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59. Philipp Zeller to William Henry Edwards, May 27, 1879 (this letter was appended to another letter to Edwards by Zeller, with the same date), Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
60. Henry Edwards, “Iron and Its Relation to Civilization,” published in his A Mingled Yarn: Sketches on Various Subjects (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 65–85. I know of only one butterfly man or miner who did have doubts about mining. Thomas Belt, a brilliant English naturalist who joined the Australian gold rush in the early 1850s and later managed the gold mines of Chontales, Nicaragua, noted briefly in his book The Naturalist in Nicaragua how a river passing through Chontales was “woefully polluted by the gold-mining on its banks, and flows, a dark muddy stream, through the village of Santo Domingo.” In 1872 he went to Colorado to mine gold; three years later, he died there. See Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua (1874; repr., London, 1888), 106–8.
61. Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 986; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 22.
62. On Philadelphia as center of printing and lithography, see Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958).
63. Preface to BNA, unpaginated.
64. William Henry Edwards to Hermann Hagen, May 16, 1871, Hagen Correspondence, EML.
65. Dru Drury, Illustrations of Exotic Entomology, vol. 1, ed. J. O. Westwood (1770; repr., London, 1837), xviii–xix.
66. In this volume, however, he tried to prove the existence of several distinct species of blues, a position he later discarded but that current systematics confirms. See “The Azures,” in Michael Gochfeld and Joanna Burger, Butterflies of New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 165–66; and “Spring Azure,” in Alexander B. Klots, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 169.
67. William Henry Edwards to Philipp Zeller, May 27, 1879, and Zeller to Edwards (copy of letter contained in Edwards’s letter to Zeller, same date), Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON. Zeller wrote that “it is certain that Europeans have been far from executing your method, which seems the only correct one, in order to obtain the truth.” Edwards did not invent this new method. William Saunders, a Canadian who corresponded with him from the early 1860s on, had been confining females in this way for many years. Saunders’s letters to Edwards were destroyed, but see Saunders to Samuel Scudder, January 4, 1864, and March 26, 1864, SS-BMS.
68. In 1876 he would write Philipp Zeller, a German naturalist, “I do little more now but breed from eggs” (Edwards to Zeller, 1876, Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON). On the ice house and the greenhouse, see Edwards to William Holland, April 21, 1886, WH-CM. On butterflies in the dressing room, and so on, see Edwards, Entomological Diary, September 25, 1873, WHE-SA, and Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 28, 1875, HE.
69. “Whole story” appears throughout Edwards’s letters, but see his letter to Scudder, July 11, 1871, SS-BMS. The term comes out of natural history, and for insects was best expressed in The Introduction to Entomology by William Kirby and William Spence (London, 1819), a book Edwards knew quite well. Viewing nature as a series of “stories” sounds unscientific, but in Edwards’s rendering, all living things have stories, people and butterflies alike.
70. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, November 15, 1875, and June 23, 1876, HE.
71. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, December 20, 1870, and January 24, 1871, SS-BMS. On the impact of Darwin’s views on other naturalists, see Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 27; and Edward Larson, Evolution’s Workshop (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 102–9.
72. Edwards to Scudder, December 1, 1875, SS-BMS.
73. Edwards to Henry Edwards, November 15, 1875, and June 23, 1876, HE.
74. See Benjamin Walsh to Hermann Hagen, May 11, 1860, and August 4, 1861, EML.
75. See, on Walsh, Charles Valentine Riley, “In Memoriam,” American Entomologist 2, no. 3 (1869–70); and Carol Sheppard, “Benjamin Dann Walsh: Pioneer Entomologist and Proponent of Darwinian Theory,” Annual Review of Entomology 49 (January 2004): 1–25. See also Edna Tucker, “Benjamin D. Walsh—First State Entomologist,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society (Springfield, IL, May 14, 1920), 54–61; and Walsh’s biographical sketch in American National Biography, ed. John Garraty and Mark Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
76. By 1869, Edwards was sending so many letters to Walsh that he could not answer them all. See Walsh to Edwards, January 18, 1869, WHE-SA. On the historical significance of Walsh, see Carol Sheppard, “Benjamin Dann Walsh.”
