40. Strecker’s 1856 notebook, Entomological Records, Academy of Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, presented to the academy by W. Russell Robinson, pp. 8, 19, 33, 64–65. For the current number of swallowtails, see James A. Scott, The Butterflies of North America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 161.
41. He still visited the fields, however, writing Henry Edwards in 1871, “Our collecting season has opened here, and I have been out several times and had fair luck” (May 12, 1871, HS-FM).
42. Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” 52.
43. George Hulst to Strecker, October 11 (or 16), 1876, HS-FM.
44. Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 32.
45. H. Landis to Strecker, September 24, 1878, HS-FM.
46. On conflicts naturalists had over prices and money payments, see Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 84–111.
47. For Reakirt, see “Descriptions of Some New Species of Diurnal Lepidoptera,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1866): 238–49, 331–42; and F. Martin Brown, “Tryon Reakirt,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 18, no. 4 (1964): 211–14. For Drexel, see Drexel to Strecker, August 29 and October 18, 1867, and March 23 and September 9, 1868, HS-FM.
48. Henry Edwards to Strecker, February 10, 1870, HS-FM.
49. Strecker to Henry Edwards, September 4, 1869, and May 7, 1870, HE; and Henry Edwards to Strecker, August 23, 1869, HS-FM.
50. These words and phrases can be found in Strecker’s letters to Henry Edwards, March 2, 1870; September 11, 1870; August 26, 1873; October 22, 1873; and August 24, 1874, HE.
51. Strecker to Henry Edwards, March 3, May 23, June 10, August 5, and November 11, 1872, HE.
52. Strecker to Henry Edwards, February 19, 1871, HE. Later, Edwards sent him a pair of specimens of Ornithoptera richmondia, discovered in 1852; his joy was equally undisguised. Henry Edwards to Strecker, June 15, 1871, HE.
53. Tepper to Strecker, July 24, 1874; November 6, 1874; and September 3, 1876, HE.
54. Tepper became an expert on Catocala moths (or underwings, in the vernacular) and amassed one of the finest collections in the world.
55. Fuller to Strecker, undated, c. 1877, HE.
56. See “New Illustrated Works on American Lepidoptera,” CE 48 (August 1872): 158–59. The journal noted: “The Lepidopterist of the present day … possesses vastly improved advantages over his predecessor of even ten years ago in the accurate and artistic drawings that are being so copiously issued from the press. There are now [two] works in the course of publication, whose chief object is to afford faithful coloured illustrations of Butterflies and Moths.” The works were by William Henry Edwards and Strecker.
57. Strecker to Mead, March 24, 1874, TM.
58. See William Hewitson, Bolivian Butterflies (London, 1874); and his Illustrations of Diurnal Lepidoptera (London, 1862–78), vols. 1 and 2. See also L. G. Higgins, preface to Hewitson on Butterflies, 1867–1877 (Hampton: E. W. Classey, 1972).
59. Hewitson to Strecker, September 1873; October 9, 1873, HS-FM. For biographical information on Hewitson, see the obituary in Entomologist’s Monthly (July 1878): 44–45.
60. Hewitson to Strecker, August 10 and October 9, 1873, HS-FM. Hewitson said in the same letter that “the cold indifference of most of those who call themselves naturalists towards our dearly loved pets show that all the warmth of feeling they have is centered in self.” On Hewitson’s “creationism,” see Richard I. Vane-Wright, “A Portrait of Clarence Buckley, Zoologist,” Linnean 7, no. 3 (1991): 30.
61. Hewitson, “Review,” Entomologist’s Monthly (July 1875): 141.
62. See Strecker’s 1878 catalog, LRH, 66.
63. William L. Devereaux, April 13, 1874, and April 4, 1898, HS-FM. Devereaux married a woman who also loved entomology. They named their first son Linné, after Linnaeus.
64. John Akhurst to Strecker, April 6, 1869, HS-FM; on Akhurst’s assistance to Edwards, see, for example, Edwards’s portrait of Papilio turnus, in vol. 2 of BNA, unpaginated.
65. James Angus to Strecker, February 28, 1871; Henry Schonborn to Strecker, October 18, 1874; and Adrian Latimer to Strecker, September 22, 1879, HS-FM.
