Butterfly People
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117. Henry Edwards also made a point of discussing Charles Ishikawa at a meeting of the club, noting that he was “a most earnest student not only of Entomology alone but of other branches of Natural History” (“Records of the New York Entomological Club, December 10, 1881, American Museum of Natural History). Edwards’s singling out of Ishikawa is interesting. Was Ishikawa, in fact, Edwards’s manservant who had been with him since Edwards had lived in San Francisco and whom Edwards had helped train as a butterfly expert? Was this man “Charlie”? The noted entomologist Herbert Osborne, in a sketch of Edwards in his history of entomology, argued that Charlie was definitely Japanese. As a young man, Osborne wrote an article for Papilio, so he must have known. But other evidence—James Behrens to Edwards, for instance—suggests he was Chinese (although, perhaps to Behrens, all Asians were Chinese or “Charlies”). The evidence points to Osborne.
118. William Henry Edwards, “On the American Form of Papilio machaon, Linn.,” Papilio (May 1882): 74–77. Edwards tried to naturalize the original European form in Coalburgh. He released a hundred butterflies sent to him in chrysalid form by Theodore Mead from Europe. The experiment failed.
119. “Comments on Dr. Hagen’s Paper in Nov.-Dec. No. of Papilio, on P. machaon, Etc.,” Papilio 3, no. 3 (1883): 45–57.
120. On Henry Edwards’s policy of giving out free copies, see Henry Skinner to Herman Strecker, June 9, 1891, HS-FM.
121. He had to “start all over from the lowest level of a broker,” he told Strecker (Neumoegen to Strecker, April 20, 1882, HS-FM).
122. William Henry Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, May 16, 1883, WGW.
123. Strecker to George French, June 6, 1881, and July 18, 1883, GF.
124. One such effort was launched by Theodore Mead, probably with the urging of William Henry Edwards, in which he criticizes Strecker for his sloppy descriptions. See Mead, “Limenitis eros Versus Var. floridensis,” CE (April 1881): 79–80.
125. Neumoegen to Strecker, December 7, 1880, HS-FM.
126. Neumoegen to Strecker, March 9, 1882, HS-FM.
127. Quoted by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, in the footnote on p. 57.
128. “New Moths from Arizona,” Papilio 1, no. 9 (1881): 153–68. On Grote’s attacks on Strecker as a cause for the collapse of Papilio, see also Harry B. Weiss, “The New York Entomological Club and ‘Papilio,’ ” New York Entomological Society 56 (June 1948): 132–33.
129. Grote to A. Gunther, August 10, 1881; July 21, 1881; June 5, 1881; and April 2, 1881, NHM-LONDON; Grote to Arthur Butler, November 11, 1881, NHM-LONDON; and Grote to Hermann Hagen, April 29, 1880, Letters to Hermann Hagen, EML. On his proposals to Central Park and to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, see Grote to Hagen, April 29, 1880, EML, and Hagen to Henry Edwards, February 12, 1880, HE.
130. For a description of the collection, see Grote to Arthur Butler, February 25, 1881, NHM-LONDON.
131. Grote to Henry Edwards, Spring 1883; June 12, 1883; and June 15, 1883, HE.
132. Papilio 2, no. 5 (1882).
133. Samuel Aaron, “Notes and Queries,” Papilio 4, no. 2 (1884): 42. For Strecker’s article, see “Citheronia infernalis and Catocala babayaga, New Species,” Papilio 4, no. 4 (1884): 73–74. Strecker described C. infernalis “from one female in my collection (!)” noting, “The male I was unable to examine, but was informed it resembled the female.” In an earlier February 1884 piece, Aaron had tried feebly to do William Henry Edwards some justice, by rehashing the question of priority that had appalled Edwards in the late 1870s. At that time, both Edwards and Strecker had received the same butterflies from the Texas collector Jacob Boll. Edwards published the description first in several journals, publishing being the requirement for taking credit for any described species. Strecker published them later in his own catalog, although to give the impression that he had published them earlier than Edwards, he inserted another date—September 1877—in his catalog. Aaron’s article confirmed this maneuver by Strecker and must have much satisfied Edwards. Then Aaron negated what he had done by inviting his brother to attack Edwards.
