, “The difference between these perfect living creatures, and the shriveled, pin-pierced subjects of the illustration of any moth book I possess is the difference between abundant life and repulsive death.” No longer pro-collecting, Stratton-Porter invoked Holland in that book but only to draw attention to color photographs as substitute butterflies. Passages in Holland’s The Butterfly Book, she charged, led to collecting and death; while she fostered life by “picturing the beauties and wonders of this creation, for people who could not go afield to see for themselves.”73
Butterfly People Page 31