Butterfly People
Page 43
8. James Tutt, “Address by the Vice-President of the City of London Entomological Society, and Natural History Society,” Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation 6 (February 15, 1895): 59–69; and Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam, 1966). For biographical material on Tutt, see Michael A. Salmon and Peter J. Edwards, The Aurelian’s Fireside Companion (Hampshire, Eng.: Papia Publishing Ltd., 2005), 21–23, 229–41, and 370–74.
9. Augustus Grote, “Collecting Noctuidae by Lake Erie,” Great Lakes Entomologist 7, no. 1 (1974).
10. On the BAAS, see Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 51–68; on the AAAS, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, et al., The Establishment of Science in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), especially chapter 1, by Kohlstedt, “Creating a Forum for Science: AAAS in the Nineteenth Century,” 7–49; and on the shaping impact of American entomologists on the AAAS, see W. Conner Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840–1880 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 242–52. On the advantages and drawbacks of establishing “agreed-upon norms,” see Mary P. Winsor, “Practitioner of Science: Everyone Her Own Historian,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 229–45.
11. William Henry Edwards to Joseph Lintner, January 6, 1877, JL.
12. George Hulst, Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society (May 1880): 4.
13. E. Zimsen, The Type Material of I. C. Fabricius (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1964); Samuel Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 2, p. 1519; and Adalbert Seitz, The Macrolepidoptera of the World (Stuttgart: Seit’schen [Kernen], 1906–33), 352.
14. See Friedrich Schnack, The Life of a Butterfly (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 30, 80; and R. P. Dow, “A Little Journey into Nomenclature,” a talk given before the New York Entomological Society, March 3, 1908, in “Minutes of the New York Entomological Society,” American Museum of Natural History, New York.
15. See William Holland to Scudder, October 30, 1886, SS-BMS. For this usage in its various forms, see Samuel Scudder, “The Names of Butterflies,” in BEUSC, vol. 2, 785–88 and 1519; Zimsen, The Type Material of I. C. Fabricius; Seitz, Macrolepidoptera of the World, 352; Schnack, Life of a Butterfly, 30, 80; R. P. Dow, “A Little Journey into Nomenclature”; and Judith Wilson, Describing Species: Practical Taxonomic Procedure for Biologists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 153. For a full discussion of current naming protocol, see Wilson, “Naming Species: Etymology,” chapter 8 of Describing Species, 148–72. For the extensive application of Indian names to skippers, see William Howe, The Butterflies of North America (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 453–83, and Robert Pyle, National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies (New York: Knopf, 1998), 796–826. “Linné [Linneaus],” observed Scudder, “applied the names of the Greek heroes in the Trojan war to a very large number of swallowtail butterflies, and his example has been followed by lepidopterists down to the present day.”
16. Herman Strecker to George French, March 20, 1883, GF.
17. George Hulst to Strecker, October 31, 1878, HS-FM. On the “Delilah” moth, see Samuel Cassino, “A New Race of Catocala delilah Strecker,” Lepidopterist (1918).
18. John Morris to Strecker, January 6, 1875, HS-FM. In a later letter, Morris insisted that “a name should express some quality of the object, and not be merely arbitrary”; Morris to Strecker, June 7, 1878, HS-FM.
19. Hulst to Strecker, November 10, 1875, HS-FM.
20. Charles Dury to Strecker, September 3, 1876, HS-FM.
21. Arthur Fuller to Strecker, June 27, 1875, HS-FM.
22. See Henry Edwards section on butterflies written for The Standard Natural History, ed. John Sterling Kingsley (Boston: S. E. Cassino, 1884), 494.
23. Hermann Burmeister, A Manual of Entomology (London, 1836), 624–32; originally in German.
24. The best discussion of the excesses of nineteenth-century naming is Ritvo’s The Platypus and the Mermaid, 51–84.
25. On the Western imperialist side of naming, see ibid.
26. Emily Morton to Strecker, February 20, 1879, and William Holle to Strecker, November 2, 1876, HS-FM; and David Bruce to John Smith, December 10, 1888, Department of Entomology, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 138, United States National Museum, Division of Insects, Correspondence, Washington, DC.
27. Strecker, LRH, 101–2.
28. See Edward Doubleday and John O. Westwood, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera; Comprising Their Characters, A Notice of Their Habits and Transformations, and a Catalogue of the Species of Each Genus (London, 1846–52).
