Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  17. On this evolution, see Lynn K. Nyhart, “Natural History and the ‘New’ Biology,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Jardine et al., 426–43; and Muller-Wille, “Collection and Collation.”

  18. Linnaeus, Philosophica Botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (1751; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 332.

  19. Buffon, quoted in Roger, Buffon, 83, 91. This discussion of Buffon and Linnaeus rests on my reading of Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Roger, Buffon, 71–73, 279, 288–89, 309–12; and Winsor, “Linnaeus Was Not an Essentialist.”

  20. Gerardo Lamas et al., Atlas of Neotropical Lepidoptera, vol. 124 of Bibliography of Butterflies (Gainesville, FL: Scientific Publishers, 1995), 207; Edward Whymper, Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator, vol. I (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 365; Alexander von Humboldt, Views of Nature, or, Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation (London, 1850), 232–33; and Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos, 155.

  21. Quoted in Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34.

  22. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx; and Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.

  23. Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  24. Albertus Seba, Cabinet of Curiosities, a facsimile copy based on an original in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (1734–56; repr., New York: Taschen, n.d.), 452, 464, 476.

  25. On the strengths and weaknesses of these writers, see Walter Rothschild and Karl Jordan, “A Revision of the American Papilios,” Novitates Zoologicae 13 (August 1906): 415–16.

  26. Lyon and Sloan, “Premier Discours,” in From Natural History, 110–11.

  27. Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth Sabine (London, 1849), 208; Humboldt, Personal Narrative.

  28. Quoted in Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos, 6; and Malcolm Nicolson, “Historical Introduction” to Humboldt, Personal Narrative, xix–xx.

  29. Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  30. This democratic situation is laid out beautifully in Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), especially in the first one hundred pages. On the diffusion of wealth, see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), and Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010).

  31. In his biography of Ernst Haeckel, Robert Richards writes that only academics made such “ritual”exchanges of photos, but the practice was widespread, embracing many individuals from many walks of life. See Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 114.

  32. Benjamin Walsh to Hermann Hagen, December 7, 1863, EML. For an account of this development earlier in England, see Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, chapters 2–6.

  33. I would like to thank Jeannette Hopkins for persuading me to make this argument.

  34. George Hulst to Herman Strecker, February 9 and 28, 1876, HS-FM.

  1. Yankee Butterfly People

  1. For an early account of the Linnaean legacy, see George Louis Leclerc Buffon, Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects, and Reptiles, vol. 5 (London, 1793), 135–37.

  2. On this weakness in Fabricius and Linnaeus, see Walter Rothschild and Karl Jordan, “A Revision of the American Papilios,” Novitates Zoologicae 13 (August 1906): 412–15.

  3. Jean Baptiste Boisduval, Histoire générale et iconographie des lépidoptères et des chenilles de l’Amérique septentrionale [A General History and Iconography of the Butterflies and Caterpillars of North America] (Paris: Librarie Encyclopedique de Roret, 1833).

  4. On Lorquin, see E. O. Essig, A History of Entomology (1931; repr., New York: Hafner, 1965), 694–97; and on Boisduval, see ibid., 559–61, and Jean Gouillard, Histoire des entomologistes français, 1750–1950 (Paris: Société Nouvelles des Éditions Boubée, 2004), 58–59. For the two volumes on American butterflies, see Boisduval, Histoire générale, and Boisduval, “Lépidoptères de la Californie,” in Annales de la Société Entomologique de Belgique (Brussels, 1868–69).

  5. For a complete definition of systematics, see Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 145–46.

  6. Edward Doubleday, “Communications on the Natural History of North America,” Entomological Magazine (March 1838): 26–27, 31.

  7. Entomological Magazine (September 1838): 199–200; and, in the same issue, “Proceedings of the Entomological Club of London,” 206–7.

  8. Edward Doubleday, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera (London, 1846–50), vol. 1, pp. 226, 210–11, and 226.

  9. Entomological Magazine (September 1838), 203.

  10. Edward Doubleday to Thaddeus Harris, July 12, 1839, draft of letter, in “Harris Manuscript II, Lepidoptera I,” in the section “Arrangement of the Bombyces, Sept. 1839,” no pagination, Thaddeus William Harris Papers, 1823–1855, EML.

  11. This was the considered judgment of Karl Jordan and Walter Rothschild in their authoritative “A Revision of the American Papilios,” 411–37. This article offers an informative overview of the changes in insect iconography, as well as a discussion of why images matter in the first place.

  12. On Abbot, see Pamela Gilbert, John Abbot: Birds, Butterflies, and Other Wonders (London: Natural History Museum, 1998). For a recent assessment of Abbot’s pictorial legacy, see John V. Calhoun’s informative essays in the Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, published over a three-year period, 2004–7, vols. 58–61.

  13. Jessie Poesch, Titian Ramsey Peale (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961), 4.

  14. Howard Ensign Evans, The Natural History of the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1819–1820 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14.

