Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  60. Edwards to Scudder, September 18, 1885, SS-BMS; Edwards to Bean, June 30, 1884, TB; and Edwards to Lintner, July 21, 1880, and July 23, 1889, JL.

  61. It was not until 1914, with the publication of F. W. Frohawk’s Natural History of British Butterflies, that the British would have their own catalog of butterflies, with a “complete series of drawings—of truly remarkable excellence of every phase of the life cycle of all our sixty-eight British butterflies,” as Walter Rothschild put it in the preface to Frohawk’s book. Frohawk, one of the leading English entomologists of the twentieth century, was wrong, however, to claim in his book that “before the year of 1898 it was the general belief that butterflies as a rule would not lay their eggs in captivity. Many entomologists also believed that in the case of these insects, each individual produced only a few eggs.… As a result knowledge of the earlier stages of many species was fragmentary and superficial.” Apparently, he knew nothing about Edwards or Scudder. See Frohawk, Natural History of British Butterflies (London, 1914). For biographical material on Frohawk, see Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 194.

  62. Scudder, review of BNA, Science 11 (1888): 339a.

  63. Fordyce Grinnell Jr., “The Work of W. H. Edwards,” Lepidopterist 1, no. 12 (1917): 92.

  64. Alexander B. Klots, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 278.

  65. Edwards, “Obituary,” CE (1888): 140; Autobiographical Notes, 279; and Edwards to Scudder, October 14, 1885, SS-BMS.

  66. Edwards to Henry Edwards, April 7, 1876, HE.

  67. William Henry Edwards to Theodore Mead, April 11, 1884, TM.

  68. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, October 14, 1885, SS-BMS.

  69. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, December 20, 1892, SS-BMS.

  70. William Greenwood Wright, “A Naturalist in the Desert,” Overland Monthly Magazine (September 1884): 4.

  71. Grace Wadleigh to J. Gerould (Dartmouth College), February 14, 1932, TB; and, on David Bruce, see Joseph and Nesta Dunn Ewan, Biographical Dictionary of Rocky Mountain Naturalists (Boston: W. Junk, 1981), 30.

  72. William Barnes to Foster Benjamin, September 13, 1907, William Barnes Correspondence, Records of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, Record Group 7, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  73. See Thomas Bean, quoted in Edwards, “Argynnis VI” and “Argynnis VII,” BNA, VIII (unpaginated).

  74. David Bruce to Henry Edwards, January 31, 1885, HE; on Bruce’s work for Darwin and Doubleday, see Bruce to Henry Skinner, April 9, 1891, HS-ANS. In 1870, he sailed to Paris to see his youngest brother, then head gardener at the Château de Chantilly, the property of the Duc de Aumale. Together they got trapped in the cross fire of the Prussian invasion of that city. On “butterflying,” see Bruce to Strecker, January 22, 1883, HS-FM; on the neighborhood “lads,” see Bruce to Henry Edwards, December 23, 1884, HE.

  75. Bruce to John Smith, December 6, 1888, Division of Insects Correspondence, Smithsonian Archives; William Henry Edwards to Bean, June 28, 1889, TB; and Thomas Bean to Edwards, March 17, 1890, TB.

  76. William Henry Edwards to Bean, May 9, 1875, TB.

  77. William Henry Edwards to Bean, February 12, 1889, May 28 and November 7, 1890, TB.

  78. William Henry Edwards to Mead, September 6, 1891, TM.

  79. William Howe, The Butterflies of North America (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 91, and James A. Scott, The Butterflies of North America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 243.

  80. Bruce, from a long 1887 letter quoted by William Henry Edwards in BNA, vol. 3 (1898) in the section entitled “Erebia I.”

  81. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, April 1 and October 7, 1895, SS-BMS.

  82. James Fletcher, “Annual Address of the President,” in the Twentieth Annual Report of the Entomological Society of Ontario (Toronto, 1889), 2–8.

  83. William Henry Edwards to Mead, September 6, 1891, TM; Edwards, “Papilio XII, XIII,” BNA, vol. 2 (1884).

  84. On eggs in quills, see Bean to William Henry Edwards, September 26, 1884, WHE-SA; on eggs in cork, see William Henry Edwards to Bean, February 13, 1876, TB. For the morphine bottle reference, see Edwards, “Notes on Butterflies, with Directions for Breeding,” 89.

