Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  55. Holland to William Wesley and Son, January 20, 1899, Director’s Correspondence, WH-CM.

  56. Holland to Professor John K. Richardson, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, January 25, 1904, Director’s Correspondence, WH-CM.

  57. Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, January 18, 1944, in Brian Boyd and Robert Pyle, eds., Nabokov’s Butterflies (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 299 (see also p. 620). Holland, The Butterfly Guide: A Pocket Manual for the Ready Identification of the Commoner Species Found in the United States and Canada (New York: Doubleday, 1915, 1925). Holland dedicated this guide “To the Boy Scouts of America.”

  58. Clench’s review of The Butterfly Book in Lepidopterist’s News 1 (May 1947).

  59. See Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 127–53; and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 57–109.

  60. I discovered this shift while reading a very useful German sourcebook, Zoologisches Adressbuch, published in two editions (1895 and 1900), in German, English, and French by Friedlander and Sons in Berlin, comparisons of which reveal for the United States a remarkable decline in bird collecting with a consequent rise in butterfly collecting, all over only five years, and due without doubt to laws passed in those years against bird collecting. An unparalleled source, these volumes give the names, addresses, and nature specialty of men and women, traders and collectors, throughout Europe, England, and the United States.

  61. Lewis to Holland, April 24, 1899, WH-HSWP.

  62. Schlarbaum to Holland, January 14, 1901, WH-HSWP.

  63. Cary to Holland, July 23, 1899, WH-HSWP.

  64. “The disappearance of the Rosy Maple Moth,” Holland wrote in his Moth Book, his 1903 sequel to The Butterfly Book, was “due no doubt to the gas wells and furnaces, which licked up in their constantly burning flames other millions of insects.” Holland, The Moth Book: A Guide to the Moths of North America (1903; repr., New York, 1968), 95.

  65. Kenneth D. Frank, “Effects of Artificial Night Lighting on Moths,” in Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting, ed. Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 306. This essay appears in part 5 of the volume, which deals exclusively with invertebrates.

  66. James Sinclair, Instructions for Collecting and Preserving Valuable Lepidoptera (Ocean Park, CA, 1917), 23.

  67. Kenneth D. Frank, “Effects of Artificial Lighting on Moths,” and Gerhard Eisenheis, “Artificial Night Lighting and Insects: Attraction of Insects to Streetlamps in a Rural Setting in Germany,” in Rich and Longcore, eds., Ecological Consequences of Artificial Lighting, 281–344.

  68. The term “suppressing” comes from Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 77.

  69. Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1911), 16.

  70. Herbert Smith to Olive Thorne Miller, March 29, 1897, and Smith to L. Hays (sp.?), April 22, 1897, William Holland Letterbook, vol. 2; for Comstock’s views, see her Handbook of Nature Study, p. 8.

  71. In a letter to Scudder in 1888, Riley wrote that “it is perhaps gratifying to our 19th century vanity, but I feel that, with all our modern processes of illustration, when it comes to naturalness, accuracy, and clearness, the old illustrations of Sepp and of Rosel Von Rosenoff beat anything that we do today, and when it comes to adolescent stages I cannot even except Edwards’ figures or your own.” See Riley to Scudder, September 12, 1888, SS-BMS.

  72. Frederic Clements to Holland, February 7, 1901, Holland Papers, WH-HSWP. On Clements, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209–20.

  73. Gene Stratton-Porter, Moths of the Limberlost (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1912), 13–14, 111; and A Girl of the Limberlost (Garden City, NY, 1909), 108, 149–51.

  74. Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 220.

  75. Strecker to Skinner, May 21, 1899, HS-ANS.

  76. F. C. Schaupp, “Insect Life on Coney Island,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entmological Society 2, nos. 10–11 (1880): 79–81.

  77. Ernest Oslar (of Denver) to William Barnes, May 21, 1919, William Barnes Correspondence, Records of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, 1863–1956, Record Group 7, National Archives at College Park, MD.