134. To disprove this idea, Aaron quoted from one of Edwards’s key theoretical sources, August Weismann, who argued in 1882 that the larval characters were too unstable for secure classification and that the adult imago should always remain the basis for specific identity. At the same time, Aaron’s brother announced the publication of a new journal—Entomologica Americana—to be edited by John Smith and published by the Brooklyn Entomological Society (established in 1876), whose members—Hulst, John Smith, Edward Graef, Franz Schaupp, and others—had long felt estranged from the Manhattan naturalists.
135. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, June 10, 1881, HE.
4. Word Power
1. William Henry Edwards to Hermann Hagen, May 16, 1871, Letters to Hermann Hagen, EML.
2. William Henry Edwards to Samuel Scudder, March 1, 1893, SS-BMS.
3. For a brief biography, see Arnold Mallis, American Entomologists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 52–54.
4. William Henry Edwards, Autobiographical Notes (privately printed, 1901), 220–21.
5. Joseph Lintner, “Report of the State Entomologist for the Year 1888,” in New York State, 42nd Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Museum of Natural History (Albany, 1888–89), 185–86.
6. According to Tim L. McCabe of the New York State Museum, Karner was the “site of intensive collecting by museum entomologists” in the late 1890s, but as Lintner observed, it had already had such a reputation in the 1860s. See Lintner, “On Lycaena Neglecta,” CE (July 1875): 122; Tim L. McCabe, “The Karner Blue Butterfly,” Legacy: the Magazine of the New York State Museum (June 2010): 16; and William Henry Edwards, under “Lycaena, II, III,” BNA, vol. 2.
7. Lintner, Entomological Contributions (Albany, 1872), 46–47.
8. “List of Lepidoptera,” in New York State, Thirtieth Report of the State Museum of Natural History (Albany, 1879), 141.
9. Eugene Pilate, “List of Lepidoptera Taken in and Around Dayton, O.,” Papilio 2, no. 5 (1882): 65–71, and Charles Fernald, Butterflies of Maine (Augusta, 1884). On the moth catalogs and biological material on Fernald, see Mallis, American Entomologists, 141–50. Unillustrated and mostly for students and farmers, Fernald’s lists lacked the color and life of the best natural history writing but contained much information about species never before presented. And Pilate’s list was, well, a list.
10. “A List of the Butterflies of Philadelphia, PA,” CE (August 1889): 145–53; and, on Skinner’s rearing practices, see Henry Skinner to Herman Strecker, March 9, 1883, HS-FM.
11. On Hoy’s catalogs, see William A. Field et al., A Bibliography of the Catalogs, Lists, and Faunal and Other Papers on the Butterflies of North America and Mexico, Arranged by State and Province (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974), 94. On Hoy’s CE list, see October 17, 1884, pp. 199–200.
12. Arthur Shapiro, e‑mail to author, November 17, 2010.
13. See Henry Edwards, “Moths and Butterflies,” in The Standard Natural History, ed. John Sterling Kingsley, vol. 2, Crustacea and Insects (Boston: S. E. Cassino and Co., 1884), 435–502; Henry Edwards to Philipp Zeller, February 10, 1870, Philipp Zeller Papers, NHM-LONDON.
14. For William Henry Edwards on Cassino, see William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 22, 1886, HE; and Samuel Cassino to Henry Edwards, April 13, 1886, HE.
15. On Comstock, see Pamela Henson’s essays “The Comstock Research School in Evolutionary Entomology,” Osiris (1993): 159–77, and “The Comstocks at Cornell,” in Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. Helena M. Pycior et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 112–25. See also Henson’s dissertation, “Evolution and Taxonomy: J. H. Comstock’s Research School in Evolutionary Entomology at Cornell University, 1874–1930” (University of Maryland, College Park, 1990), pp. 124–25, 250–53.
16. On Linnaeus, see Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Natu
re and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 40.
17. Ferdinand Ochsenheimer’s 1804 bibliography of such books, “Sachsens entomologische Litteratur,” gives a wonderful and authoritative glimpse into the extent of this literature. Ochsenheimer was one of the great early insect systematists. See his Die Schmetterlinge Sachsens (Dresden, 1805), 1–40. See also Jacob Hübner, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schmetterlinge (Augsburg, 1786–89, 1790); Abel Ingpen (England), Instructions for Collecting, Rearing, and Preserving British Insects (London, 1827); and Achille Deyrolle (France), Guide du jeune amateur de coléoptères et de lépidoptères (Paris, 1847). For later little guides (which many Germans brought with them to America), see H. Rocksroh’s Anweisung, wie Schmetterlinge, gefangen, ausgebreitet, geordnet, bewohnt, und wie ihre Raupen und Puppen erkannt werden (Leipzig, 1833) and Hermanus Raupen und Schmetlerlingsjäger (Leipzig, 1877). The British and Germans invented the leading practices and much of entomological gear. On the British contribution, made in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–117, and David Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 83–107. The English imported what may have been the first butterfly net, a “bag net” from Holland (or Germany). See Salmon, Aurelian Legacy, 69.