  15. Quoted in Poesch, Titian Ramsey Peale, 53–54.

  16. Doubleday, “Communications on the Natural History of North America,” 199.

  17. Titian Peale, “Proposals for Publishing by Subscription, a Work to Be Entitled Lepidoptera Americana” (1833), original in special collections, American Museum of Natural History, New York; Poesch, Titian Ramsey Peale, 60–61; Thomas Say, American Entomology: A Description of the Insects of North America with Illustrations Drawn and Colored After Nature (1815), unpaginated; and Titian Peale, “Lepidoptera: Larva, Foodplant, Etc.” (1833, 1877, 1879), with handwritten introduction, entries, and drawings, Rare Book Collection, American Museum of Natural History. For more on Peale’s plates, see Patricia Tyson Strand, Thomas Say: New World Naturalist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

  18. Michael Salmon, in his history of English butterfly people, claims that “the twentieth century” was “the age for the study of living insects,” pioneered especially by an Englishman, Frederick Frohawk, who “reared every British species from the egg.” But this is incorrect, since American entomologists had led the way on this matter in the nineteenth century. See Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 370.

  19. See William Henry Edwards to Philip Zeller, November 22, 1873, Philipp Zeller Papers, Manuscripts Collection, Entomological Library, NHM-LONDON, in which he decribes the Canadian Entomologist as “the only organ American Entomologists have for making known their observations.” On clubs and societies, see Sally Kohlstedt, “The Nineteenth-Century Amateur Tradition: The Case of the Boston Society of Natural History,” in Science and Its Public, ed. Gerald Holton and W. A. Blanpied (Dordrecht: D. Reidal, 1976); and Sally Kohlstedt, ed., The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode (Washing
ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

  20. The dedication for Samuel Scudder’s The Life of a Butterfly (New York: Holt, 1893).

  21. “Beauty of the World” (1725), published in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 14–15.

  22. I have relied here on George Marsden’s biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), especially chapter 4, “The Harmony of All Knowledge,” pp. 58–81. Marsden’s discussion of Edwards’s religious views, on pp. 433–505, is excellent, the concluding pages profound.

  23. Quoted in Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 65.

  24. William Henry Edwards, Autobiographical Notes (privately printed, 1901), 14–16, WHE-SA.

  25. William Henry Edwards to Samuel Scudder, October 21, 1893, SS-BMS. In another letter to Scudder, Edwards wrote, “Mr. Hopkins was a wise old fox, well fitted to govern such an institution. I was twice fined three dollars by him.… I went to him one Sunday, when I thought the sun was down, to ask if I might go to Troy for a celebration the next day. He glanced at Round Top Mountain, and saw the last rays shining on its summit, and told me to go and come back in half an hour, which I did, and then he told me I could go to Troy!” (May 2, 1892, SS-BMS).

  26. Edwards, Autobiographical Notes, 66–67, 64, 63, and 72.

  27. William Henry Edwards, “Journal of Natural History,” November 4, 1844, and February 22 and May 7, 1845, WHE-SA.

  28. Edwards, “Journal of Natural History,” 103–4.

  29. Edwards, Autobiographical Notes, 72. See Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, January 25, 1891, WGW. In his sunniness Edwards even presented a sanguine view of slavery. “Brazilian slavery, as it is,” he wrote, “is little more than slavery in name. Prejudice against color is scarcely known, and no white thinks less of his wife because her ancestors came from over the water. Half the offices in the government and of the army, are mingled blood; and padres, and lawyers, and doctors of the intensest hue, are none the less esteemed. The educated blacks are just as talented, and just as gentlemanly as the whites, and in repeated instances we received favors from them, which we were happy to acknowledge.” Whether fully accurate or not, this reflection is nevertheless remarkable, not only for what it says about Brazil, but for what it reveals about Edwards, whose family members were at the time practicing abolitionists.

  30. William Henry Edwards, “Preface to My London Diary of 1848,” July 8, 1906, and March 25, 1848, WHE-SA.

  31. Spence later reported glowingly to his colleagues, after Edwards had returned home, about Edwards own “stories” in his Voyage. See “Proceedings of Entomological Society of London,” May 1, 1848, in Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, vol. 5 (1847–49): xxxviii; and Edwards, “London Diary,” April 8, 1848. Also William Kirby and William Spence, Introduction to Entomology (London, 1819), 69, 72; and William Spence to Ernst Germar (an entomologist in Halle, Germany), July 21, 1817, DEI.

  32. David Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1976] 1994), 89.

  33. Edwards, “London Diary,” April 8, 10, and 28, 1848.

  34. Ibid., May 10, 1848, and April 28, 1848.

  35. On Edwards and the early coal business, see Otis K. Rice, “Coal Mining in the Kanawha Valley to 1861: A View of Industrialization in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 31, no. 4 (1965): 393–416; and George W. Atkinson, History of Kanawha County (Charleston, 1876), 216–20. “West Virginia,” Atkinson wrote, “contains more than one-fourth of the coal of this country, and Kanawha County is the great center of this immensity of natural wealth.”

  36. For this history, see Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 56–86; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 85–89; and Barbara Rasmussen, Absentee Landowning and Exploitation of West Virginia, 1760–1920 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 93–179.