29. Edwards to Scudder, October 14, 1885, SS-BMS.
30. Edwards, Catalogue of the Lepidoptera (Philadelphia: American Entomological Society, 1877), 2; and, in another version of the catalog, “Catalogue of the Diurnal Lepidoptera of America North of Mexico,” Transactions of the American Entomological Society 6 (1877): 1–67.
31. William H. Edwards, “Notes on Entomological Nomenclature,” CE (May 1876): 81–94; CE, 113–19; and Fred Tepper to Strecker, May 16, 1876, HS-FM.
32. See Humboldt’s introduction to Cosmos for diverse readings of “the face of Nature”: volume 1 (1845; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 25–26.
33. The Portable Darwin, edited and with an introduction by Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham (New York: Penguin, 1993), 151.
34. Scudder to Edwards, March 13, 1875, WHE-SA.
35. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, June 22, 1876, HE; William Henry Edwards to Mead, February 4, 1877, TM; and William Henry Edwards to Lintner, February 6, 1873, JL.
36. Edwards, “Catalogue of the Diurnal Lepidoptera of America North of Mexico,” 2–3. At the time of writing this letter, Edwards had just finished Haeckel’s History of Creation. “Haeckel and Darwin,” he wrote, “both expressly lay down the ‘breeding line’ as the origin of a ‘good species.’ ” He loved the Haeckel book because it issued “the strongest affirmation of Darwin” and “bears awfully hard on Agassiz.”
37. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, March 8, 1876, HE. On Scudder’s classification of lycaenids and swallowtails, see William Henry Edwards, “Notes on Lycaena pseudodargiolus and Its Larval History,” CE 10 (January 1878): 1–14. For Edwards’s attack on this argument, see especially the long footnote on p. 2.
38. Edwards to Lintner, February 6, 1873, JL. Here Edwards affirms the field over the laboratory.
39. Selim Peabody, Cecil’s Book of Insects (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872), 198; and S. H. Peabody to William Henry Edwards, December 15, 1875, and July 27, 1876, WHE-SA.
40. “Mr. Scudder’s Butterflies,”CE (December 1881): 246–50.
41. Kohlstedt et al., The Establishment of Science, 37; and Scudder, “Fossil Butterflies,” in Memoirs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Salem, MA, 1875).
42. Edwards to Lintner, April 3, 1878, JL.
43. Edwards to Scudder, April 30, 1877, SS-BMS.
44. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, November 16, 1876, HE.
45. See William Swainson, Taxidermy with the Biography of Naturalists (London, 1840), 8–12. Swainson mentions as standard “the fly net, elastic net, bag-net, hoop-net, landing-net, forceps, and digger” (8).
46. Theodore Mead to George Dodge, December 5, 1870, TM; and Mead to John Ridings, June 1, 1872, TM. On the invention of the net, see David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (1976; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4.
47. Mead to Willie Edwards, March 18, 1870, Mead Letterbook, TM; and Mead to Arthur Whittemore, March 7, 1870, TM. On Schickel’s and Akhurst’s businesses, see Mead to Edward Nelson, August 22, 1871; Mead to Akhurst, May 28 and August 22, 1871; and Mead to Akhurst, March 22, 1874, TM. On “camping equipage,” such as tents and hammocks, see Psyche 1, no. 18 (1876): 180–81.
48. George Crotch
to Henry Edwards, March 5 and November 20, 1873, HE.
49. On the urban-based Romantics and their influence, see especially Keith Thomas’s groundbreaking Man and Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapters 4–6; Anne Larsen Hollenbach, “Of Sanfroid and Sphinx Moths: Cruelty, Public Relations, and the Growth of Entomology in England, 1800–1840,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 11 (1996): 201–20; and Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (New York: Holt, 2008).
50. New Checklist of North American Moths (New York: D. Appleton, 1882).
51. Grote, “Moths and Moth-Catchers: Part II” Popular Science Monthly (July 1885): 377–89.
52. Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America (Bremen, 1886), 7.
53. Herman Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America: Complete Synonymical Catalogue of Macrolepidoptera (Reading, PA: B. F. Owen, 1878), 8–9.
54. Andrew Foulks to Herman Strecker, no date, but probably from the 1880s, HS-FM.
55. Grote, “Moths and Moth-Catchers,” 377–89.
56. Eliza Fales to her sister, February 14, 1835, Fales Family Papers, Fales Library, New York University, New York, NY.
57. John Adams Comstock, “Presidential Address to the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Lepidopterists’ Society,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 16, no. 1 (1962): 248.