  85. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 27, 1887, HE. He told Arthur Butler in 1886 that he planned to be finished in “four to five years,” but he was, of course, dreaming. See Edwards to Butler, March 1, 1886, NHM-LONDON. After volume 2, Edwards planted more beans and potatoes in his garden with his wife, Catherine, than he had ever done in his life. He helped home-educate his first granddaughter and watched another, the only child of Edith and Theodore Mead, suffer and die from scarlet fever. Between 1884 and 1894 he served one term as president of the Board of Education for Kanawha County on the Republican line, establishing forty-nine schools and hiring fifty-six teachers, and another term as “road master,” or Commissioner of Roads, during which time he “made a road that never was!” (as he wrote to Henry Edwards). “No pay and plenty of hard work,” he informed William Wright. See Entomological Diary, January 18, 1889, WHE-SA; Edwards to Henry Edwards, April 18, 1889, HE; Edwards, Autobiographical Notes; Edwards to Wright, May 21, 1891, WGW; and Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 19, 1884, and May 27, 1885, HE.

  86. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 27, 1887, HE; and Edwards to Wright, March 12, 1891, WGW.

  87. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, October 10, 1883, HE. On Catherine Edwards’s legacy, see Theodore Mead to his mother, February 8, 1900, TM. In 1900 Willie Edwards invested his mother’s money in oil royalties, paying her $75 a month. Edwards had wealth in land, but he couldn’t get to it because he hadn’t paid taxes on it for years. See Willie Edwards to Theodore Mead, December 21, 1886, TM.

  88. “Sometimes I have been $500 in their debt,” he told Scudder in 1887. “They are remarkably kind people.” And five years later: “That house has ever since my connection to it, nearly thirty years ago, paid in advance the bills of every description for BNA. Never once did they decline to send me a check at my request!” See William Henry Edwards to Scudder, August 27 and October 6, 1887, and January 6, 1892, SS-BMS.

  89. Once Edwards promised William Wright that he would give him William Hewitson’s books “if thereby I can get the caterpillar of Rutulus” (the western tiger swallowtail); Edwards to Wright, February 19, 1883, WGW. See also Edwards to Mead, February 4, 1890, TM. On the death of his mother, see Edwards to Lintner, November 18, 1887, JL.

  90. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, March 26, 1887, HE.

  91. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, May 5, 1886, HE.

  92. William Henry Edwards to Holland, April 12, 1886, WH-CM.

  93. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, August 28, 1888, SS-BMS.

  94. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, October 6, 1887, and November 26, 1888, SS-BMS.

  95. “By Jove that was grand you getting the $500 grant for Edwards,” wrote Scudder’s Canadian friend James Fletcher to Scudder. “It will give him grand help forward and he ought to be very grateful to you.” See Fletcher to Scudder, January 9, 1892, SS-BMS.

  96. See Scudder to Edward Nolan, December 31, 1888, and February 2, 1888, Director’s Correspondence, Collection no. 567, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Ewell Sale Steward Library, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

  97. See Scudder, “Notes and News,” Science 5, no. 11 (August 2, 1889): 339. James Fletcher, a Canadian butterfly man, also complained in the pages of the CE that Edwards had to “sacrifice” his insects in order “to continue his unselfish labors.” See Fletcher, CE (April 1887): 72.

  98. Fletcher to Scudder, March 1, 1893, SS-BMS.

  99. On the “dreariness,” see Scudder’s preface to Nomenclator Zoologicus (Washington, DC: 1882–84), published in the Bulletin of the United States National Museum, no. 19. Scudder modeled his Catalogue of Scientific Serials after Agassiz’s 1846 four-volume Bibliographia Zoologicae et Geologicae and on the single-volume
update of Agassiz by the German naturalist Hermann Hagen, Bibliotheca Entomologica (Leipzig, 1862), which reached to 1862 and appeared in three languages (German, English, and French), with separate entries by Hagen, Carl Dohrn, and Henry Stainton. Agassiz’s volumes offered a “comprehensive listing of books and articles relating to all phases of natural history published up to 1846, together with a guide to scientific periodicals and to the publications of societies and institutions of natural science”; see Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 106. Scudder, then, dealt fresh only with sixteen or seventeen years, but more had been published in that short span than ever in history. It demanded that he examine every American repository “book by book,” as he put it, scrutinize every catalog and bibliography in whatever language on all scientific subjects, and solicit reliable scholars from other countries to double-check his lists for correctness and depth. Just in browsing it, the reader gets a feel for the wealth of the scientific achievement in the world, especially after 1860 and above all in Europe (German serials alone consume nearly one-third of the volume). Its full title is Catalogue of Scientific Serials of All Countries Including the Transactions of Learned Societies in the Natural Physical and Mathematical Sciences, 1633–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Library of Harvard University, 1879). Scudder’s second catalog, Nomenclator Zoologicus, combined older “lists” of genera by Agassiz and others with newer ones created by modern-day specialists in countries from Britain to Cuba, all contacted by Scudder. It was published in two parts; the first part contained nearly sixteen thousand entries, the second, eighty thousand.