  78. Preston Clark to William Barnes, May 23, 1916, Barnes Papers, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Buchholz obituary, “Otto Buchholz,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 13, no. 1 (1959): 27–29.

  79. On the new industrial order in West Virginia, see John Alexander Williams, West Virginia (New York: Norton, 1976), especially chapter 5, “Paint Creek,” pp. 130–58.

  80. Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 35–37, 72, and 132. Lewis also observes that “although the band saw was first patented in Britain in 1808 and in the U.S. in the 1830s, problems securing the endless steel band kept it out of general production until the late nineteenth century.”

  81. Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  82. David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 272–74.

  83. Wallace, quoted in Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology, ed. Andrew Berry (London: Verso, 2002), 150–51. August Weismann, “On the Mechanical Conception of Nature” (1877), reprinted, in Studies in the Theory of Descent, trans. Raphael Meldola (London, 1882), 651.

  84. William Seymour Edwards, Coals and Cokes in West Virginia (Cincinnati, 1892), 7.

  85. See Mead, “Theodore L. Mead … An Autobiography,” published in The Yearbook of the Amaryllis Society (1935), 2: 3–14.

  86. Barrow, A Passion for Birds, 133; and Brian Czech and Paul R. Krausman, The Endangered Species Act: History, Conservation Biology, and Public Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 16–17.

  87. For Donald Worster, see chapter 8 “Private, Public, Personal: Americans and the Land,” in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 101; and for Peter Huber, see Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xiv–xv, xxi, xxx.

  88. On tourism in the parks, see Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

  89. Lewis, Tranforming the Appalachian Countryside, 278.

  90. See Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 284; James E. McWilliams, American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 10–25.

  91. On secondary succession, see Scott L. Ellis, “Biogeography,” chapter 1 in Butterflies of the Rocky Mountain States, ed. Clifford D. Ferris and F. Martin Brown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and David R. Foster, Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 73–74.

  92. This paragraph draws especially on Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See also Norman Boltin and Christine Lang, The World’s Columbian Exposition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 74–75, 85.

  93. J. F. M. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 134.

  94. On Buffon, see, for example, Histoire Naturelle, vols. 1–5 (London, 1792), and, on Linnaeus, see Lisbet Koerner, “Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1996), 150. On the United States, see Clark A. Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris (1795–1856) (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 75–96.

  95. See “French Exhibition of Economic Entomology,” in the column “General Information,” in the Entomological Journal (July 1868): 50–51; and on French and British applied agriculture, see Clark, Bugs and the Victorians, 132–215.

  96. Herbert Osborn, Fragments of Entomological History (privately printed, 1937), 7–8; L. O. Howard, A History of Applied Entomology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1931), 53–57; W. Connor Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840–1880 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 92–126.

  97. James Fletcher to Scudder, December 19, 1894, SS-BMS.

  98. “Annual Address of James Fletcher, President of the Entomological Club of the A.S.S.A., 1889,” reprinted in Entomologica Americana 4 (January 1890): 1–9.

  99. Howard, A History of Applied Entomology, 74–75, 101. On Howard’s role, see Hae-Gyung Geong, “Exerting Control: Biology and Bureaucracy in the Development of American Entomology, 1870 to 1930” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1999), 33–52.

  100. CRS Report for Congress, “Salaries of Members of Congress: A List of Payable Rates and Effective Dates, 1789–2008,” Order Code 97–1011 GOV, compiled by Ida A. Burdick, Analyst on the Congress, Government, and Finance Division; and Howard, A History of Applied Entomology, 177–80.

  101. Osborn, Fragments of Entomological History, 7–8.

  102. Augustus Grote, An Illustrated Essay on the Noctuidae of North America (London, 1882), 21. Grote tried to get a job on the Entomological Commission, run by Riley, but Riley detested him as an egomaniac (others viewed Riley as one, too!) and blackballed his chances. Both men remained hostile to each other for the rest of their lives.

  103. Strecker, “Butterflies and Moths of North America, in Their Relation to Horticulture and Floriculture” (paper, Pennsylvania Fruit Growers’ Association, Reading, 1879), 17.