66. Hulst to Strecker, June 9, 1876, and December 4, 1878, HS-FM.
67. Having grown up in France, once in America, Neumoegen married Rebecca Livingston, the daughter of a German Jewish immigrant and owner of a wholesale clothing business on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Neumoegen to Strecker, April 4, 1876, HS-FM. Livingston owned a summer estate in Morris County, New Jersey, near the estates of other Livingstons, though unrelated. I would like to thank Sarah Dockray and Carie Levin of the Joint Free Public Library of Morris and Morris Township, New Jersey, for tracking down this information for me, which they located by examining the 1870 census records at the North Jersey Genealogy Center at the JFPL. Why Neumoegen’s father-in-law, Lewis Livingston, took the name of Livingston (if that was, in fact, what he did) and had a summer estate near the native-born Livingstons, I do not know. That Livingston was Jewish I discovered in a draft letter from Strecker to Otto Staudinger, dated July 1894: “They are all Hebrews you know,” he wrote of the Livingston family.
68. Neumoegen to Strecker, February 28, 1876, HS-FM.
69. Neumoegen to Strecker, March 14, 1876, HS-FM. For biographical information, see April 4, 1876, and March 21, 1876, HS-FM. A brief sketch of Neumoegen appears in Harry Weiss, “Journal of New York Entomological Society, 1893–1942,” Journal of the New York Entomological Society 1 (December 1943): 285–94.
70. Julius Meyer to Strecker, May 1885, HS-FM.
71. Titian Peale, letter to the editor of Papilio 4, nos. 7–8 (1884). Throughout the 1870s, near Red Bank, New Jersey, he did drawings from life of many butterflies and moths, fleshing out his portraits with “full descriptions and habits of each insect,” although these studies never reached beyond drafts. See Peale, “Lepidoptera: Larva, Foodplants, Etc.” (1833, 1877, 1879), handwritten, in possession of the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
72. Peale to Strecker, December 30, 1873, and April 26, 1875, HS-FM.
73. John Morris to Strecker, January 6, 1875, HS-FM.
74. Harrison Dyar, preface to Insecutor Inscitiae Menstruus 1, no. 1 (1913), a journal Dyar edited. For Henry Bird, see his unpublished study, “Epic of Papapeima,” 52, 425, Research Library, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Henry Skinner, the influential editor of the Entomological News, called Grote “one of the greatest students of American Lepidopterology,” high praise from Skinner, since he was no fan of Grote’s. See Skinner, “Augustus Radcliffe Grote,” EN 14, no. 9 (1903): 277–78.
75. William T. Davis, obituary of Grote, Proceedings of the Natural Science Association of Staten Island 3 (November 10, 1903). For other biographical information, see Charles Bethune, “Professor Augustus Radcliffe Grote,” The 34th Report of the Entomological Society of Ontario (1903): 109–12. For a remembrance of the collecting ventures of these boys, see Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” 47–56; and Grote, “Moths and Moth-Catchers,”; part 1 appeared in June 1885, pp. 246–52, and part 2 in July 1885, pp. 377–89. On the rural character of the area in the 1850s, see Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 19–51, 131.
76. Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” 47.
77. Johann Meigen, Handbuch für Schmetterlingsliebhaber: Besonders für Anfänger im Sammeln (Aachen, 1827), 1 and 9 (my translation).
78. Charles E. Lang and William T. Davis, Staten Island and Its People: A History, 1609–1929 (New York, 1930), 231.
79. Quoted ibid., 246.
80. Grote, “Notes on Staten Island Noctuidae,” CE (May 1886): 95.
81. Grote, “Notes on Staten Island Noctuidae”; and Grote, Checklist of North American Moths (1882
), 5.
82. H. Frederik Nihout, The Development and Evolution of Butterfly Wing Patterns (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1.
83. Grote, “Die Saturiniiden,” Mittheilungen aus dem Roemer-Museum, Hildesheim 6 (June 1896): 1.
84. Grote, “Moths and Moth-Catchers: Part I,” 246–52; and Grote, Hawk Moths of North America, 5.
85. Grote, Hawk Moths of North America, 5–12; and Grote, “On the Geographical Distribution of North American Lepidoptera,” CE (September 9, 1886): 162–74.