  100. See Scudder, “Fossil Butterflies,” in Memoirs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, vol. 1 (Salem, MA, 1875), 43, for an account of his European experience. Adolph Menge, a German archaeologist who exhumed many insects trapped in Prussian amber deposits, honored Scudder in 1880 by bequeathing to him all his amber fauna, one of the great collections in the world.

  101. Scudder to Alexander Agassiz, April 17, 1880, Alexander Agassiz Letter Books, 1859–1910, EML. In 1886 he made summer trips to Florissant, a newly discovered fossil bed in Colorado, with thirty-five-million-year-old butterflies in it. Even earlier, in 1878, he had traveled to Florissant when it was a primitive, inhospitable place; he slept in a dusty post office near the rail station, treated the nearby Green River “as a toilet,” and encountered “more drinking saloons” than he had ever wanted to see in his life. He went again in 1885, this time staying in a “nice hotel” and enjoying many “creature comforts.” (“There was,” however, he noted, “the same alignment of saloons.”) In 1889 Scudder brought a tiny entourage with him—three boys, a cook, and several horses—but few amenities. He and the boys sat together in the dirt, hammering and chipping away at the shale in hopes that some fossil treasure might drop free from its adamantine obscurity. At one point, Scudder walked off alone, armed only with a net and a hammer, to quarry in what he called the “broiling, breathless valley.” “I found just one bit of shade the entire distance by hugging a huge rock, and here I stripped to the skin to bathe in the air, the only element I had, and then pushed on, inspired by the thought of a coming plunge in the White River.” “Hunting for Fossil Insects,” Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the Entomological Society of Ontario, 1903 (Toronto, 1904), 101–3, an account of all his trips to Florissant; and, on his Canadian work, see Scott A. Elias, Quaternary Insects and Their Environments (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 3–8.

  102. Emmel Drummond, and Minno, Florissant Butterflies, 3–5.

  103. Scudder, “The Fossil Butterflies of Florissant,” Part I (Washington, DC, 1889), 439–70.

  104. Fletcher to Scudder, April 19, 1890, SS-BMS.

  105. Lintner to Scudder, March 19, SS-BMS.

  106. William Henry Edwards to Scudder, May 3, 1891, and May 5, 1894, SS-BMS.

  107. In 1879 Scudder published Butterflies: Their Structure, Changes, and Life-Histories, a sort of trial run for the later volumes, delivered in 1878 or ’79 as a lecture series at the Lowell Institute in Cambridge. Information on Scudder’s Lowell Institute lectures comes from a review of Butterflies by William Henry Edwards in Papilio, January 1882, pp. 16–17.

  108. Fletcher to Scudder, September 7, 1888, SS-BMS.

  109. Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 262.

  110. Thaddeus Harris, Treatise on Some of the Insects Injurious to Vegetation (New York: Orange Judd, 1862), iii–iv.

  111. Henry Bates to Scudder, September 11, 1869, SS-BMS.

  112. Blum, Picturing Nature, 297–305. Blum situates Scudder’s work within an evolving tradition of scientific representation in America.

  113. For Grote, see Scudder, BEUSC (Cambridge, 1889), vol. 2, p. 835; for Higginson, BEUSC, vol. 2, p. 1627.

  114. BEUSC, vol. 1, pp. 457, 519. See also, in vol. 1, pp. 8, 52, 127, 208, 280, 397, and 710.

  115. Scudder’s opening editorial for Science had noted that “scientific evolution, like the evolution of the species, requires complete conformity with the conditions of existence.” See “The Future of American Science,” Science (February 9, 1883): 3. Davis and Woodworth would acquire national reputations, Davis as creator of the science of geomorphology, and Woodworth as a leading economic entomologist in California (he also spent years in China, introducing the Chinese to pesticides, among other things).