77. Walsh to Hagen, January 14, 1869, EML.
78. “In every department of nature,” Wallace wrote in 1865, “there occur instances of the instability of specific form, which increase of materials aggravates rather than diminishes.… It is for such reasons that naturalists now look upon the study of varieties as more important than that of well-fixed species. It is in the former that we see nature at work.” Quoted in Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, ed. Andrew Berry (London: Verso, 2002), 97–98.
79. See Wallace’s essay in Berry, ed., Infinite Tropics, 88, plus Berry’s commentary.
80. “Papilio III,” in BNA, vol. 1, unpaginated.
81. Edwards’s immaturity about the life history of butterflies may have shaped his failure to see how surface coal mining on any scale might have threatened butterflies. In the late 1860s, despite his desire to focus on living things, he still did not have much feel for how they interacted with one another or with the larger environment around them. Thaddeus Harris, at the end of his life, had achieved this ecological state of mind, but Edwards was only beginning to understand how every stage of a butterfly’s life history, from egg to butterfly, could open up one’s insight into larger environmental conditions.
82. For an excellent and extensive assessment of this breakthrough, see W. Conner Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840–1880 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 219–22.
83. Ibid., 222–24.
84. Edwards to Scudder, October 20, 1870, SS-BMS; Edwards, BNA, vol. 1, Grapta IV, unpaginated.
85. Edwards to Hagen, May 16, 1871, EML.
86. Edwards to Scudder, August 1871, SS-BMS.
87. “What Volume I cost I never knew,” he wrote Samuel Scudder in 1890. “I burned all the bills so that no one should see how extravagant I had been.” Edwards to Scudder, September 25, 1890, SS-BMS.
88. Edwards, Entomological Diary, July 5, 1868.
89. Ibid., September 2, 1868.
90. William Henry Edwards, “Habits of Melitaea Phaeton,” CE (February 15, 1869): 59; and “Melitaea I,” in BNA (Boston, 1884), vol. 2, unpaginated. In both places, Edwards refers to Frank Fraser as “one of my young friends.” See also Entomological Diary, June 6, 1871; August 21, 1869; and May 20, 1869.
91. Edwards, Entomological Diary, June 24, 1870; Edwards to Theodore Mead, June 10, 1871, TM; and Edwards to Henry Edwards, July 14, 1873, HE. On Edwards’s sister in Florida, see Edwards to Hermann Hagen, December 29, 1878, Letters to Hermann Hagen, EML; and on his other sister, see Edwards to Joseph Lintner, September 20, 1884, JL.
92. David Bruce to Henry Skinner, March 17, 1896, HS-PAS; and William Henry Edwards to Charles F. McGlashan, June 11, 1891, Charles McGlashan Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. In a letter to William Wright, William Henry Edwards mentions Henry’s agnosticism (see June 15, 1891, WGW). Arnold Mallis has Edwards’s birth date incorrectly at 1830, but the May brothers saw Edwards’s birth certificate. See Andrew Brown-May and Tom W. May, “ ‘A Mingled Yarn’: Henry Edwards, Thespian and Naturalist, in the Austral Land of Plenty, 1853–1866,” Historical Records of Australian Science 11, no. 3 (1997): 407–8; and Arnold Mallis, American Entomologists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Unive
rsity Press, 1971), 292.
93. For Anna Dickinson, see Mead’s 1871 journal, January 10, 1871, in private possession of John V. Calhoun, who graciously let me read this document. See also his Letterbook, 1870–74, especially Mead to Arthur Whittemore, November 21, 1872; Mead to Willie Edwards, February 26, 1872; Mead to Willie Edwards, January 11, 1874; and Mead to his father and mother, July 12, 1886, TM. As a very young man, Mead argued for more (not less) Chinese immigration (the Chinese being “honest, sober, industrious, and clean”), defended the rights of Jews to join established clubs in New York City, and viewed blacks as just as intellectually able as whites. His only prejudice (or the only one he would admit to) was against what he called the “savage” Catholic Irish, “incapable of reasoning and destitute of any sense of justice or personal moral responsibility.” When he heard that William Henry Edwards considered American Irish the most “efficient foremen”—John Burke, the man who managed his coal miners on Paint Creek, was one such—and believed that they had an “unexcelled genius for government,” he could not believe his ears.