58. Grote, preface to An Illustrated Essay on the Noctuidae of North America (London, 1882), 22; and “Moths and Moth-Catchers,” 377–89.
59. Alpheus Packard, letter to his father, c. 1862, in J. Walters Wilson’s biography of Packard (Alpheus Packard Papers, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME). On Strecker’s debt to Bridgham, see his portrait of Catocala tristus in LRH, 17, 37.
60. Alpheus Packard, Guide to the Study of Insects (New York, [1869] 1876), 239.
61. Neumoegen to Strecker, April 7, 1877, HS-FM.
62. Tepper to Strecker, April 25, 1876, HS-FM.
63. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, June 5, 1872; March 8, 1874; and November 7, 1873, HE.
64. Grote to Strecker, March 17, 1873, HE; “Minutes of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences,” Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, May 2, 1873; and Strecker to Grote, March 27, 1873, Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON. This letter was sent to Strecker, but a copy of it cannot be found in Strecker’s papers in the Field Museum. Perhaps it was destroyed. Grote, however, retained it and mailed a copy to Zeller as part of his proof that Strecker was a thief.
65. Bulletin, vol. 1 (April 1873 to March 1874): 5–8, 23.
66. Strecker to Grote, March 27, 1873, Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
67. Arthur Fuller to Strecker, December 9, 1873, HS-FM.
68. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 351–57.
69. Strecker to Grote, draft letter, April 15, 1873, HS-FM.
70. Grote to W. V. Andrews, November 13, 1873, HS-FM.
71. Grote to Zeller, March 16, 1874, Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
72. William Hewitson to Strecker, August 28, 1875, HS-FM.
73. Grote, An Illustrated Essay on the Noctuidae of North America (London, 1882); “Moths and Moth-Catchers: Part II,” 377–89; and Checklist of the Noctuidae of America, North of Mexico (Buffalo, 1876), 35.
74. Strecker to Mead, January 23, 1887, and May 1, 1881, TM.
75. “I doubt,” Strecker argued, “if there can be much variation in the imago unless it existed in the earlier stages. Too much stress by far is laid on the circumstance of whether the larva differs or not from that of the ordinary form. If this were so conclusive, why is it then that the green and brown larvae of Cer. Imperialis, both bring precisely the same form of moth, or the tawny and green larvae of Thyreus Abbotii, produce the same results? No; if we have a varietal form or subspecies in the last stage of the insect we must just as reasonably expect to find it in the earlier stages.” See his Butterflies and Moths of North America, pp. 118, 155, and 158. Strecker immediately followed this observation with a very bad analogy: “Is the Albino off-spring of negro parents black when a child or with black or brown eyes? Certainly not; as an infant it has the same abnormal white cuticle to its body.… Again, would the child born with six toes and fingers on each foot or hand have but five to each extremity on attaining maturity?” Strecker’s obvious mistake here is to equate childhood with the larval stage of butterflies. He pursued these anti-Edwards themes in his descriptions in Proceedings for the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences in 1878. See his “Descriptions of Some Species and Varieties of North American Heteroceres, Mostly New,” vol. 2 (1876–78): 270–78.
76. Strecker, LRH, 66–67, 84–85.
77. Ibid., 118–20, 53. Many other naturalists here agreed with Strecker, despite whatever else they thought of him.
78. William Henry Edwards to Joseph Lintner, November 7, 1878, JL.
79. Morris to Strecker, August 1878 (no day), HS-FM.
80. Edward Graef to Strecker, July 23, 1878; and Tepper to Strecker, August 19, 1878, HS-FM.
81. Lintner to Strecker, May 23, 1873, and July 16, 1877, HS-FM.
82. Hulst to Strecker, October 30, 1879, HS-FM.
83. Arthur Fuller to Strecker, May 4, 1874, HS-FM; on “cutting stone” as a dead end, Fuller to Strecker, May 29, 1874, HS-FM.
84. Mary Putnam to Strecker, January 12, January 17, and February 9, 1878, HS-FM.
85. Berthold Neumoegen to Strecker, April 2, 1877, HS-FM.
86. Heinrich Ribbe to Strecker, February 10, 1878, HS-FM.
87. Neumoegen to Strecker, April 28, 1879, HS-FM. On Doll, see George P. Engelhardt, “Chapters from the Life of a Butterfly Collector,” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1925): 171–78.