18. Stainton’s Manual of British Butterflies and Moths (London, 1857), aimed to get as much information as possible to as many people as possible, in the smallest size and at the cheapest price possible. He omitted all “hairsplittings” (as he put it), Latin names, and synonymy, arguing that “those who collect insects, and who do not wish to be utterly ‘isolated,’ must learn to call [butterflies] by names by which other people will know them.” See Stainton, vii. On Stainton, see Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 162–64.
19. Theodore Cocherell, “American Moths,” Dial (January 16, 1904): 41–42.
20. William Walters to Strecker, August 27 and September 7, 1880, HS-FM.
21. Helen S. Conant, The Butterfly Hunters (New York, 1881), 139.
22. Julia Ballard, Moths and Butterflies (1880; repr., New York, 1889), 1.
23. Ibid., xxxiii–xxxiv.
24. George H. Hudson (of Plattsburgh, Pennsylvania) to John H. Smith (curator of entomology at the Smithsonian), September 24, 1886, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 138, National Museum of Natural History, Division of Insects, Correspondence, Washington, DC.
25. William Henry Edwards to George French, February 20, 1886, GF. Edwards even helped advertise the book, after French sent him several circulars for that purpose. “I have distributed about all the circulars,” he wrote French. “As I write letters to new parties I enclose one. I also sent out several to parties who were not likely to hear of the book at once. You may as well send me another score.” For Edwards’s praise to friends, see Edwards to Lintner, March 7, 1886, JL.
26. Scudder, “A Manual of North American Butterflies,” Science 8, no. 194 (1886): 378.
27. Alpheus Packard, “Introductory,” American Naturalist (March 1867): 4.
28. Augustus Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America (Bremen, 1886), 17; and on the subsidizing of CE, see Henry Skinner to Strecker, June 9, 1891, HS-FM.
29. Scudder, “Salutatory,” Science (July 3, 1880): 6.
30. On the poor Science subscriptions as a cause of failure, see J. S. Kingsley’s obituary of Scudder in Psyche 18 (1911): 175. Science “was ably edited,” Kingsley wrote, “and rejoiced the hearts of scientific men of the day,” but “there were not subscribers enough to pay the expenses and no thought of the later expedient of making it an organ to some large association.”
31. Henry Edwards, “Notes on Noises Made by Lepidoptera,” Insect Life 2, no. 1 (1889): 11–15 (Edwards mentions the Swinton piece at the outset); and Lord Walsingham, “Steps Toward a Revision of Chambers’ Index, with Notes and Descriptions of New Species,” Insect Life 2, no. 1 (1889): 51–54.
32. On the membership of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, see Edward Graef, “Some Early Brooklyn Entomologists,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 9, no. 3 (1914): 55–56.
33. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, January 26, 1885, HE.
34. For a description of the farm, see William Schaus to Henry Skinner, September 11, 1916, HS-ANS.
35. Skinner to Strecker, March 31, 1896, HS-FM.
36. Skinner to Strecker, June 9, 1891, and January 30, 1897, HS-FM.
37. Skinner, EN (January 1897): 10; for a biographical sketch, see Mallis, American Entomologists, 322–33.
38. Flyer advertising the Entomological News, December 1, 1889, appended to letter to Strecker, HS-FM.
39. Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America, 58.
40. C. J. [Charles Johnson] Maynard, The Butterflies of New England (Newtonville, MA: C. J. Maynard, 1886), iii–iv. Maynard published a revised edition in 1891, which added only an appendix with accompanying species described and “two hand-colored plates” of his own, pp. 67–78. On Maynard’s reputation as a bird naturalist, see Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 33–34. See also Maynard, “A Catalogue of the Birds of Loos, New Hampshire and Oxford Co., Maine,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 14 (1870–71): 365–85.
