Butterfly People
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41. Strecker to Skinner, May 3, 1900, and November 27, 1900, HS-ANC.
42. William Kearfott to Strecker, January 17 and 21, 1901, HS-FM.
43. Levi Mengel to Henry Skinner, July 18, 1901, HS-ANS; on the bout of influenza, see Strecker to Henry Skinner, September 19, 1901, HS-ANS.
44. Mengel to Skinner, November 30 and December 17, 1901, HS-ANS.
45. Holland to Sir George Hampson, June 24, 1902, WH-CM.
46. Mengel to Skinner, January 21, 1906, HS-ANS, collection no. 210; William Gerhard, EN (July 1909); and David Walston, “The Sculptor Who Collected,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 46 (January 1995): 1.
47. D. F. Hardwick, “An Analysis of the Heliothidine Types (Noctuidae) of Herman Strecker with Lectotype Designations,” Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 32, no. 1 (1978): 49.
48. Will Doherty to his father, March 27, 1897, JMH.
49. Doherty to Ernst Hartert, January 31, 1900 (from the Norfolk Hotel), Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
50. Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 2–3.
51. Doherty to Mr. Durrant, February 5, 1900, NHM-LONDON.
52. Doherty to Hartert, January 31, 1900, NHM-LONDON.
53. José Steinbach to Holland, February 10, 1909; and on Steinbach’s “first sendings” to Holland, see Steinbach to the “Director of the Carnegie Museum,” March 19, 1900, WH-CM. On the total number of birds sent by Steinbach to the museum over thirty years, see W. E. C. Todd (curator of ornithology) to Edwin G. Conklin, May 3, 1939, WH-CM. By 1914 he had collected for the Carnegie museum “25,000 moths in 3000 species.” See Steinbach to William Schaus (care of Douglas Stewart), April 24, 1914, Director’s Correspondence, WH-CM. On Holland’s fear of being cheated, see Steinbach to Holland, July 1, 1915, WH-CM. It is not clear that the 1900 Lacey Act banning transport of wild birds (Steinbach’s specialty for the museum) and animals across American state lines had any legal impact on the international transport of dead or living birds. Probably it did, therefore making the Carnegie museum, and other similar museums, a clear violator of if not the letter of the law, its “spirit.”
54. Tyler Townshend to Strecker, February 7, 1900, HS-FM. Townshend also wrote that Holland insisted “that the collection contained several hundred specimens short of my count” but that, “out of the generosity of his heart,” he would “give me $100 for the lot. The price I agreed to collect for was $10 per 100 [he caught 1,800 altogether], Holland to get the entire catch for the season. I accepted the $100 offer of course—couldn’t do otherwise, since I needed the money at once. But I wrote him that I knew that my count was approximately correct, and that I should never again send him a single specimen of anything. He wrote me several abusive letters, and said that it was fortunate for me that I was out here where I am or he would make me smart for my insinuations. Wouldn’t that crinkle your hair!”
55. Holland to Hans Fruhstorfer, January 18, 1902, WH-CM.
56. Herbert Smith to Holland, January 25, 1893; August 7, 1894; and December 8, 1894, WH-CM.
57. Smith to Holland, Director’s Letter book, October 11, 1892, WH-CM.
58. The title of Smith’s expedition appears in a letter from C. F. Baker to George Clapp, October 10, 1898, Smith Papers, Geological Museum of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. I have seen the title nowhere else, however. Baker was a field botanist from Auburn, Alabama, who may or may not have accompanied the Smiths on their journey. This letter indicated that he did go, but probably not for long.
59. Agreement between Holland and Smith beginning “It is mutually agreed,” February 22, 1898, Box 27, folder 11, WH-HSWP. Smith also signed contracts with the rich British naturalists, Herbert Druce and Lord Walsingham, who promised to pay well for rare moths and butterflies. He signed another with George Clapp, a Carnegie trustee and naturalist, who arranged with Smith to act as his partner and agent, dealing with money matters, receiving payments for lots, and establishing research agendas. Smith to Managing Committee of the Carnegie Museum, December 8, 1897, and Smith to George Clapp, March 7, 1898, Carnegie Museum Archives, Pittsburgh.