  37. Edwards, Autobiographical Notes, 109–11; photocopy courtesy of Douglas Willis, direct descendant of William Henry Edwards.

  38. William H. Edwards, “History of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company” (1902), 1–7, LOHE-SA; West Virginia Geological Survey (Wheeling, WV, 1914), 33; “Records of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company Store,” June 1864–January 30, 1865, WHE-SA; “History of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company,” 2–3.

  39. Ten years earlier, in 1854, a Virginian, R. H. Maury, opened a mine using slaves on the same mining property, after buying the land from Edwards, which Edwards, in turn, bought back from him in 1864. His miners and their families lived on the bottomlands along the river, very near the store, a local monopoly selling not only dry goods, meat, and groceries but also such “personals” as “looking glasses,” “hair oil,” “cologne,” something called “1 B pain killer,” and laudanum (according to the records for 1864–65, one man, Peter M. McCourt, bought all the laudanum in stock, and we can only imagine for what purpose). “History of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company,” 2–3; West Virginia Geological Survey, 33; “Records of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company Store.”

  40. On Edwards’s debt to Weidemeyer, see Edwards to Scudder, December 31, 1874, SS-BMS.

  41. On Akhurst, see Edward Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 9, no. 3 (June 1914): 49–50. And on Edwards’s debt to Weidemeyer, see Edwards to Theodore Mead, December 15, 1876, TM: “When I began collecting, Weidemeyer was in the vigor of collector-ship, and I got a great deal of information from him.” Weidemeyer later moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where Edwards and others lost touch with him (perhaps he either ceased his butterfly work or died). See his Catalogue of North American Butterflies (Philadelphia, 1864), taken from the “Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Philadelphia.” Edwards’s butterfly collecting began along the Hudson River in New Hamburg, New York, where he lived in a rented cottage between 1857 and 1858, shortly before moving to nearby Newburgh. “New Hamburgh, where the house was in a bit of a forest,” Edwards recalled, “started me in the butterfly path. I found many sorts of caterpillars, and my wife made colored drawings of them. The next summer we were at Lenox, Massachusetts, and I used my net to much advantage.” See Edwards, Autobiographical Notes, 201–2.

  42. Edwards to Scudder, December 20, 1870, SS-BMS.

  43. Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, January 28, 1896, WGW. In April 1891, Edwards wrote to the naturalist Henry Skinner about this discovery. “I saw Mr. Peale’s collection in Washington in 1861, I should think. Was taken to his house by Robert Kennicott. Noticed his style of putting up his insects, and straightway went home and had a lot of cases made, about 16in X 10, glass on both sides, tin foil over the inside frame, and fastened corks to the bottom. Glass just as Peale showed, and that case I have used to this day. Mine are not sealed. But I have scarcely ever lost an insect by dermestes” (Edwards to Skinner, April 5, 1891, HS-ANS). Peale laid out his preserving methods in an article prepared for the Smithsonian Institution, “Method of Preserving Lepidoptera,” in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC, 1864), 404–6. Edwards brought fifty of Peale’s boxes home with him to Newburgh for his own butterflies, and would use them for another forty years. Edwards to Joseph Lintner, June 29,1897, JL.

  44. Edwards, Autobiographical Notes, 202–7.

  45. For a map of the counties in West Virginia, see Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 24–25.

  46. Edwards recounts this history in a letter to Lintner, August 2, 1879, JL.

  47. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 4 and May 29, 1879, HE.

  48. William Henry Edwards, Entomological Diary, July 1876, WHE-SA.

  49. Edwards regretted that there were not more
clover fields around the house. He wished he’d had “fields of it,” to study better the member of Argynnis (fritillaries). See Edwards to Thomas Bean, January 13, 1876, TB.

  50. Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, August 2, 1896, WGW.

  51. On Edwards’s sighting of the Diana fritillary and on its impact on his decision to write a book, see Edwards’s autobiography, Autobiographical Notes, 207–8.

  52. “Argynnis I,” BNA (Philadelphia: American Entomological Society, 1868–72), vol. 1, unpaginated.

  53. Letter to the editor, CE (July 1878): 140; and letter to Scudder, June 14, 1888, SS-BMS, in which he recounts this spectacular sight. The other citations in this paragraph can be found in Edwards “Entomological Journal,” April 14, 1867; April 16, 1869; May 28, 1869; and May 8, 1870, WHE-SA.

  54. On Thoreau, see David R. Foster, Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); on Marsh, see George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (1864; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

  55. Thaddeus Harris to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, c. June 1851, in The Entomological Correspondence of Thaddeus W. Harris, ed. Samuel Scudder (Boston, 1869), 263–64. This letter appears at the very end of the volume.

  56. August Weismann, Studies in the Theory of Descent (London, 1882), 651. This quotation comes from an essay in this volume, “On the Mechanical Conception of Nature,” written sometime in the 1870s, probably in 1877.

  57. Alexander Humboldt, Personal Narrative, quoted by Richard H. Grove, in his Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 367.

  58. On early coal mining in this region, see John Alexander Williams, West Virginia (New York: Norton, 1976), especially chapter 5, “Paint Creek,” pp. 130–58.