  104. Joseph Lintner, “On the Importance of Entomological Studies,” Papilio 1, no. 1 (1881): 1–2.

  105. EN, January 1897.

  106. Fletcher to Scudder, January 18, 1893, SS-BMS.

  107. See Jakub Novak, “Alfred Russel Wallace’s and August Weismann’s Evolution: A Story Written on Butterfly Wings” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008), 244; and Soraya De Chadarevian, “Laboratory Science Versus Country-House Experiments: The Controversy Between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin,” British Journal for the History of Science 29 (1996): 17–41.

  108. Fordyce Grinnell, “The Spirit of the Naturalist and of Natural History Work,” Lepidopterist 1, no. 1 (1916): 1–2.

  109. Henry Bird to Frank Jones, April 29, 1911, Frank Jones Papers, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

  110. On the separation of entomology from ecology and Riley’s role in it, see Paolo Palladino, “Entomology and Ecology: The Ecology of Entomology” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1989), 26–31. On Riley’s new biological approach to insect control, see Geong, “Exerting Control,” 8, 22–33. On the importance of Insect Life, see Howard, A History of Applied Entomology, 68–69. On the history of economic entomology, see Howard, A History of Applied Entomology; Arnold Mallis, American Entomologists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971); Sorensen, Brethren of the Net; Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and, most recently and comprehensively, McWilliams, American Pests.

  111. Henry Bird to Frank Jones, October 7, 1948, Frank Morton Jones Papers, Biological Correspondence, record number 565, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

  112. George Hulst to William Henry Edwards, August 2, 1878, WHE-SA.

  113. For the end to farming in Brooklyn and the spread of suburban real estate, 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), especially chapters 2, 3, and 11. Of the Long Island prairie, one butterfly man observed in May 1912, that it could “be reached one hour from Brooklyn or New York, combining as it does prairie and pine barren, and it ought to receive special attention for collectors during the present season, for the original prairie is fast yielding to cultivation.” See George Engelhardt, in the minutes of the “Annual Meeting of the New York Entomological Society,” May 7, 1912, American Museum of Natural History, New York.

  114. Anna Comstock, Nature-Study Review 1, no. 4 (1905): 143–46.

  115. Theodore Roethke, “The Small” and “All the Earth, All the Air,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1958; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 117, 142.

  8. Death of the Butterfly People

  1. John S. Garth and J. W. Tilden, California Butterflies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 45; and William Henry Edwards to William Greenwood Wright, January 6, 1904, WGW.

  2. Thomas Bean to Herman Strecker, April 23, 1893; December 14, 1894; June 2, 1894; and February 25, 1899, HS-FM.

  3. Bean to William Barnes, March 15, 1910, William Barnes Correspondence, Records of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, 1863–1956, Record Group 7, National Archives at College Park, MD.

  4. Edwards to Samuel Scudder, April 18, 1901, SS-BMS, and Edwards to William Holland, 1904, WH-CM.

  5. Edwards to Scudder, December 7, 1887, SS-BMS.

  6. Edwards to Scudder, December 6, 1892, SS-BMS. On Mrs. Bowen’s death, see Edwards to Theodore Mead, August 11, 1888, TM.

  7. Preface to volume 3, BNA (Philadelphia: American Entomological Society, 1868–72).

  8. Edwards to Scudder, November 23, December 6, and December 20, 1892, SS-BMS.

  9. Karl Jordan and Walter Rothschild, “A Revision of the American Papilios,” Novitates Zoologicae 13 (August 1906): 425.

  10. Holland to William Schaus, September 15, 1930, William Schaus Papers, Record Group 7100, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC.

  11. Neumoegen to Bean, July 3, 1893, Bean Letterbook, American Museum of Natural History, New York; Doll to Strecker, May 28, 1891, HS-FM; and Neumoegen to Edwards, February 26, 1894, WHE-SA.

  12. “Resolutions on the Death of Mr. Neumoegen,” minutes, March 19, 1895, Annual Meeting of the New York Entomological Society, p. 59, American Museum of Natural History.