60. Holland to Strecker, September 5, 1888, HS-FM. A year earlier, his article on the butterflies of West Africa—a first stab at such fame—appeared in the Transactions of the American Entomological Society, the journal that launched the career of William Henry Edwards and others. On the basis of only one or two specimens, he identified several “new” species collected by Christian ministers. In an accompanying piece on Japanese butterflies, he took the liberty to name one insect “after my faithful Japanese assistant, Tora-san,” and another after Mrs. Mabel Louise Todd, “who did so much to enliven the stay at the old castle of Shirakawa.” See “Contributions to a Knowledge of the Lepidoptera of West Africa,” Transactions (1887): 73, 76.
61. Holland to his parents, March 21, 1894, WH-HSWP.
62. Holland to Skinner, October 19 and November 9, 1892, HS-ANS; and Holland to Scudder, February 2 and 3, 1891, SS-BMS.
63. Holland to Doherty, February 10, 1900, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
64. Doherty to Hartert, March 13, 1900, NHM-LONDON.
65. Doherty to Hartert, March 15, 1900; March 1900 (undated), and March 13, 1900, NHM-LONDON.
66. Doherty to Hartert (Norfolk Hotel), no date but c. January-March 1900, Tring Correspondence, NHM-LONDON.
67. Holland to Doherty, January 11 and 31, 1901, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
68. Holland to Doherty, January 11 and 31, 1901, and November 12, 1900, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM. In the last letter, Holland reported visiting London and seeing “our mutual friends, Mr. Rothschild and Dr. Hartert.” “Mr. Rothschild,” he wrote, “expressed great solicitude in reference to you. And the first question that he asked me when I met him at Tring was, ‘Dear Doctor, have you heard from Doherty.’ He blurted out the inquiry as soon as he had ended the customary salutations, and seemed to be greatly anxious to know what had become of you.”
69. Holland to Doherty, January 11, 1901, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
70. Ibid.
71. George Clapp, “Herbert Huntington Smith,” Nautilus (July 1899): 137.
72. Smith to Holland, July 20, 1899, and January 6, 1900, WH-CM.
73. Holland to Robert Berryhill of Iowa City, December 19, 1903; and Holland to Charles T. Scott, April 23, 1903, director’s letter book, WH-CM.
74. Holland referred to himself as Carnegie’s “obedient servant” in a letter to E. Ray Lankester, director of the British Natural History Museum, July 14, 1904, NHM-LONDON. In 1900 Carnegie and Holland went to England together, for a celebration of the British Museum of Natural History, bearing with them a replica of the beast, which the British had dearly wanted. Other European capitals got their replicas, too. Holland even traveled to Buenos Aires, to present a replica to the leading museum in Argentina. See Holland to Lankester, July 14, 1900, WH-CM, and Holland, To the River Plate and Back: The Narrative of a Scientific Mission to South America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 1–11. Holland made the trip in 1911.
75. Holland to Andrew Carnegie, March 27, 1899, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
76. Holland to Stephen Downey of Laramie, Wyoming, May 10, 1899; and Holland to Carnegie, March 27, 1899, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
77. Holland to Dr. J. L. Wortman, August 15, 1899, Director’s Letter book, WH-CM.
78. Holland to Professor J. B. Hatcher, August 13, 1902, WH-CM.
79. Ibid.
80. “As I look back at what he accomplished here,” Daisy wrote a friend, “I am astonished. I must stay until the work is ended—for there is no one else who could do it.” No husband-wife bond could have been closer; they had labored and traveled together throughout Latin America, and now canoed the rivers of Alabama in search of freshwater shells together, camping in a full, satisfying isolation together, and without the tropical nightmare. See Daisy Smith to George Clapp, undated, c. 1919, and Smith to Clapp, December 25, 1905, Smith Paper
s, Alabama Museum of Natural History, Tuscaloosa. See also Eugene A. Smith, “Explanatory Note” to an article by Calvin Goodrich, “The Anculosae of the Alabama River Drainage,” Museum Paper No. 6, Alabama Museum of Natural History, Tuscaloosa (July 1, 1922), 1.
81. Doherty to his mother, October 21, 1900, JMH.
82. Doherty to Hartert, November 4, 1900, NHM-LONDON.
83. Doherty to Edward Janson, February 10, 1901; Doherty to Oldfield Thomas, November 4, 1900, “Letters on Mammalia, 1900, A-M,” NHM-LONDON.
84. Doherty to Hartert, November 4, 1900, NHM-LONDON. See also Doherty to his mother, October 21, 1900, JMH; and, for a description of Papilio rex, see Bernard d’Abrera, Butterflies of the World (London: Hill House, 2001), 147, 151.