86. Obituary, CE 4, no. 6 (1872).
87. Grote to Cajetan Felder, c. 1862–63, Felder Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
88. Grote to Philipp Zeller, December 9, 1867, Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
89. This information comes from a letter Grote wrote John L. Le Conte, February 18, 1876, John L. LeConte Papers, 1812–1897, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Grote refers to “my mother’s plantation” and says that he has “planted cotton practically for five years.”
90. Grote to Scudder, October 6, 1869, and December 20, 1869, SS-BMS.
91. See his letter to Le Conte, February 18, 1876; Grote says, “My wife was a granddaughter of Judge Johnson of Charleston, South Carolina and relative of Reverby Johnson of Maryland and General Edward Johnson of Richmond, Va.” Julia Blair’s name appears on the Grote family Stammbaum (family tree), courtesy Peter and Marianne Gaehtgens.
92. Grote to Scudder, May 18, 1872, and September 2, 1872, SS-BMS.
93. In his 1876 letter to Le Conte, Grote says, “my step mother and children still live near the plantation at Demopolis, Alabama. I have been anxious to rejoin them for some time, but my means have not allowed it.”
94. He also wrote such long and interesting poems as Rip Van Winkle: A Sun Myth, which integrated the story of Rip Van Winkle into musings on life and death, youth and old age. Spare and grim, reflecting the burden of his personal history, part 1 ends:
Ere the passing of breath
Comes the luring hour of death;
Weariness restrains the feet,
And the dying bed is sweet
To the dying. All in vain
Frets the busy working brain—
It will slumber presently,
It must sleep from toiling free.
Love will vanish from the heart,
Hate forget to play its part,
And the harvest of the mind
From the book, the field, the wind,
Housed within us, will be freed:
Death for Life must sow the seed.
Time is Life in larger sweep,
Death is but a longer sleep.
Grote, Rip Van Winkle: A Sun Myth (London: Kegan Paul, French, 1881).
95. John G. Milburn, “Recollections of A. R. Grote,” EN 24 (April 1913), 182–83.
96. Editorial, “Why a New Weekly,” Evolution (January 6, 1877): 1; and Grote, “The Laborer in Politics,” Evolution (December 1877): 308–9. The people who wrote for the Evolution—Henry Edger, Annie Besant, Alexander Wilder, Augusta Cooper Bristol, Sara Underwood, Caroline Dall, Steven Pearl Andrews, and so on—often wrote for other similar papers (including Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly). Many were anarchists, some positivists or theosophists. All followed the banner of evolutionary thinking. Grote did not agree with them on all things, but he shared their commitment to equality and to challenging modern conditions and priorities. See, on these people, William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
97. Grote, “Protestantism and Science: Part I,” Evolution (July 1877): 204–5; “Protestantism and Science: Part II,” Evolution (January 1878): 8–9; and New Infidelity (London, 1883). Grote wrote the lead article for the last issue of the Evolution, “Does Humanity Need a New Revelation?” No, Grote argued. “The true conclusion is, that there may and must be new revelations, but not supernatural ones, to Humanity,” which “will be brought out by continued observation and experience,” he wrote. “The only way to ‘reconcile’ the Bible with Science is to make anything out of anything” or “to twist words until they lose their meaning. Those who think such a course profitable will continue to indulge in it. They will write books to prove that the Biblical chronology holds true for the white race and except the blacks. But it may be said of such workers in any rank that it would have been better for them never to have been born.” See Evolution 2, no. 2 (1878): 193–95.
98. “Minutes of the Executive Committee,” March 26, 1873, Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences.
99. For contributions by women to the North American Entomologist, see, for example, Emily Smith, “Natural History of Eurra Salicicola,” the leading piece in vol. 1, no. 6 (1879): 41–42; and “Biological and Other Notes on Pseudococcus aceris,” also a leading piece, vol. 1 no. 10 (1880): 73–77.
100. Grote, “On the Species of Helicopis Inhabiting the Valley of the Amazon,” Bulletin of the Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences 1 (April 1873–March 1874): 106; and for Grote’s German work, see, in the same issue of the Bulletin, his “Kleiner Beitrag zur Kenntniss einiger Nordamerikanischer Lepidoptera” (A Small Contribution to Knowledge of a Few North American Lepidoptera), 168–70. Strecker described Merian’s work as “wonderful” in his Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2.