  13. EN (September 1899): 208–9.

  14. Edwards to Scudder, April 13, 1891, SS-BMS.

  15. William Henry Edwards to Henry Edwards, February 9, 1891, HE.

  16. Henry Edwards, A Mingled Yarn: Sketches on Various Subjects (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 106.

  17. See clipping, “Harry Edwards’s Funeral,” in the Entomological Diary of William Henry Edwards, April–May 1891, WHE-SA. The details in this paragraph also come from the following letters: Edwards to Wright, May 10, 1891; May 21, 1891; and June 15, 1891, WGW.

  18. Henry Edwards to Holland, August 6, 1891, WH-CM. On his advertisements, see Edwards to Henry Skinner, August 1, 1891, HS-ANC.

  19. Henry Edwards to Holland, August 6, 1891, WH-CM; and Edwards to Skinner, August 1, 1891, HS-ANC.

  20. Henry Edwards to Arthur Butler, October 14, 1885, NHM-LONDON.

  21. Harry Weiss, “The Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 1893–1942,” Journal of the New York Entomological Society 6 (December 1943): 285–94.

  22. Holland to Scudder, January 2 and 8, 1892, SS-BMS.

  23. Henry Edwards to Scudder, December 2, 1890, SS-BMS.

  24. Holland to Schaus, November 30, 1923, Schaus Papers, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Frank E. Lutz, “Amateur Entomologists and the Museum,” Natural History 24, no. 3 (1924): 339; and, on Slosson and the founding of the New York Entomological Society, see Charles Leng, “History of the New York Entomological Society, 1893–1918,” typescript, American Museum of Natural History.

&nb
sp; 25. On the donations, donors, and the fund, see William Beutenmuller to Annie Trumbull Slosson, November 24, 1891; William Beutenmuller to Mr. James, December 24, 1891; Beutenmuller to A. M. Palmer, December 28, 1891; and Beutenmuller to Morris Jessup, November 5, 1891, and May 26, 1892, Beutenmuller Scrapbook, American Museum of Natural History, New York.

  26. Edwards to Wright, June 11, 1891, WGW.

  27. “Old Buzzfuzz” mentioned in a letter from Skinner to Strecker, around 1890–91, HS-FM.

  28. The quote relating to Neumoegen, that he could “keep friends with everybody,” appears in Strecker to Charles Valentine Riley, January 9, 1882, draft letter, HS-FM.

  29. Strecker to F. Cormack, no date but c. 1897, HS-FM; and O. W. Barrett, “Cheap Tropical American Butterflies,” EN (October 1902): 238.

  30. Russell Robinson to Strecker, March 24, 1900, and April 8, 1899, HS-FM. Strecker’s letters to Robinson don’t exist; I have inferred his responses from Robinson’s letters. There were other letters, but these have disappeared as well. See, on Wirt Robinson, Austin Clark, “Notes on the Butterflies of Margarita Island, Caracas, and Carupano, Venezuela,” Psyche (February 1905): 1–11; and his obituary, in “Notes and News,” Auk 58 (1941), 131–32.

  31. John Morris to Strecker, August 4, 1895, HS-FM.

  32. Fifty years later, Bird still delighted in telling this story to his friends; see Henry Bird to Frank Jones, November 15, 1950, and October 2, 1952, Frank Jones Papers, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

  33. William Henry Edwards to Henry Skinner, August 1, 1891, HS-ANS; Smith to Strecker, May 5, 1900, HS-FM.

  34. Smith to Strecker, May 5, 1900, HS-FM.

  35. Preface to “Supplement No. I,” of LRH (Reading, PA, 1872–78).

  36. Skinner to Strecker, January 7 and 16, 1899, HS-FM.

  37. Strecker to Skinner, June 7, 1900, and September 16 and January 17, 1899, HS-ANS.

  38. Strecker to Skinner, June 7, 1900, HS-ANS.

  39. Strecker to Andrew Weeks (draft), March 18, 1895, HS-FM.

  40. Strecker to Harrison Dyar, December 16, 1900, HD.