  116. Scudder, “The Names of Butterflies,” excursus 25, BEUSC, vol. 2; and BEUSC, vol. 1, p. 111.

  117. Earlier, in 1873, Scudder wrote: “Mr. Edwards and I have been helping each other materially all through our connection with each other, though I always feel as if the gain were on my side, he is very liberal with his specimens. Recently, we have been over each other’s drawings of earlier stages.” Scudder to Henry Edwards, December 19,1873, HE.

  118. Edwards to Lintner, November 27, 1885, JL. Edwards quoted from Scudder in this letter.

  119. See BEUSC, vol. 1, excursus 20, “Three Pioneer Students of Butterflies in the Country,” pp. 651–58; and BEUSC, vol. 1, excursus 24 on fossils, pp. 756–60.

  120. Brian Boyd and Robert Pyle, eds., Nabokov’s Butterflies (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 38, 66, 475, and 530.

  121. William Henry Edward’s footnote at the bottom of p. 70, CE, April 1889.

  122. Scudder to Holland, February 11, 1894, WH-CM. In this letter, Scudder recalled his insomnia of “a year or two ago.” When William Henry Edwards heard about Scudder’s misfortune, he sympathized by blaming it on the Democrats, who had just gained control of the presidency. What could you expect from them who didn’t care a fig about “science and knowledge,” he told Scudder. But they weren’t at fault, Scudder responded; the Senate Republicans, not the Democrats, had terminated the funding. Edwards, a passionate Republican in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner, couldn’t believe it. “I see an investigation is in order,” he wrote. “A Democrat would strike out the appropriations for pure cussedness.” Edwards to Scudder, August 5 and July 27, 1892, SS-BMS.

  123. On this adoption, see William Field’s “Doctor Scudder’s Work on Lepidoptera,” Psyche 18 (December 1911): 180.

  124. Scudder, Every-day Butterflies: A Group of Biographies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), iii, 1–11, 24–28, 58–62, 67–72, 87–94, 106–13, 146–65, 248–53, 262–76, 311–16, 381–86; and Frail Children of the Air: Excursions into the World of Butterflies (1895; repr., New York, 1899).

  125. Samuel Scudder, Brief Guide to the Commoner Butterflies of the Northern United States and Canada (New York, 1893), iv.

  5. The Life and Death of Butterflies

  1. Alexander Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1 (1845; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 39–40.

  2. Herman Strecker, Butterflies and Moths in Their Connection with Agriculture and Horticulture (Harrisburg, PA, 1879), 17.

  3. Augustus Grote, “The Noctu
rnidae of Europe and North America Compared,” CE (August 1890): 145–50; and, on Darwin’s governing perspective, see Peter J. Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 75–85, 118–19.

  4. See “Ancestry and Classification” in Samuel Scudder’s Butterflies: Their Structure, Changes, and Life-Histories (New York: Holt, 1881), 226–48.

  5. Charles Fernald to Scudder, December 29, 1879, SS-BMS.

  6. Jakub Novak, “Alfred Russel Wallace’s and August Weismann’s Evolution: A Story Written on Butterfly Wings” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2008), 219.

  7. On Riley, see Charles V. Riley, “Philosophy of the Pupation of Butterflies and Particularly of the Nymphalidae,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 28 (1880): 455–63, and Scudder, BEUSC (Cambridge, 1889), vol. 2, excursus 71, “The Act of Pupation,” pp. 1693–95, and pp. 1554–58, in which he thanks and cites Riley. On Burgess, see Scudder, “The Services of Edward Burgess to Natural Science,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History (December 16, 1891): 358–60, and Edward Burgess, “The Structure and Action of a Butterfly’s Trunk,” American Naturalist 14, no. 5 (1880): 312–19.

  8. See especially, Scudder, BEUSC, vol. 1, “The Eggs of Butterflies,” pp. 190–99; “The Modes of Suspension of Chrysalids,” pp. 201–3; and vol. 2, “The Act of Pupation,” pp. 1693–1711, and “How Butterflies Suck,” pp. 1737–46. On Scudder’s use of the microscope in the making of his wood engravings and lithographs, see Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 292–97.