85. Doherty to his mother, October 21, 1900, JMH.
86. J. M. Doherty to Hartert, no date, c. 1902, and January 26, 1902, NHM-LONDON; Doherty to his mother, October 21, 1900, JMH; and Doherty to Hartert, November 4, 1900; December 26, 1900; February 9, 1901; February 14, 1901; January 26 and May 12, 1902, NHM-LONDON. From these letters I have also extracted a narrative of Doherty’s activities until his death.
87. Augustus Grote to Dyar, August 28, 1895, HD.
88. On Smith replacing Strecker, see George Horn to Isaac Hays, March 1, 1897, Isaac and I. Minis Hays Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
89. J. F. Gates Clarke, the chief lepidopterist at the Smithsonian in the mid-twentieth century, wrote to F. Martin Brown, March 13, 1972: “I am a firm believer in and advocate of the use of genital characters in classification. They present, usually, the best set of definitive characters I know of. Admittedly they fail in some cases beyond presenting generic differences but when they do other characters can be used for specific separation.” See Record Group 427, Box 2, Division of Lepidoptera Records, 1963–1990, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. In an attack on William Henry Edwards, John Smith told Henry Skinner, “I should never base a classification on larvae, unless there was something in the imago to bear them out. My test in every case rests only with the genitalia.” See Smith to Skinner, December 15, 1896, HS-ANS, collection 150. In a letter to Spencer Baird, Edwards wrote of Smith in 1886, when Smith was the curator of insects at the Smithsonian and the editor of Entomologica Americana, “Your curator knows next to nothing about butterflies.” In another letter to Baird, he wrote that “any determination by [Smith] would carry little weight. I don’t care to subject myself to his impertinence in the magazine he edits, and therefore say what I do to you in confidence.” See Edwards to Baird, October 12, 1886, Spencer Baird Papers, Smithsonian Archives, Washington, DC.
90. Grote to Dyar, May 13, 1895, and September 27, 1896, HD.
91. See his unpublished paper “The Epic of Papaipema” (1940), especially pp. 1–5. The full draft is in the Henry Bird Papers, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
92. Grote to Bird, circa 1900; the letters can be found in the back pages of Bird’s “The Epic of Papaipema.”
93. On Harrison Dyar, see Marc Epstein and Pamela Henson, “Digging for Dyar: The Man Behind the Myth,” American Entomologist 38 (Fall 1992): 148–69. On John Comstock, see Pamela Henson’s “The Comstock Research School in Evolutionary Entomology,” Osiris 8 (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, as well as her dissertation, “Evolution and Taxonomy: J. H. Comstock’s Research School in Evolutionary Entomology at Cornell University, 1874–1930” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 1990).
94. Grote to Dyar, November 6 and 17, 1896; December 16, 1895; January 28, 1896; and April 17, 1896, HD.
95. John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock, How to Know the Butterflies: A Manual of the Butterflies of the Eastern United States (1904; repr., New York: D. Appleton, 1915), “with forty-five full-page plates from life reproducing the insects in natural colors.”
96. Ibid., 93–94, 113–14, 194–95, 245–46, and 50.
97. Ibid., 41–42, and Alexander B. Klots, A Field Guide to Butterflies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 51.
98. Grote to Dyar, June 17, 1895, HD.
99. Grote to Dyar, January 17, 1896, HD.
100. These generalizations appeared in the CE, as “Diphyletism in the Diurnal Lepidoptera” (December 1899, pp. 290–91), and “The Principle Which Underlies the Changes in Neuration” (October 1900, pp. 289–92). They synthesized for Americans much of what he had published in the following articles: “Die Saturniiden,” Mittheilungen aus dem Roemer Museum, Hildesheim (June 1896): 1–32; “Die Schmetterlingsfauna von Hildesheim” Mittheilungen aus dem Roemer Museum, Hildesheim (February 1897): 1–45; “Specializations of the Lepidopterous Wing,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (May 17, 1898); “The Descent of the Pierids” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (January 1900): 3–67; and “Fossile Schmetterlinge und der Schmetterlingsflügel,” Verhandlungen K.K. Zool.-bot. Gesellschaft Wien (1901).
101. Grote to Dyar, December 12, 1898, HD.
102. Grote, “A Reply to the Critic of Psyche,” Psyche (August 1897): 106.
103. Scudder, “The Butterflies of Hildesheim,” Psyche (June 1897): 83; and Grote to George Horn, October 1897, Hays Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Modern research supports Scudder’s contention that the swallowtails are, in fact, lower in evolutionary development than the skippers. Author’s interview with Charles Remington, September 13, 2003.