101. Practical Entomologist (December 25, 1865): 17; Grote, “A Few Remarks on Silk-Producing Lepidoptera,” Practical Entomologist (November 27, 1865): 13–14, and (February 26, 1866): 38–39; and Benjamin Walsh, Practical Entomologist “Salutatory” (October 1866): 25.
102. Walsh to William Henry Edwards, March 27, 1867, WHE-SA.
103. Grote to Scudder, May 18, 1872, and October 30 and December 20, 1869, SS-BMS.
104. See Grote’s essays “Our Genera and the Law of Priority,” CE (March 1876): 36–37, and “On Jacob Hübner and His Works on Butterflies and Moths,” CE (July 1876): 131–35.
105. See, on this wide acceptance, Peter Bowler’s Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
106. Evolution 1, no. 1 (1877): 9.
107. Evolution (December 1878): 194; and Grote, New Infidelity, 101.
108. Grote, Checklist of Noctuidae (1876), 32.
109. See Grote, “The Effect of the Glacial Epoch upon the Distribution of Insects in North America,” CE (September 1875): 164–67; Grote “On the Insect Fauna of the White Mountains,” Psyche 1, no. 1 (1875): 76–77. “I am the original propagator of the view of the colonization of Insects on Mountains through the Glacial Epoch,” he later explained to a friend (Grote to John Comstock, October 29, 1898, John Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock Papers, 1833–1955, #21-23-25, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).
110. Grote, “On Genera of the Moths,” CE 1, no. 6 (1875): 113–15. See also Grote, “Our Genera and the Law of Priority,” 36–37; and “On Jacob Hübner and His Works on Butterflies and Moths,” 131–35.
111. Grote, Bulletin 1 (1873–74): 1–2.
112. For a fine account of this reminiscence, see Ronald S. Wilkinson, “The Genesis of A. R. Grote’s ‘Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie,’ ” Great Lakes Entomologist 7, no.1 (1974): 16–18.
113. Grote, “Notes on Noctuidae,” CE (October 1877): 196–99.
3. Beating Hearts
1. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1880; repr., London: Periphus Editions, 1959), 257–58; and Wallace to Samuel Stevens, Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 5 (1858–61): 70. For Conrad’s treatment of Wallace, see Lord Jim (1900; repr., New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), 151–52. For citations of the Wallace experience, see Adolph Portmann, Tropical Butterflies (New York: Iris Books, 1945), 7; Miriam Rothschild, Butterfly Cooing Like Dove (New York: Doubleday, 1991); and Sharman Apt Russell, An Obsession with Butterflies (New York: Basic Books, 2003), vi. In June 1949, the Lepidopterists’ News, the most influential of all modern butterfly jou
rnals, quoted this passage in full “as the best example of enthusiasm in a butterfly hunter”; vol. 3, no. 7, p. 80.
2. Doherty was so aroused by it that he told his mother about it in two different letters. Doherty to his mother, February 20, 1883, and June 27, 1883, JMH. Eugene Pilate to Herman Strecker, June 2, 1875, HS-FM; Henry Edwards, “Notes on Noises Made by Lepidoptera,” Insect Life 2, no. 1 (1889): 14. James Fletcher to Samuel Scudder, December 19, 1894, SS-BMS; and William Greenwood Wright, “Butterfly Hunting in the Desert,” American Naturalist 17, no. 4 (1883): 363–69.
3. Arthur Shapiro, e‑mail to author, October 28, 2009.
4. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1896; repr., New York: Dover 1961), 33, 51–54, 100–101. Freud wrote that “psychoanalysis has scarcely anything to say about beauty.… All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; repr., New York: Norton, 1962), 29.
5. Edward O. Wilson, “Paradise Beach,” Naturalist (Washington DC: Island Press, 1994), 5–15; and Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49–66. Scruton’s analysis is brilliant. Unfortunately, I read it too late to make adequate use of it in this book.
6. On color and wildness as the basis for attraction to natural beauty, see George M. Trevelyan’s 1931 lecture “The Call and Claims of Natural Beauty,” in his An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 92–106; and on early childhood encounters with natural color as the basis for later scientific work, see David Lee, Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ix–xi.
7. This argument again resembles Freud’s in his Civilization and Its Discontents (see chapter 1).
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