94. Mead to Willie Edwards, May 15, 1871; September 10 and November 3, 1872; May 15, 1871; and February 9, 1873, TM.
95. Mead to Willie Edwards, May 19, 1872; Mead to William Henry Edwards, February 12, 1873, and May 29, 1872; and Mead to James Behrens, June 19, 1872, TM.
96. Mead to Herbert Morrison, February 12, 1873, TM.
97. Mead to William Henry Edwards, December 7, 1870, TM.
98. Mead, “Notes upon Some Butterfly Eggs and Larvae,” CE, 7, no. 9 (1875): 161–63.
99. Edwards to Scudder, September 13, 1873, SS-BMS; and William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, October 5, 1871, HE.
100. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, October 5, 1871; December 5, 1871; and October 16, 1876, HE.
101. Edwards to Mead, July 4 (or 7), 1878, TM.
102. Theodore L. Mead, “Naturalist, Entomologist, and Plantsman: An Autobiography,” published in The Yearbook of the Amaryllis Society (1935), 2, 3–14, TM.
103. Edward Doubleday, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera, vol. 1 (London, 1846), 46. Among other earlier pioneers to the Rockies were the Americans William Wood, Winslow Howard, and James Ridings, who visited in the 1850s and ’60s. See F. Martin Brown’s biographical sketches, especially “Two Early Collectors of Colorado Insects,” draft, in the F. Martin Brown Papers, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
104. Mead to William Henry Edwards, June 27, 1871, in Chasing Butterflies in the Colorado Rockies with Theodore Mead, ed. Grace H. Brown and annotated by F. Martin Brown, Bulletin No. 3 (Florissant, CO: Pike’s Peak Research Station, Colorado Outdoor Research Center, 1996), 20; Mead to Will Scott, November 1, 1871, TM; and Mead, “Notes upon Some Butterfly Eggs and Larvae,” 161–63.
105. Edwards, Entomological Diary, July 4, 1871; July 11, 1871; and December 5, 1871.
106. Mead to William Henry Edwards, October 27, 1871, TM; and William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, July 5, 1878, HE.
107. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, July 5, 1878, HE.
108. Mead to William Henry Edwards, October 20, 1871, in Brown, ed., Chasing Butterflies, 70.
109. Henry Edwards to Scudder, June 2, 1870, SS-BMS; and Charles F. McGlashan to Edwards, June 7, 1887, HE.
110. Obituary, “Henry Edwards,” EN 2, no. 7 (1891): 7–8; and Andrew Brown-May and Tom W. May, “ ‘A Mingled Yarn,’ ” 407–9.
111. At the same time, Edwards did “battle” (his word) against Australian clerics who were convinced that theatrical “amusement” promoted prostitution. In an open letter to a leading ministerial opponent, Edwards observed that actors and actresses have faults, to be sure, but “more virtue,” not less, than most other human beings; besides, “the Great Author of divine things himself” has, for centuries, “permitted amusement to exist,” because he “regards” it as “a natural craving of the human heart” and because it has “aided and directed the progress of the human mind.” Edwards later published this letter in the United States in his collection A Mingled Yarn, 90–91.
112. On Brooke and Polly, see William John Lawrence, The Life of Gustavus Vaughan Brooke: Tragedian (London, 1893), 160–64, 190–95, 200–2. I thank Andrew Brown-May for supplying me with the name of Brooke’s wife (Marianne Bray).
113. Letter cited by William Henry Edwards in BNA, vol. 1, in the description “Pieris I, Pieris Beckerii,” n.p.; and Brown-May and May, “ ‘A Mingled Yarn,’ ” 411.
114. Brown-May and May, “ ‘A Mingled Yarn,’ ” 411.
115. Henry Edwards to J. Angelo Ferrari, Vienna, May 24, 1862, DEI.
116. On the California theater in the days of gold rush and beyond, see Constance Rourke, Troupers of the Gold Coast (New York: Harcourt, 1928), and Richard A. Van Orman, “The Bard in the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 5 (January 1974): 29–38.
117. For these words, see an essay by Edwards published in High Jinks, a San Francisco magazine, in 1873 and republished in A Mingled Yarn, 90–91.
118. Essig, A History of Entomology, 611–12.
119. Edwards, A Mingled Yarn, 1–63.
120. Obituary of Henry Edwards, appended by William Henry Edwards in his Entomological Diary, 1890.
121. Arthur Shapiro to the author, e‑mail dated November 17, 2010; Henry Edwards to Charles McGlashan, July 25, 1885, Charles McGlashan Papers; and Samuel Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 2, p. 845.
122. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144–45, 136–80.
123. On Muir’s conversion to the “religion of nature” in the late 1860s, see Worster, A Passion for Nature, 141–64; and Muir, quoted by J. S. Wade in “Vignettes of Henry Edwards and John Muir,” Scientific Monthly 30 (March 1930): 240–50.
124. Arthur Shapiro to the author, e‑mail dated November 17, 2010; Arthur Shapiro, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 137–38; and Wade, “Vignettes of Henry Edwards and John Muir.”
125. Henry Edwards to Herman Strecker, October 11, 1873, HS-FM.
126. Henry Edwards to Charles McGlashan, July 25, 1885, NHM-LONDON.
127. Edwards to Lintner, October 13, 1877, JL.
128. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, February 12 and 22, 1876, HE. The butterfly man David Bruce used the same metaphor to express Henry’s impact on him: “A letter from you is like a gleam of sunshine on a dull day.” See Bruce to Henry Edwards, November 4, 1884, HE.
129. Augustus Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America (Bremen, 1886), 61.
130. Entomologists’ Magazine (London; July 1868): 50. Peart’s art was later displayed in the Women’s Pavilion of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, as an example of what women could do. See George Dimmock, “Entomology at the Centennial Exhibition,” Psyche 1 (October 1876): 201–5. “Six sample plates from Edwards’ Butterflies of North America,” observed Dimmock, “testify to Miss Peart’s extraordinary ability in figuring insects on stone.”
131. Butler was quoted by Edwards in a letter to Scudder, April 23, 1874, SS-BMS.
132. Jean Baptiste Boisduval to Edwards, June 1, 1873, in Brown, ed., Chasing Butterflies, 198. Ironically, Edwards himself detested Hübner and his system. On Hübner, see Essig, A History of Entomology, 664–66.
133. American Entomologist 1, no. 1 (1868).
134. On Agassiz’s geological creationism, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 517–33.
135. Horace Scudder, Life and Letters of David Coit Scudder, Missionary in Southern India (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1864), 3–8, 239, 380.
136. Mark Hopkins, “An Address Delivered in Boston, May 26, 1852, Before the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West” (Boston, 1852), 9. For Charles Scudder’s admiration of Hopkins and his hope that Samuel “might come under his intellectual guidance,” see Alfred Goldsborough Ma
yor, “Samuel Scudder, 1837–1911,” in Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 17, no. 3 (1924): 82.
137. Samuel Scudder, “How I Served My Apprenticeship as a Naturalist,” Youth’s Companion (November 5, 1896): 593.
138. Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 2, p. 821; and Scudder, Every-day Butterflies: A Group of Biographies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 58, 225–30.
139. On Chadbourne’s influence on Scudder and other students, see J. Walter Wilson’s biography of Alpheus Packard (one of Scudder’s student friends), unpublished manuscript, p. 8, Alpheus Spring Packard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, ME. In the early 1860s, Packard was a student with Scudder at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, studying under Agassiz. Chadbourne introduced the two earlier, however, when he taught briefly at Bowdoin College in Maine, where Packard was an undergraduate. He told Packard that “he had many young men working under him at Williams College who were studying to make Natural History their profession. In particular he suggested that he write to Scudder to initiate a correspondence in regard to entomology” (8–9).
140. Wilson biography of Packard, 282–83, 299.
141. Paul Ansel Chadbourne, Instinct: Its Office in the Animal Kingdom, and Its Relation to the Higher Powers of Man (New York: Putnam’s, 1883), originally given in the 1871 Lowell Lecture series, which in turn drew on “the Author’s Natural Theology published in 1867,” p. 13. Chadbourne served as president of Williams in the 1860s, and of the University of Wisconsin shortly after. He had a political career as well.
142. Scudder to R. Ostensacker, July 24, 1858, EML.
143. Mayor, “Samuel Scudder, 1837–1911,” 83.
144. I have based this paragraph entirely on information from Edward Lurie’s biography of Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), which though first published in 1960, remains a fresh assessment of Agassiz and of a major transformation in American culture.
145. Ibid., 194–95. For Agassiz’s debt to Humboldt, see his tribute to Humboldt, “Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Humboldt” (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History, 1869).