88. Neumoegen to Strecker, April 28, 1879, and January 27, 1880, HS-FM.
89. When the Streckers failed to arrive for Christmas in 1876, the stockbroker wrote the stone carver, “I only wish you could be here, and I would really make it merry for you,” by which he meant the wine and butterflies. See Neumoegen to Strecker, November 11 and December 22, 1876, HS-FM.
90. Neumoegen to Strecker, January 24, 1877, HS-FM.
91. In December 1877, he invited Strecker to his baby son’s bris, or to “the circumcision of my boy. When may I expect you here?” Neumoegen wrote. See Neumoegen to Strecker, December 8, 1877, and January 29, 1878, HS-FM.
92. Strecker to O. H. Staudinger, January 27, 1874, HS-FM.
93. Strecker to Duncan Putnam, June 10, 1876; June 7, 1877; and January 14, 1878, DP.
94. Neumoegen to Strecker, February 8, 1877, HS-FM.
95. Neumoegen to Strecker, January 31, 1877, HS-FM.
96. See Charles Fernald’s testimony to this effect, Fernald to Zeller, January 11, 1878, Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
97. Titian Peale to Strecker, December 20, 1873; and Morris to Strecker, November 1879 (specific day unclear), HS-FM.
98. See letters from Strecker to George French, an Illinois naturalist, in which Strecker thanks French for his various payments: $8.50 in February 1878, $15 on July 1, 1878, $14 in June 1879, and so forth. Strecker to French, February 8 and July 20, 1878, and June 17, 1878, GF; and The Naturalists’ Directory, ed. Samuel Cassino (Boston, 1886), 154.
99. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, March 10, 1873, HE.
100. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, September 4 and 17, 1874, SS-BMS.
101. This history was laid out for me by John Willis, a direct descendant of Edwards, in an interview in the old Edwards house, May 16, 2002. See also Edwards to Scudder, November 12, 1874, SS-BMS.
102. Grote to Judge Clinton, May 20, 1880, George William Clinton Papers, Buffalo Museum of Natural Science.
103. Grote to Clinton, May 20 and 23, 1880, Clinton Papers.
104. In an 1875 letter to Strecker, the taxidermist John Akhurst echoed what both Edwards and Scudder believed. “In speaking of Grote, I hit him pretty hard on self conceit and vanity,” John Akhurst (HS-F
M).
105. Grote, Checklist of the Noctuidae of America, 35.
106. Grote to Strecker, November 6, 1875, and April 3, 1878, HS-FM.
107. W. V. Andrews to Strecker, October 12, 1876, HS-FM.
108. Preston Clark to William Schaus, June 22, 1916, Papers of B. Preston Clark, 1999-1, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Archives, Pittsburgh, PA.
109. For Barnes’s quote, see Jeanne Remington’s biography of Barnes, under “Brief Biographies,” in the Lepidopterist News (April–May 1949): 54; and for the Clark citation, see Clark to William Schaus, June 22, 1916, B. Preston Clark Papers.
110. Strecker to Henry Skinner, June 7, 1900, HS-ANS.
111. Hulst to Henry Edwards, October 28, 1880, HE. The term “déclassé naturalist” is Harriet Ritvo’s. See The Platypus and the Mermaid, 65.
112. See Levi Mengel to Henry Skinner, February 4, 1902, HS-ANS. In this letter, Mengel, Strecker’s neighbor and also a butterfly enthusiast, explained how Strecker came to own his home: “You know Drexel gave him his old house, without security for the money advanced and was his friend until death.” On Drexel’s help with butterflies, see Drexel to Strecker, December 1, 1871, HS-FM. Drexel wrote: “I enclosed 18 pounds on our London House—this is payable to your order and I have endorsed it Pay Dr. Otto Staudinger on order. You must write your name under this when I have written it in pencil. By so arranging this will be a receipt and in case of any dispute the draft can be produced and will thus show the Doctor got the money from you.”
113. Grote to Harrison Dyar, July 18 and September 6, 1898, HD.
114. Scudder, Butterflies, 242–43. I must say, however, that Scudder, during the time he spent under Agassiz, had already held something of this view. “My ‘love for a collection,’ ” he told a European specialist in that year, “is only such that it may subserve the best interests of science and advance my own knowledge of its contents.” See Scudder to Carl Robert Osten-Sacken, January 1, 1860, Samuel Hubbard Scudder Papers, EML.
115. Henry Edwards to Hermann Hagen, February 10 and March 18, 1880, Letters to Hermann Hagen, EML.
116. Henry Edwards to Hermann Hagen, February 8, 1881, EML.