41. Maynard, “A Catalogue of the Birds of Loos,” 1–2.
42. On Maynard’s mounting of birds at the Boston Society of Natural History, see Barrow, A Passion for Birds, 33.
43. William Henry Edwards, CE (January 1887): 34–40.
44. Grote to Scudder, April 16, 1886, SS-BMS.
45. He started visiting the Bremen Museum of Natural History, doing what research he could there on American moths. He read philosophy and literature; he composed music, especially band music, with performances in Hamburg, Hannover, and Kassel. “That is doing pretty well in this musical country where competition is ruinous,” he wrote a friend. His reputation as both a humanist and a naturalist flowered; in 1886, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha awarded him a silver medal, the Princeps Musarum Sacerdos for Art and Science. See Grote to Charles Fernald, May 8, 1886, Charles Henry Fernald Papers (RG 40/11 C. H. Fernald), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; on the medal, see CE (December 1886): 240.
46. Grote to William T. Davis, August 18, 1886, and April 2, 1887, William T. Davis Papers, Staten Island Museum History Archives and Library, Special Collections. In an otherwise scientific piece on “representative species,” he invoked the “wanderings of Ulysses,” an obvious reference to himself (CE [July 1888]: 177). “I am writing this in my European exile,” he wrote in The Hawk Moths of North America, p. 13. He was critical, too, of German natural science for “its failure to generalize” and to show how “facts bear on each other, as Darwin had done.” (But what of Weismann, Haeckel, and the others?) “The German mind is too apt to be satisfied with the mere accumulation of learning,” he averred. American natural science was better, more advanced, or so he seemed to believe. But time and again, despite his efforts, he could not get a job in the United States; nor were there any offers. “Everywhere I hear there is no place for me, which is funny, the continent is so big,” he wrote. “The crowning ambition of my life,” he told Scudder in 1887, “was to be elected” to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, and even though he made many overtures to friends (including to Scudder) to help him get elected, nothing ever came of it. See Grote to Davis, April 2, 1887, Davis Papers. There are reasons to believe that had he worked hard enough at it and courted enough people, he could have come back to a good job and acclaim, but the main obstacle had little or nothing to do with things in the United States: Grote’s father-in-law feared that his daughter, Minna, and her children would suffer from the instability of living there; he hated the prospect of not seeing them and probably threatened to cut off Minna’s inheritance, thereby impoverishing Grote.
48. Popular Science Monthly 22 (June 1885): 246–52, and 28 (July 1885): 377–89.
49. Grote, CE (January 1895): 1–6.
50. Grote, CE (June 1890): 108.
51. Grote, The Hawk Moths of North America, 6.
52. Strecker, Butterflies and Moths of North America: Complete Synonymical Catalogue of Macrolepidoptera (Reading, PA: B. F. Owen, 1878). The book was printed on the press of B. F. Owen in Reading and appears to have been published by Strecker himself. Although the print run is unknown, there were several copies in circulation.
53. Strecker, LRH (Reading, PA, 1872–78), 85.
54. Ibid., 78–79.
55. Ibid., 25–26.
56. The Whitman and Thoreau quotations can be found in Robert Finch and John Elder, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: Norton, 2002), 217, 229.
57. On this period, see William Henry Edwards to Scudder, January 8, 1889, SS-BMS; and on insects dying in transit, see Edwards’s discussion “on transportation of eggs and young larvae” in his article “Notes on Certain Butterflies, Their Habits, Etc.,” CE (February 1882): 24.
58. For a contemporary account of the impact of the railroad on natural science and collecting in the 1880s, see E. A. Schwarz, “Entomological Club of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—Annual Address of the President,” CE (September 1892): 213–24.
59. William Henry Edwards, “Notes on Butterflies, with Directions for Breeding Them from the Egg,” CE (May 1884): 81–89. By this time, Edwards had acquired great skill as a breeder. In the past, many of his caterpillars had escaped from his containers or died as a result of mold, shifts in temperatures, or the impact of smoke in the greenhouse. By 1880, however, he had learned to secure his larvae “within cylinders of fine wire set over” the food plants and “deep enough in the earth to prevent escapes.” He had also discovered the necessity of “fresh air and moisture” for all his larvae. See “Argynnis VII,” in BNA, vol. 2. “The life cycles of some of our common species are known” only from the eggs and larvae “described by William Henry Edwards a century ago,” according to Thomas Emmel. See Thomas Emmel, Boyce A. Drummond, and Marc C. Minno, Florissant Butterflies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 13.