104. Staudinger, quoted in CE (July 1902): 185.
105. Dyar, preface, Insecutor Inscitiae Mensruus 1 (January 1913).
106. Grote to Dyar, June 13, 1898, HD.
107. Grote to Dyar, February 11, 1896, HD; all of the italics are mine.
108. Grote to William Henry Edwards, July 4, 1895, WHE-SA; Grote to Charles Fernald, August 28, 1896, Charles Henry Fernald Papers (RG 40/11 C. H. Fernald), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Grote to Dyar, January 17, 1896, HD.
109. Grote to Dyar, May 15, 1898, HD.
110. Scudder to close friend Charles Fernald, November 12, 1896, Fernald Papers; Edwards to Scudder, November 21, 1896, SS-BMS; and Scudder to young colleague Lawrence Bruner, September 18, 1896, LB.
111. Scudder to Bruner, January 5, 1897, LB. This letter to Bruner contains the only comment by Scudder I know of on his son’s death. There is no doubt he destroyed most of his letters bearing on the illness and demise. All of Fletcher’s letters written between 1896 and 1898, for instance, were removed by Scudder.
112. Scudder to Bruner, March 27, 1897, and November 23, 1901, LB.
113. Scudder to Holland, February 17, 1902, WH-CM.
114. Scudder to Bruner, October 21, 1895, LB.
115. Albert P. Morse, “The Orthoterlogical Work of Mr. S. H. Scudder, with Personal Reminiscences,” Psyche (December 1911): 18; and Alfred Goldsborough Mayor, “Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hubbard Scudder, 1837–1911,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 17 (Washington, DC, 1924).
116. U.S. Geological Survey, Monograph 40 (1900). On prayers, see Psyche 8 (1897): 142–43; on cave crickets, Psyche 9 (1902): 312; and on pink grasshoppers, see EN 12 (1901): 129–31. On the guide to grasshoppers, see Guide to the Genera and Classification of the North American Orthoptera Found North of Mexico (Cambridge, 1897); and on the later catalog, see “Catalogue on the Described Orthoptera of the United States and Canada,” Proceedings of the Davenport Academy of Natural Science 8 (1900): 1–101.
117. Scudder to Samuel Henshaw, August 22, 1900, EML.
118. Scudder to Henshaw, April 13, 1907, EML.
119. Theodore Cockerell, Science 34 (September 13, 1911): 338–42; and Mayor, “Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hubbard Scudder,” 81–86.
120. Entomological Diary, January 1895, WHE-SA.
121. Edwards to Wright, October 13, 1896, WGW.
122. Edwards to Wright
, March 20, 1897, WGW.
123. Edwards to Wright, March 20, 1897, WGW; see also Edwards to Wright, October 13, 1896, WGW.
124. Edwards to Wright, June 14, 1905, WGW.
125. Edwards Timothy and Rhoda Ogden Edwards and Their Descendents: A Genealogy (Cincinnati: The Robert Clark Company, 1903).
126. Edwards, Shakesper Not Shakespeare (Cincinnati, 1900), 178. On current debates about the authorship of the plays, see Doug Stewart, “To Be or Not Be Shakespeare,” Smithsonian Magazine (September 2006): 62–64.
127. Edwards to Scudder, April 18, 1901, SS-BMS. In his 1909 obituary of Edwards, Charles Bethune, the editor of the Canadian Entomologist, wrote incorrectly that “Mr. Edwards was seventy-five years old when he gave up his studies of butterflies, feeling, no doubt, that his advanced age precluded him from carrying on further investigations with the ability and success that he had so remarkably displayed.” Why Bethune made this claim about Edwards is not clear, since Edwards had never felt healthier or more able to do work on butterflies. He was perfectly prepared to begin a fourth volume. See Bethune, “William Henry Edwards,” CE (August 1909): 217.
128. Edwards to Wright, November 20, 1898, and January 6 and 29, 1904, WGW.
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Aaron, Eugene M., 3.1, 4.1
Aaron, Samuel
Abbot, John, 1.1, 1.2, 4.1
Academy of Natural Sciences, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1
Acraea excelsior
Adams, Henry
adaptation, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
admirals, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1
adult, see imago
aesthetic entomology, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
Africa, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 8.1, 8.2
Agassiz, Louis, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
Agriculture Department, U.S., 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1
Entomology Division, 4.1, 7.1
Akhurst, John, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2
Albright, Max
alpines, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 7.1, 8.1